This argument misses the fact that the ESRB is a voluntary, self-regulatory organization. The gaming industry, Rockstar included as one part thereof, agrees to rate their own games because it looks better in the public eye, and because if it doesn't, there is the risk that the government will step in and regulate. This would probably be a much more painful solution for the industry and a wasteful one for the government.
No individual company wants to get slapped with an AO, but the companies collectively recognize that having a rating agency that acts independently of their individual interests is a good thing for them overall. Rockstar, fairly or not, is already in the watchdogs' bull's-eye, and Take-Two has had enough recent legal troubles on its hands anyway. The lawyers don't pay themselves, and I suspect it will be Rockstar's greater interest to negotiate for an M rating than to bypass the ESRB.
One reasonable way of thinking about it is analogous to Bayesian stats. You have a song, and you don't know how much you'll like it - a good prior assumption is that you'll find it average. However, if you know that many other people have downloaded it, you'll upwardly revise your opinion, and vice versa. That much is pretty simple and obviosu; a little better is to extend the same rationale to view each individual listen as a data point and the parameter being estimated as your long-term appreciation for the song. Maybe you didn't like it on the first listen, and clearly you'd weight your own opinion far more heavily than others'. But if you've just listened to it once and many other people really, really like it, you might decide it's worth listening to more in case it grows on you with subsequent listens, or for whatever other reason your first time through "wasn't good."
The implication is not really that the good bands will get most popular so much as that bands that reflect broader ranges of appeal and reflect the average person's taste get popular. Your own taste can be very uncorrelated (or even negatively correlated, though I think people too heavily negative are more likely snobs) with what is generally popular. And a relatively inoffensively acceptable song, that many people can listen to and think, "Yeah, I'll listen to that," can snowball in popularity once it catches on. There are also more factors at play in the real world, such as the greater difficulty in finding unpopular bands (anyone can turn on the radio and hear U2, but the Bad Brains are a bit harder to find).
On a side note, I do think that people are way too disdainful about popular music being crappy. There's a serious survivor bias at work. I've listened to a decent amount of more obscure stuff and there sure are a lot of really bad obscure bands out there, unknown for good reason, applauded by some silly people even though they sound like a less-slickly-produced version of the Top 40.
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This argument misses the fact that the ESRB is a voluntary, self-regulatory organization. The gaming industry, Rockstar included as one part thereof, agrees to rate their own games because it looks better in the public eye, and because if it doesn't, there is the risk that the government will step in and regulate. This would probably be a much more painful solution for the industry and a wasteful one for the government. No individual company wants to get slapped with an AO, but the companies collectively recognize that having a rating agency that acts independently of their individual interests is a good thing for them overall. Rockstar, fairly or not, is already in the watchdogs' bull's-eye, and Take-Two has had enough recent legal troubles on its hands anyway. The lawyers don't pay themselves, and I suspect it will be Rockstar's greater interest to negotiate for an M rating than to bypass the ESRB.
The implication is not really that the good bands will get most popular so much as that bands that reflect broader ranges of appeal and reflect the average person's taste get popular. Your own taste can be very uncorrelated (or even negatively correlated, though I think people too heavily negative are more likely snobs) with what is generally popular. And a relatively inoffensively acceptable song, that many people can listen to and think, "Yeah, I'll listen to that," can snowball in popularity once it catches on. There are also more factors at play in the real world, such as the greater difficulty in finding unpopular bands (anyone can turn on the radio and hear U2, but the Bad Brains are a bit harder to find).
On a side note, I do think that people are way too disdainful about popular music being crappy. There's a serious survivor bias at work. I've listened to a decent amount of more obscure stuff and there sure are a lot of really bad obscure bands out there, unknown for good reason, applauded by some silly people even though they sound like a less-slickly-produced version of the Top 40.