Kanye has long had quite extreme ambitions. A few years ago he Tweeted an org chart for a company he called "Donda." It ranges from what you would reasonably expect ("Music Production", "Merchandising," "Web Music Store") to the absurd ("Cancer Research," "Hovercrafts", "Luxury Cloud Service")
I mean it sounds crazy but honestly I would use it. There's been more than a few times I've typed a message in haste and hit the wrong emoji. My keyboard already ranks them by recently used and somehow does some context matching, so current technology isn't even too far off from that idea.
Yeah but Kanye is actually generating billions in revenue and is one of the biggest cultural icons right now which imo gives him more of a pass to be weird.
Neumann was more of a conman that was only good at turning billions of dollars into...billions of dollars of debt. And don't forget his weird cultish entourage.
The quotes around "unhinged" were to imply positively pivotal figures — like Leonardo da Vinci, Walt Disney, or Steve Jobs — not categorical terrorists.
Clearly it was intended to convey a positive association. I think it's totally fallacious to imply that unhinged is a positive attribute; hence the rebuttal. Unhinged is just unhinged.
Sure, the crazy people who made a bunch of money (or the terrorists) are the ones you've heard of. The majority of "unhinged" people are probably not better off for it.
Steve Jobs is kind of a great example. On HN people fawn over him, but he was "unhinged:" he was a giant asshole to everyone, by all accounts, and he opted for snake oil over medicine during the earliest part of his cancer treatment.
Plenty of people get lucky and strike it rich or contribute meaningfully to society without being unhinged. There is no meaningful correlation here.
How do artists actually collect this kind of cash these days, now that no one buys CDs? Wouldn't he need a trillion or so streaming listeners to generate a billion dollars?
Edit: never mind, looks like he's selling sneakers.
Live music industry is also bigger than it's ever been. Obviously not so much this year but booking fees for big artists run into the millions. They also get paid to feature in other peoples' music/content, and then again for access to their built-in promotional/marketing networks. They're selling hype. Anyone focused on milking profit out of the actual recordings themselves is stuck in the past, for the most part.
The modern model is to share the music freely as it serves primarily as a sales pitch for the artists brand. Young people want something of "value" for their money and they don't see a recording itself as having even $0.99 of value (even though they've mostly forgotten how to actually pirate media), like shitty overpriced merch and miserable "live music experiences" and "meet and greets".
Really what they're selling is hype. Which explains why an extreme manic depressive like Kanye has been so successful in this context. It's a system that directly rewards con men and effectively punishes any kind of caution or prudence. It also rewards drug addiction as many of these con men rely on drugs to maintain the illusions of their existence.
It's particularly sad because this system exploits the earnest passions of both the artists and the fans to manipulate them into participating.
It's more than just 'CDs' or 'Downloads' for artists these days, which which is pretty much not what they just do to get revenue. It's from their merchandise, investments in other companies and also founding their own companies which actually makes them their billions.
Think of Dr. Dre's Beats, Jay-Z's Tidal and investments in Uber. Now Kanye's Yeezy brand too.
> How do artists actually collect this kind of cash these days, now that no one buys CDs?
For big artists it’s mainly going on tour.
Doing a tour tends to generate more money for an artist than the album itself and it’s been this way for years now.
Ed Sheeran’s tour grossed almost a billion dollars ($776.200.000) .. that’s 1 tour. He did 2 before that.
One of the most cynical things about his entire persona is that a few months ago he was ranting on about black people being brainwashed and that they'd need to make economically sensible choices and pretty much the entire 'bootstrap' speech, and then he's out there selling overpriced sneakers to kids calling it the next frontier for humanity.
You don't seriously believe that right? If only people would buy those shoes who are in a position to buy luxury vanity sneakers then he'd not market them the way he does, and probably not make any money with them.
He just doesn't care and panders to everyone at the same time because nobody bothers to keep this kind of cynical celebrity culture in check.
> Alexandra Fletcher, a Bank of America spokeswoman, confirmed the authenticity of the document reviewed by Bloomberg. Prepared in September, it hasn’t been updated since the coronavirus pandemic began. The valuation of “future royalties generated in the footwear category is estimated from $1.75 billion to $3 billion,” according to the bank’s preliminary analysis.
It sounds like that preliminary analysis will be revised... downward.
https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/v1/articles/2016/...