There are two points that utterly dismantle this argument:
1. Admitting that a lack of payment would severely impact the art form - why would we even entertain the notion that "art should be free" if we know as a fact that the outcome would be negative? People cannot dedicate their life to an art if they are not able to sustain themselves. What this is proposing is art as part time - nothing more than a hobby.
I don't know, would it? The cost of the tool required to actually make an album have decreased dramatically with the introduction of computers since the 1980's. Sitting here at my sub $1000 computer, I can produce any sound that's virtually equivalent to all the music Taylor Swift is complaining about. Large capital expenditures are no longer needed to produce music. What is still required is human capital...
or is it? Unlike the costs of building machines, we do not have to place the costs of human capital solely upon capital markets. We have other ways of sufficiently compensating people (human capital) outside of money alone- you just have to be imaginative enough to visualize a societal condition where that is the case. We're heading there anyway, and the entertainment industry doesn't want to embrace it.
The entertainment industry (and first of all, the music industry) is feeling the brunt of this change because what it produces is purely information (that so happens to be entertaining). Music, movies, games, visual art, and so on... they're all information. Handling information is something computers tend to be particularly good at.
However, the entertainment industry is not alone in feeling these effects. Will anyone really think Adobe will still be around in its current form 30 years from now? They've been getting less and less relevant as tech consortiums and volunteer coders have begun to replace their high priced software with free products. Are Adobe's workers entitled to a job? More crucially, are their investors entitled to make money from something that can be acquired for free? I understand Adobe's situation is different because their products are tools, and not a pieces of entertainment. To the user however, the utility of both is the same. If I can acquire a solution to a need for less money, why should I pay for it?
Point is, as Adobe is experiencing, the decline in costs to produce valuable goods has made it more difficult to procure revenue from their traditional product suite (though they will for some time because of the vicegrip on teaching their products at colleges and universities). It will continue to get harder as time goes on.
2. Following the above - that art without payment would be reduced to a part-time hobby - and arguing that "art" is different from "traditional work" because people would elect to do the former for free and not the latter is patently false. Unless you despise your line of work, I would argue most everyone would gladly volunteer or take up their line of work intermittently for free - even assembly line workers (hard to imagine volunteering to assemble a car, but the concept of doing assembly line work for free exists in food banks as an example).
If you aren't making your art because you love to do it, (you would do it for free if you could) then I doubt I want any part of it.
I am not going to get into arguing whether "art is work" as that is a blatant deflection from "art should be free." Regardless of the argument, however, art is an outcome of work - and you cannot dedicate full-time to any work without being paid; and anyone that has worked a day in their lives would not even entertain the notion that work should go unpaid.
But I'm not done:
The purpose of incorporating concepts of "capitalism" is redundant since there is no permutation of society that would lead to art unrelated to the concept of monetary value. Not in a capitalist society, not in a communist society, not in anything in-between. Not in the present, or in the past.
This is completely false. I bolded some stuff to highlight the most wrong part, but every bit of this section is false.
Not that I believe there should be no monetary value for art that is sold (I think it should be much lower), but free art is produced all the time. My aforementioned college choir gave free concerts regularly... in fact, I can't remember one in which people paid to get in. We weren't a shitty choir, either. And that leads me to my larger point...
My college choir produced and still produces plenty of art for free. We could do this because the University pays our expenses for the sake of having art on campus (as I stated previously, we don't have a music program). The University "micro" society is organized in such a way that it is able to afford the costs of a choir (and band) program despite receiving little to no monetary value from it. This is not to say that the art my choir produces has no value- we produce value for the University all the time through goodwill, name recognition, and positive association. However, it is to say that the value the choir provides cannot be easily quantified.
We can do this at a national level as well. In fact, we already should be doing this. Had wages risen in proportion to productivity over the past 40 years, the United States would be wealthy enough to organize itself in such a way to support the lives of artists (and all other citizens, no matter what they do). A mincome, and guaranteed housing are all that would really be required. Lest you say this is an impossible arrangement to create,
you should know that we already have enough housing stock to comfortably house every American in this country. We simply don't provide guaranteed housing because we're stupid enough to think that capitalism (as we know it) is the only economic arrangement that will work ever. It's not.
Capitalism, as we know it today was created by governments- beginning with the Dutch East India Company. DEIC was the first corporation created as a legal entity recognized as by a government. Prior to this, "corporations" were nothing more that loose and informal bands of traders. Large corporations weren't even prevalent in America until post reconstruction.
Prior to capitalism, there was feudalism, in which the state heavily regulated the production of goods. Usually, the economy was organized to the benefit of royals, who in exchange offered protection to peasants. Peasants were essentially enslaved to the government with little ability to improve their condition. This arrangement was successful for a long time, until society became efficient enough to democratize economic power without surrendering military power. That is, military protection became something governments did as a matter of course- independent of an individual's, community's, or region's economic contribution. Societies became wealthy enough to discard the previous arrangement, and create a new one. What today we would call capitalism.
Capitalism is more efficient than feudalism, however, it has flaws. It is not good at doing things that have value, but cannot be monetarily quantified. It has no sense of the larger society. As human productivity continues improve, individuals will be more able to generate more economic power outside of the corporation. Once this reaches a critical mass, corporations will be regulated to only doing fairly complex things that require an assemblage of knowledge and capital that is outside of the grasp of the individual (or small informal group).
I think when you say "capitalism," you mean reciprocity. "What do I get in exchange for producing this art?" That's different from saying that what the artist must get in exchange for producing art is money. I think providing the artist (and all people) with guaranteed housing and guaranteed base income (mincome) would remove a substantial amount of the demand for what artists seek in exchange fore producing art. The society would have already compensated them for gracing us with their existence through guaranteed subsidies. After the needs of housing and income are satisfied, it becomes much easier to create art for its own sake.
As I said previously, I think Spotify's fees are low, but I also think artists should also move away from the notion that their art is worth "x" dollars because capitalism.
The closest we have gotten to art being separate from monetary value, ironically, is the one related to piracy - the utter THEFT of someone's property.
Also not true. See above.
Another incredible irony given that "first world" conditions is the only thing making us entertain the notion of art without pay. Some would-be artists in poorer countries don't even have the energy to lift an instrument because of an utter lack of basic humane conditions.
I agree with the premise, but disagree with the conclusion. First world conditions are creating a situation in which our society is so wealthy that we can allow people to create art for its own sake. We just don't do it yet because people are still to attached to the prior system of corporate capitalism.
