Definitely not. There’s a whole genre of music that’s created for riding the coattails of popular songs. They wait for a song title by artists like Taylor Swift to be announced and then release their own songs with the same title. Sometimes they’re actually good, like this dude:

https://genius.com/artists/Only-fire

I’ve been wondering how much of that is back to school. I have the sense that Lemmy has a lot of younger users. I can’t judge though as I’ve been inactive for long stretches due to life. I’ve been trying to contribute more now

The latter, but I also don’t really mind paywalls in the form of “get early access” like SMBC comics or “get exclusive special content” like a lot of bands do.

You can just straight paywall with those too, but you don’t have too. A band I like crowdfunded a music video and you can watch it free on youtube, but if you didn’t crowdfund it you missed out on perks that go all the way up to being in the music video

Probably my favorite set of stories is by qntm, who writes lots of short fiction you can check out at his site. He wrote There Is No Antimemetics Division, which I think is best described by the intro he wrote for it:

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn’t share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams…

But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can’t record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war?

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

There’s a lot of other good entries too. They generally take the form of a wiki entry at https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/, as a classified file describing some anomalous thing or event. They have a shared canon but only loosely, individual stories can conflict with one another. Here’s a couple good ones:

• https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-173 - The original. No picture because the creator of the picture didn’t like being used for SCP, but you can find it online
• https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2521 - An anomaly that covets any written information about itself
• https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008 - An anomalous IKEA, got turned into a video game
• https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-j - Joke SCP

I’ll post over in !scp@lemmy.world too, to see what other people recommend for getting into it

The trilogy would’ve been much better if either director had done all 3. Either J.J. Abrams with a fun nostalgic return to form, or Rian Johnson with a fresh new take. The whiplash from them fighting with each other over the direction of the plot just ended up being a huge mess. I’m pretty surprised they weren’t just told what the plot was going to be, kind of seems like a screwup by whoever handled that.

False dichotomy, I’d rather see other funding models like Patreon/Kickstarter. Paying gets you early access/bonus stuff/whatever, and you don’t need intrusive technologies like ads/paywalls.

!scp@lemmy.world and !bluey@lemmy.world are both communities that are pretty low traffic atm, but seem like there’s a lot of Lemmings that would be into them