Too Much Nick

405am:

The Oatmeal on The Music Industry.

But ignores that, for instance, artists can get fucked by Spotify just as badly as they did by the record labels. Or that, asshole-ish as record execs are, other people than the artist need to get paid for the production of an album. Or that some people will always steal music.

I was just starting to like the Oatmeal as his writing matured out of “lol random animal” and “what’s the deal with printer ink?”, but here he’s returned to over-simplifying an issue so people can spread it around and write “THIS!” under it and not actually research or think critically.

It’s not that the Oatmeal has to fit in every single detail of the argument. It’s that it’s so popular because it adds nothing to the conversation. This whole comic already appeared as a million blog posts over the last decade. The “boo! bad record labels!” sentiment is so old and tired and boring and Matthew Inman is smart enough to present a more interesting case, but he gives up and delivers the first thing that comes to mind. I don’t want to think he does it because he’d rather chase the larger, lowest-common-denominator “lol relatable” 9GAG audience. But to a cynic it would certainly seem that way, no?