Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World

Today’s selection covered pages 229-258 in our Spreadable Media textbook. The reading continued our look into chapter six, or “Courting Supporters for Independent Media”. We are back at it again with the textbook today, and the weekly swapping between platforms has really been quite beneficial to my overall understanding of the content. At the beginning, I was always so lost and confused, but the fact that the essays we read are actually mentioned in the book too has aided me a lot.

This excerpt covered a lot of material, but a lengthy discussion about Animator Nina Paley’s newfound perspective on giving away content for “free” was definitely the one that stood out the most to me when I was reading. The book corrected my idea that creators actually give away their content for no value at all, because these artists actually imply that they want some “form of reciprocity” from their audience when they share their media pieces. According to the text, Paley encourages her audience to “remix and recirculate [her] content in ways that spark discussions”, and after a period of time, her content will become popular if it is worthy.

The book’s discussion of independent content creators made me think about the artists that I interact with, and one specifically: Lil Uzi Vert. Lil Uzi posts his entire music catalog on to SoundCloud for fans to stream without paying a single dime. While he also makes his albums available to purchase on iTunes with higher quality, it is very important that he makes all of his content available for free if that’s how fans want to consume it. In this way, Uzi is able to ensure his content reaches a wider audience, “and, if they value [it]”, then they will eventually pay for another portion of his content. Since he has to “split [his] revenue with an outside distributor”, or Atlantic Records, Uzi ends up netting more from his creations in the long run because he not only makes money from record sales, but he also makes money from the fans who end up paying for his content in some other manner later on. Clearly, Uzi and Paley have a profitable mindset.