If your pension plan is a rope, might I suggest a guillotine instead? or first? Get rid of as many top hoarders as you can.

I remember the looks I got at a goalsetting workshop when they asked, “What would you do if you had six months to live?” and I said, “Killing spree.”

That’s already happening: just look at the origins of top British musicians and actors now vs 3 decades ago - the age of stars hailing from the working class like David Bowie and Michael Caine is well and truly gone.

Like many other things, the filtering out of anybody not from the upper middle and upper class happens very early on and often even upstream from them starting their careers: it’s simply not affordable for them to go live in the places were things like good theatre academies and the best opportunities are, especially with the insane housing costs there.

On top of that there’s also the heavy nepotism and cronyism in those environments, especially theatre, so somebody not from that environment already and whose parents don’t “know somebody who knows somebody” there are pretty much screwed.

Losing money to piracy is well behind those things in affecting working class kids’ chances at making it big in the arts, especially given that the stage at which they are being blocked from progressing is one where they’re not famous and make most of their money from live performances, were piracy has no effect or can even have a positive effect if it helps make them more known as artists.

Mind you, I think it’s the morally right thing to do to pay those who need the money when you enjoy the product of their work, directly and bypassing the industry leeches which just leverage their control of distribution to extract rents, I just disagree with your theory that it’s somehow relevant for the arts being accessible for people not from well off origins, since my own observations when I had some contact with that world back in the UK and being interested in the subject also read about it, were that the causes of the massive fall in people from the working class in the arts in the UK were a cross between broad structural problems that pretty much stopped social mobility in general there and the nature of the arts as a very tough area were a handful of people make most of the money whilst the vast majority of artist spend years trying and failing barely capable to survive (nowadays not at all unless they have the bank of mommy and daddy to support them).

Paywalls only move this to the consumer:

If art doesn’t make you money, only rich people can make art.

Under the current system, you can make money making art, but only access it if you’re not poor (or pirate it lol).

Either way, much of art becomes an image of the experiences of rich people, either through the artists themselves or the audience.

A more fundamental change is needed if you really want to solve this issue.

Nah, that’s all fundamentally wrong.

Paying artists for their work, especially when there’s not enough food for everyone, is capitalist bullshit that perpetuates and is perpetuated by letting rich people dominate society. Your post makes the problem worse by not expressing any loss of respect for artists who enrich themselves while others starve.

If Eminem read your reply, he’d probably take it as a sign his low income background makes it OK for him to be so famous we both know him, while other people are starving to death and other artists have zero audience - but you’re trying to twist it the other way around, like rocket launching him into capitalist mental illness is actually keeping things grounded or something.

That’s how you get a society where people like Eminem aren’t organizing to overthrow Trump, because instead of the situation being “I’m known and paid as an artist for the useful stuff I do in that position aside from art,” the situation is “anything useful I do aside from art will detract from my career as an artist so I should just shut up and be less political, at least less political than organizing a revolution.”

If someone doesn’t care enough about art to do it when it’s hard, their opinion isn’t more valuable than mine just because they’re poorer than me.

I have been homeless before and probably will again because I have a spine - people who waste their lives doing whatever corporations tell them, do not have more valuable opinions than me just because they have less money than me.

It would be more reasonable if no one paid artists for their work until there was enough food for everyone, and art had to come from people like me who can afford to do it regardless of how much money we have, because we’d rather face stuff like homelessness than waste our lives. That’s how you would get a society that isn’t culturally dominated by capitalist bullshit.

Then I’d be making money for the useful stuff I do instead of facing possible homelessness, Eminem would be making money for the useful stuff he does including making any political statements he wants instead of staying quiet to get paid for music, and Trump wouldn’t be a topic.

Edited this comment a lot. Made it too long. Removed one angry paragraph because all the paragraphs are too angry as it is. Sorry.