<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Applejinx</author><text>If even people reaching a truly stupidly huge number of people don&amp;#x27;t get even close to making a living (I get more than that off a few hundred people on Patreon for the work that I do), in a situation where those operating the streaming services are renting out entire floors of office buildings in Manhattan, your question is disingenuous.&lt;p&gt;Just because some of us are eking out a sort of existence in the new era doesn&amp;#x27;t make it a functional system.&lt;p&gt;I would be perfectly happy to see it become &amp;#x27;this is the Star Trek future, your entire compensation is the satisfaction of a job well done and being personally liked for what you&amp;#x27;ve created&amp;#x27;, if our world operated on some sort of UBI and we didn&amp;#x27;t have to have our performance linked to survival at all.&lt;p&gt;Under those circumstances, things naturally shift down the Maslow hierarchy of needs, and people take for granted that they&amp;#x27;ll live, and get desperate for validation and popularity, that being what they lack. I have NO problem with a world that completely unlinks money from performance, because I&amp;#x27;m not a free-market capitalist type demanding that financial reward behave like a &amp;#x27;meritocracy&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;Self-evidently it doesn&amp;#x27;t anyway, so literally nothing of value is lost.&lt;p&gt;BUT, we have that completely decoupled world and yet demand that people pay for even the most frugal living with money they got somebody to give them, in a world where people simply can&amp;#x27;t and don&amp;#x27;t do that anymore.&lt;p&gt;Silicon Valley clever-boffins: come up with some disruptive alternative really fast. We don&amp;#x27;t have time to mess around, and what these songwriters face is the same fate waiting for all of us, in turn, including you. How about abolishing money and replacing it entirely with &amp;#x27;likes&amp;#x27;?</text><parent_chain><item><author>look_lookatme</author><text>&amp;gt; How will I be able to support my gift?&lt;p&gt;In the end what we are seeing is that that golden era of creators making a living (and much much more) was an anomaly. Control of new types of distribution created scarcity and new forms of expression and shifting norms jacked up demand. But now distribution is free, instant and global. Demand has flatlined and production has exploded.&lt;p&gt;The hard question a creator needs to ask themselves now is not &amp;quot;how do I get paid for what my art is worth?&amp;quot;, but instead &amp;quot;was my art ever worth much to begin with?&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber</title><url>https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/03/hit-song-justin-bieber-royalties/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Animats</author><text>&lt;i&gt;In the end what we are seeing is that that golden era of creators making a living (and much much more) was an anomaly.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Historically, musicians and actors were very poorly paid. For a brief period in the 20th century, some of them made a lot of money. That&amp;#x27;s over.&lt;p&gt;There were, at peak, several million Myspace bands. Some of which didn&amp;#x27;t suck.  Supply of musicians far exceeds demand.</text><parent_chain><item><author>look_lookatme</author><text>&amp;gt; How will I be able to support my gift?&lt;p&gt;In the end what we are seeing is that that golden era of creators making a living (and much much more) was an anomaly. Control of new types of distribution created scarcity and new forms of expression and shifting norms jacked up demand. But now distribution is free, instant and global. Demand has flatlined and production has exploded.&lt;p&gt;The hard question a creator needs to ask themselves now is not &amp;quot;how do I get paid for what my art is worth?&amp;quot;, but instead &amp;quot;was my art ever worth much to begin with?&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber</title><url>https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/03/hit-song-justin-bieber-royalties/</url></story>