nothing screams "i want people to value music again" than a bunch of mega-millionaires, who (mostly) make dumbed down music that drives disposable "singles culture", promoting a streaming service where no customer gets the tactile or romantic (however irrational) feeling of actually owning something (digital or physical)...worth owning.
I mean, Jay-z said it himself in the song:
And the music I be making I dumb down for my audience And double my dollars They criticize me for it Yet they all yell "Holla" If skills sold Truth be told I'd probably be Lyrically Talib Kweli Truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense (But I did five Mil) I ain't been rhyming like Common since
Well congrats man - you go for the quick buck and you've built yourself a little empire. But are you the kind of guy that inspires people to fall in love with music as an artform? Are you the kind of guy that inspires the type of fan who'll blow his hard earned money on a phyical record and be the type of person who loves it so much he'd want to be buried with it?
Market value of music is directly proportional to how much people think it's WORTH.
Music becoming so dumb down, repetitive, and what-not, just becomes a pure marketing game of megastars trying to keep their name in the news from one year to the next. And jay-z contributes to it. And he wants people to see the value of music again? by what? using celeb adverts to promote a streaming service, to promote "rental" as the primary means the next generation consumes music?
All of this garbage just makes music less valuable. Chasing dollars for singles, rental models, the hipster/millennial obsession with having to mass consume and have knowledge of 100s or 1000s of artists to name drop in conversation rather than getting to know someone's work intimately - making it impossible to obtain that knowledge without streaming or piracy purely by financial constraints. It's all just a bunch of bullshit.
Streaming is a neat tool. I don't outright hate it or think it's all bad. But like all technology - the problem usually isn't the tool. But the normative trends in society when they use that tool...and the things they abandon and the aspects of humanity that's left behind. And once it's all gone the next generation to have never experienced it will just act like you're a grouchy grandpa who's over-stating this or that, b/c they have no comparison point. Everything you say, in their eyes, is just a romantic bias and nostalgia. They know no reality but their own - and communicating the subtlety of what once was becomes near impossible to articulate.
People stream rather than own - b/c of the reality people like Jay-Z created. Pop hit after pop-hit after pop-hit with no true love for craft, album, theme, message, or anything that takes more than a 2minute attention span. a better streaming option - especially such a gimmicky one - isn't going to fix it.