The Interesting Parallel Between Pop Music and Sex Work
Based on a Tyler Cowen pointer (who else), I thought this Twitter thread on how the Internet was changing sex work was really interesting. This in particular caught my eye:
And now let's get to a third point: the internet has changed the economics of porn by gutting the industry through piracy, which means 3) there's increasing amounts of overlap between porn performers and escorts.
She makes this observation as part of a larger point that the Internet is breaking down some of the opposition to sex work (in addition to making it safer). This would be a welcome change. Sex work should be legal, and it has always been a weird thing to me that one of the stronger opponents of legalization has been parts of the keep-your-laws-off-my-body feminist community.
Anyway, what I found interesting was how parallel this is to the modern music business. Piracy and streaming enabled by the Internet have killed the profits of the vast majority of the music recording business, meaning that top artists make a lot of their money in other ways, particularly from live performances. In this business model, the published music is merely an advertisement and brand-building to encourage people to pay for the live performance. If you consider pornography to be parallel to recorded music, and the escort business as the live performance, then the business models look surprisingly similar.
