Internet is a blessing for cultural production - says prof. Joel Waldfogel from University of Minnesota

-> Let's go back in time, thinking about the ambivalent attitude that many artists have toward digitization, to the moment when the digitization of music occurs in Nashville. The ability to pirate, to download things from the web without paying for them, arose. Since then, digitization and the Internet began to be seen as a threat by artists.  But it didn't take long for the Internet to turn out to have its good sides as well. -> The Internet, yes, has made it possible for people to steal cultural goods, but it has also made it much cheaper to produce them. What followed can safely be called an explosion of creative potential in terms of the number of new works. -> We listen to a lot of old music, which means that thanks to streaming, artists of old who are still listened to but no longer release albums can still make money. Yes, it may often not be large amounts of money, but in the pre-Internet era they would have received nothing, because you don't have to pay royalties on subsequent plays of a store-bought CD. -> On the other hand, streaming services are powerful. They have great power to decide what is successful and how much they will pay the record labels. There's a lot to complain about. It's a very complicated system. But there are a lot of artists who get something they would never get otherwise."