Everyone gets the Internet they deserve.

I wonder if liking one of them opens the floodgates to recommendations for others, and becomes a kind of positive feedback loop.

This may be good news. Some people will want to consume more real natural music. The best way to make this happen with minimal incidence of fakery will be very small-scale cottage-industry performance venues, 10 to 50 people in a room, including both musicians and performers, voices, instruments and no wires, wireless, computers or electronics involved. Do the math, and you can see that a few musicians should be able to make a pretty good living performing that way with ticket prices no higher than what millions are now paying to sit in crowds of 10,000 or so. Of course, there will be an adjustment period as the mass-production of culture and art declines, and small-scale decentralized production becomes the norm. The media moguls will try to convince us that art made by machine is superior, and their opinion shaping conglomerates will keep manufacturing superstar icons to deliver it. But cottage-industry music will be almost as hard to control as cottage-industry terrorism, and underground cooperatives of radical musicians and listeners will pop up and start making and sharing music with each other for free. As anything free is not counted in the Gross National Product, this will be terrible for the economy, and it will also distract people from all the other distractions to which we are supposed to addict ourselves. Use your brains; lose your chains!

Pop Will Eat Itself was right all along…

I wonder how it is affecting music torrent sites- they reward people uploading new music with download quota, so it seems like a way for torrenters to cheat the system.