I have come to the opinion that profit is the main reason art becomes worse. By art I mean anything of any medium that exists to be experienced whether by seeing, reading, hearing, playing, or whatever for entertainment or even educational reasons. I believe at a certain point, profit generated by art begins to corrupt it due to expectations cast upon the artists that influence them to begin to make art solely to make money. These influences could be a company employing an artist, people paying the artist, or the artist themselves swaying towards a profit-driven purpose. I don't mean to say that profiting from art is a bad thing, in fact it is a good thing but I do believe there is a point at which the monetization of the art becomes more and more important therefore encouraging the artist to make the art due to profit, not despite it. I think this is especially true when the profit surpasses the stage of it funding further investment into the art itself and into other things like making the art your primary income.
YouTubers Are Cowards
The first example that comes to mind about this is YouTubers. What should be a haven that enables independent and free creation is actually a cesspool of corporate pandering among what many think are the freest artists in terms of video making. Most YouTubers bend the knee to YouTube and even though they complain and complain about how bad YouTube gets, they still comply in the end. YouTubers keep censoring more, keep making videos made primarily to appeal to the common denominator, and become mini-businesses themselves that rely on the YouTube mega business to keep the profits rolling in.
What bothers me the most is the self-censorship. The vast majority of YouTubers I've seen censor themselves because 'YouTube makes them'. Most of the time demonetization would be the worst result of not self-censoring making me think it's the profit that's most important, not the videos themselves. Now this wouldn't be a problem to me if they published uncensored versions of their videos elsewhere but almost every YouTuber that does this locks uncensored videos behind a paywall through a subscription service. What really bothers me about this is that YouTubers will also usually claim they do this so uncensored videos are available but the problem is there are so many other places they could post uncensored videos that are free for viewers to watch. If they were honest and said they just want to monetize uncensored videos then this wouldn't bother me but they tend to word it like paywalled videos are the only possible way one could watch an uncensored video that isn't on YouTube. They could easily post uncensored videos somewhere like LBRY or PeerTube but they want to be disingenuous and pretend like a paywalled service is the only way they could release videos uncensored.
An example of censorship absurdity is how so many YouTubers will censor firearms that appear in videos like simply showing a video of a gun will cause YouTube to punish them all the while videos of people literally shooting guns will get recommended to me. It's so absurd I've even seen people censor video game guns. And a fun fact somewhat unrelated is that almost every person I've seen online that claimed to be shadow-banned, I found through that platform's recommendation algorithm.
Video Games
Another example of an art form I witness this in is video games. I have noticed that the more monetized a game is, the worse it is. Games with microtransactions have game design that encourages said microtransactions and does its best to get players to spend more and more money on the game. I also believe DLC purely exists to squeeze more profit out of people as I said in my DLCs Suck article. I have also come of the opinion that every and I mean 'every' multiplayer-focused game is bad. Pretty much every single multiplayer-focused game is riddled with shit to buy and the games try their hardest to get you to buy stuff. Obviously this is also going to affect the game design and make the game worse even if the buyable stuff is cosmetic only. Even with cosmetic only stuff, games still try to market their microtransactions hard at you and usually make obtaining cosmetic stuff without paying extremely grindy or straight up impossible. The worst example of this is Fortnite Battle Royale. I don't believe BR is even a true game anymore; it is an advertising platform that you can play a game on. When monetization models do work on game, you then see so many other games do the exact same thing like with battle passes and all these garbage free-to-play shooters riddled with monetization attempts and trying to appeal to as many people as possible.
The problem is that people keep encouraging this. The most popular games are usually these free-to-play and even full priced microtransaction hells and people keep buying stuff in them. You'll see streamers and YouTubers will play games because of its popularity in an attempt to get their stream or videos more popular and make more money. This cycle just perpetuates and worse games get more popular.
Copyright Hinders Creativity
Copyright, what proponents of it claim encourages creativity by giving copyright holders a monopoly over their works actually hinders creativity massively. By giving an entity legal ability to essentially commit theft against an 'infringing party', any creative possibility is destroyed when it comes to copyrighted work. And a giant problem with the mentality that copyright protects artists is that anything short of a corporation probably won't have the resources to defend themselves or challenge an infringer in court. This makes it so only companies and rich people actually have the so-called protection that copyright apparently offers.
Having a monopoly over your work is a dumb idea anyways. Monopolies encourage profit over innovation as seen with patents. Like patents, copyright just makes innovation slower but in terms of creativity. If someone can improve upon someone's work or alter it to make it appealing to a different audience, well too bad for them, the copyright system kills competition and creativity so they can't do that unless the copyright holder releases the work under a free license or gives them permission.
A myth I see perpetuated is that people "own" their works. You don't "own" your published, available works. Ownership and property are constructs even with tangible things but are especially fake in terms of ownership and property in regards to your published work. You reading this right now on whatever it may be will be an example. Who owns the text or data causing these words to appear on what you're reading this on? Do I? How would I own this text when you're the one that physically possesses it and I have virtually no possibility to alter that fact? You reading this right now proves that the copy or information you have is not mine. I have no control over what you do next with this text or data therefore the copy that you have I do not own.
An example of the copyright system hurting creativity and only really benefiting corporations and rich people is music. Probably one of the simplest forms of art is probably the strictest in terms of copyright enforcement. People have been prosecuted over what are literally just sound waves being shared to others. The monopoly the companies hold over their music does not at all improve it. There is no creativity being enabled when you can't alter and share your own modification to a song or use one in your works without paying. This may be a reason why I think pretty much all mainstream and label-controlled music is worse than independently created music. The music I've actually liked tends to have a very heavy amount of remixing and covers and through this creative liberty, I have found music made in these types of environments much better than music that enforces its copyright 'protections'.
Although more annoying than actually harmful, I have found that many artists mostly the ones that make visual art like to pretend that their art is solely theirs to control and throw fits over people simply using their art or reposting it. You will see this a lot with the people that enjoy their art too. If their art gets reposted, they will claim it's art theft. If their art is modified or used in another work, they will claim it's art theft. Some people even think copying someone's style is morally wrong. These artists and their (fan)atics will get angry and pretend like they actually have the power to control their published works when they really don't. Most of these artists don't have the money for legal fees and even if they did, they would have to track down these infringers which most of the time are anonymous internet users and the artist would have to reveal their real life identity if they themselves are anonymous. What's hypocritical of many of these artists too is that they will claim whatever is art theft when they themselves make art of stuff that another entity has the copyright and trademark for without permission from them. They will make art of characters from a show they didn't make but will get mad when you use their art without permission. They pretend like they have the protection copyright is supposed to offer but they really don't and the worse they can do is get their followers to attack the so-called infringers. People need to stop pretending like they can actually control their works and just let art be free.
Final
These were a few examples but obviously you can find more in other forms of art. Be wary of how art is monetized and pay attention to how monetization affects it.
Written 2023-3-21/22 Published 2023-4-1