How the internet turned 'selling out' from career suicide into strategy

In 1992, Pearl Jam reacted to sudden superstardom by refusing to make music videos, declining interviews, and cutting a guaranteed hit single from their second album — which then broke sales records anyway. That behavior is unthinkable today, and the essay uses it to mark how completely the culture has flipped. Back then, commercial success and artistic integrity were assumed to be at odds; ‘selling out’ was a genuine insult, one strand of a broader anti-consumerist mood that ran through No Logo, Fast Food Nation, and the Battle of Seattle.

That stigma has evaporated. Artists now chase brand tie-ins in the open — Lady Gaga Chromatica Oreos, Ice Spice x Dunkin’, Drake shilling online gambling, a Goldman Sachs CEO DJing at Lollapalooza — and audiences cheer rather than jeer. What’s unprecedented isn’t the commercialism itself but how well it works: the collaborations are a feature, not a betrayal.

The piece weighs two explanations. W. David Marx blames poptimism — the well-meaning reaction to rockist snobbery that curdled into a refusal to judge art by artistry at all, leaving popularity as the only remaining yardstick. The author agrees but calls that incomplete: the bigger force was the internet gutting professional criticism, flattening the Pitchfork editor and the anonymous YouTube commenter into equals. With tastemakers tuned out, culture optimizes for the casual consumer over the connoisseur, and competition pushes that toward lowest-common-denominator ‘slop.’ The excerpt breaks off before resolving its final question — why the death of criticism also made audiences tolerant of naked greed and self-promotion.