When people say art is being devalued, it's almost always in the context of selling a product - usually streaming music - and held up against the music industry at its commercial peak, as though the goal was always to maximize revenue, and we've simply failed to keep up.
The underlying problem, as we see it, is that community has been devalued. The music industry and those with a stake in its perpetuation have increasingly pushed artists toward operating as solo brands - a model that serves platforms and labels better than it serves the people making the work. That's not a judgment on individual artists; it's a description of a system designed to keep them isolated and therefore easier to exploit.
Labels far prefer to invest in individuals rather than scenes, and bands - which are really just tiny communities themselves - have been in dramatic decline. None of this is by accident. The more separate we become, the greater the profits are for those that would exploit us and our work.
The scenes that produced the music that people still care about weren't built by lone individuals chasing streams. They were built by people who shared rehearsal spaces, toured together in the same van, played on each other's records, and pulled each other up.
What we're building here are the structural conditions for that to happen again - not by relying on goodwill alone, but by creating something that doesn't disappear when a lease runs out or a venue owner decides that the room is worth more as a cocktail bar.