Sure, there is certainly some labor exploitation here, but at the end of the day musicians like her make money because they can do the thing once and sell it an infinite number of times, so that scaling is messy. Most of the professionals involved in actually producing this art do get royalties. So most of the labor exploitation would be on the distribution side - people running the servers and driving the trucks which deliver CDs and whatnot, but where does that line get drawn?
Do we say that Taylor Swift is also exploiting the labor of the people who make headphones which are required to listen to her music? It’s definitely possible to make a worker owned electronics collective, but Taylor Swift likely doesn’t have much power to drive consumer preferences towards or away from such a hypothetical resolution, right? Maybe she is actually morally obligated to stand up her own collective and vertically integrate her art with it? If she did that would it actually absolve her from any labor exploitation derived from people choosing to consume her art through other means? Or does the mere act of creating art which might interact with capitalism in any way create some form of moral liability?
You will find that there are many, many people involved in the music industry not being paid fair wages.
There are theoretical means to accumulate billions as an artist purely from the distribution of your own work but she certainly isn’t using them.
Sure, there is certainly some labor exploitation here, but at the end of the day musicians like her make money because they can do the thing once and sell it an infinite number of times, so that scaling is messy. Most of the professionals involved in actually producing this art do get royalties. So most of the labor exploitation would be on the distribution side - people running the servers and driving the trucks which deliver CDs and whatnot, but where does that line get drawn?
Do we say that Taylor Swift is also exploiting the labor of the people who make headphones which are required to listen to her music? It’s definitely possible to make a worker owned electronics collective, but Taylor Swift likely doesn’t have much power to drive consumer preferences towards or away from such a hypothetical resolution, right? Maybe she is actually morally obligated to stand up her own collective and vertically integrate her art with it? If she did that would it actually absolve her from any labor exploitation derived from people choosing to consume her art through other means? Or does the mere act of creating art which might interact with capitalism in any way create some form of moral liability?