Good for Lawyers, Bad for Everyone Else

I often joke with my nephew that there's never been a better time in history to be a lawyer, with a brand new cottage industry of Republicans paying lawyers to sue anybody & everybody over & over every time they lose an election, and in last week's episode of EGG FOO WHAT?! I railed about the fact that next up is songwriting "plagiarism". As we see in this latest case vs. Ed Sheeran, the new play will be "just blanket-sue every song that ever comes out and hope to get a few suckers to settle/pay up". The Washington Post puts things a little more eloquently - and really reveals how fucking depressing it is for songwriters not named (insert Boomer rocker on every classic rock station in the country here):

Greed has already ravaged a once thriving, if highly imperfect, ecosystem of songwriters and performers. The streaming economy has systematically disassembled that infrastructure — suffocating the revenue streams of all but the most bankable entities and selling off the entire history of recorded music as a loss leader to peddle cellphone data plans. 

This trial is the next horizon. If artists must pay a tax for employing the most common modes and tones of composition, the process of grinding popular music down to a consensus-driven pay window for tech entrepreneurs and corporate opportunists will have reached its apotheosis.

It's fucking bullshit, but of course perfectly in line with the bullshit we've all become. 😡