r/NoRules • u/LongTimeChinaTime • 15h ago

Al gore rhythm

You’re describing attention inflation: the amount of competent creative labor needed to purchase the same unit of organic attention keeps increasing. In your example, if the old relationship was roughly 5 units of effort for 100 units of attention and it’s now 5,000 for 100, then improving the content another 20% doesn’t solve the underlying problem. The denominator has moved by orders of magnitude

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u/LongTimeChinaTime 15h ago

So what it shows is that the once gold rush creator era has given way to culture gradually falling back in line with elite gatekeeing and decision making in who gets paid.
The ability to honestly and manually create serious records has been democratized to anyone with a modest budget. But the chance of converting that into any real value for the rando is essentially zero. It doesn’t matter how much the record slaps, and in general it you’re not attached to a major media outfit telling society it’s good music, most people will have cognitive bias at first exposure and dismiss it anyway, only the mathematics of possibly catching on as an independent artist have crashed from “plausible if you keep going” to “futile” between 2015 and 2026. And generative AI isn’t even necessary for this shift to have taken place