>If you, a consumer, are making the decision then it's not censorship. If some company, government, organization, school, etc is making the decision then it is censorship.
That seems too strong, what about curation or editorial discretion? The NYT deciding not to publish my op-ed screed about the lizard people isn't censorship, it's just how you run a good news agency.
Does Perl have mature equivalents for pandas and sklearn (setting aside what everyone else is saying about numpy)? The python ecosystem has a bunch of killer apps that make the workaday tasks of data science extremely ergonomic. R is similar with the tidyverse imo, but I don’t know of other languages with a comparable package landscape.
Quick addendum: data science != computer science, most data scientists learn coding on top of another skillset, not as their primary area of expertise, so things like under-the-hood efficiency are often second order concerns to learn-ability, ease of use and maintenance.
Like I don't know how you can read something like this and just say "well have you tried selling on Bandcamp?"
'''
Live Nation’s consolidation of the industry was rapid and aggressive, spending around $1 billion in just 18 months in the late 1990s buying independent concert promoters and venue owners. By 1999, when radio titan Clear Channel paid $4.4 billion for the company (then called SFX), it was the largest music venue owner and concert promoter. Antitrust enforcers took no action to stop the deal.
By 2005, Clear Channel had spun off its live music division into a new, standalone company: Live Nation, the country’s largest artists manager and concert promoter and second-largest venue owner. Today, Live Nation is once again part of a massive broadcasting and live music conglomerate that wields immense power.
Live Nation has since combined with the ticketing monopoly Ticketmaster, satellite radio monopolist SiriusXM, and online radio leader Pandora as part of media mega-conglomerate Liberty Media. Last year, Liberty Media was approved to take control of iHeartMedia, the largest radio station owner in the country; prior to 2014 iHeart was known as Clear Channel. The proverbial band was back together, antitrust concerns and all. Competition and consumer advocates stridently opposed every corporate tie-up along the way; my organization was part of a coalition that argued against the Liberty/iHeart deal last year. Antitrust enforcers permitted every one.
'''
Further down:
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The company’s power to steer business away from rivals is not theoretical. In late 2019 the Justice Department found that, for years, Live Nation had abused its monopoly by steering its artists and tours away from venues that refused to use Ticketmaster. The government could have sued for monopoly violations but instead simply amended the agreement it struck with the companies when they merged a decade ago.
>Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists for any price you want.
I think you're missing my point. The opportunity to market direct to consumer does not negate the massive wage-setting power of a cartel which can buy up rivals, production talent, leverage radio, venue, and streaming contracts, etc.
>Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale of music are similar to software, in that they are massive
Is this the case? It seems that there's the fundamental limitation of 10 musicians not being able to record a song in 1/10th of the time. Certainly there are SOME economies of scale, but it seems a little incredible that music would be as "factory producible" as something like a bookshelf or a car.
> The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few.
This seems incongruous with the rest of what you are saying. Yes clearly there is an entrepreneurial component of music, and absolutely eg. SoundCloud and BandCamp is enabling independent artists in new and important ways. That doesn't change the fact that massive financial institutions are rent-seeking the bejeezus out of the bulk of the industry in a way that (to me) would appear to hurt competition.
I think generally the point of cartelization is to make it very challenging NOT to sign with them. Clearly many independent labels can thrive, and I can't imagine that it's impossible for an artist to start their own label. Nevertheless, when eg. sound and recording engineers can be aggressively poached by a major studio it's got to be challenging to go it alone.
Your example is a little specious in that a bookcase is very different from a song. The production of one has huge economies of scale, whereas a song doesn't. I agree that producing things competitively is important to improve overall efficiency, but with the music industry you really have a small cartel of massive labels dictating the terms for everyone else (ie. engaging in massively anti-competitive behavior). It seems weird to me that your pro-market ideology leads you to support what (to me) seems to be more or less wage-fixing for a labor supplier (musicians)
That seems too strong, what about curation or editorial discretion? The NYT deciding not to publish my op-ed screed about the lizard people isn't censorship, it's just how you run a good news agency.