Institutions - especially those driven by profit - do not regret. If they did, an internet archival project would not trigger it when the likes of Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse could not.
Prince turning himself into a symbol is much more emblematic of record labels controlling the lives of artists.
Seems rather immaterial. Unless, of course, I'm missing something. Admittedly, I don't know much about him even though I'm a millennial. Seems like I should but I was more into post grunge music.
Steve Albini remarked that during the In Utero sessions, he ignored everyone but the band and that everyone associated with Nirvana were "the biggest pieces of shit I ever met." [0]
There was absolutely massive pressure on Cobain to produce for his contract, and that greatly exacerbated a number of the issues you listed.
Seems like a guy who should have been given some time off from his contract. Same with Winehouse; ultimately both were a commodity for their labels to package and sell and the problems that they were showing in their behavior were ultimately their own to deal with.
Because companies are composed of individual tapeworms working towards a common goal?
>Companies are totally emotionless entities
You speak as if they're evil spirits. They're made up of people. They're very emotional, you just get to see all the worst emotions manifesting at the most inappropriate times.
The gist of the book is that organizational behavior never makes sense if you anthropomorphize it as if it were a single entity with its own goals and motivations. Nor does it make sense if you think of it as a corporate machine that behaves mechanistically. It really is a bunch of individual humans with their own goals and motives interacting within a bureaucratic structure.
It's a pretty interesting book because its ideas actually got a pretty decent test. He used the Cuban missle crisis to evaluate these three theories of organizational behavior, and showed how publicly knowable facts didn't make sense under the first two models. He then showed that the third model fit them better, and went on to make some hypotheses about what really happened that couldn't be verified at the time. Decades later the relevant information was declassified and it turned out that, while many of his guesses were incorrect, an impressive number of them were spot on.
Kurt and Amy did that to themselves.
FWIW, I am a former heroin addict and alcoholic.
If you want an actual honest take on what’s fucked up about the music industry, Steve Albini covers it well in this essay: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
I think simply getting a paycheck was quite a contribution to these artists' demise. Though he managed to not die directly as a result of the heroin that consumed his existence, the late Matt Dike autobiographically remarked (paraphrasing here) that the worst thing in the world for a junkie was unlimited resources.
I said they don't regret.
Now you can argue that's psychopathic, which is often synonymous with monstrous, but I wouldn't call them psychopathic, either, because a person is psychopathic. A group of people, an institution, cannot be.
Now, the systems that these institutions exist within are often heavily influenced by psychopaths looking to leverage situations for their own maximum benefit, often at the expense of other humans, but the institutions themselves, they're amoral.
My objection is to vague attacks on all and any "institutions". Yes, most of them are corrupt and broken now. But that doesn't preclude the belief we can build good institutions, and should keep trying.