tl;dr: stfu

One would think people commenting on a tech website would understand the definition of trolling, which is participating in online discussion for the sole purpose of irritating others, which you are poorly attempting to do. But I’ll go ahead and feed you anyway.

The article presented a fascinating case, inviting numerous viewpoints. This guy is throwing everything at every wall and seeing what sticks, and this would have been practically impossible without recent technological advancements. But time is limited, so if you divide that by 14,000 songs it’s safe to assume that some sacrifices in quality were necessary, as evidenced by the song samples in the TLDR podcast if you actually clicked through to hear it. These are obviously low-budget, low-production works, but thanks to technology, they are also low-cost, and Matt has turned his quantity of effort into five-figure revenues if not profits.

But anyway, since you’re so fixated on copyright, I’ll oblige. He’s made personalized birthday recordings for presumably hundreds of different people’s names. And he did this without plagiarizing the song “Happy Birthday to You” (which may fall into the public domain after a court decision, but that’s another matter) or using any samples of existing sound recordings.
Paradoxically, limits breed creativity. Just look at Vine and how creative people can be with a mobile app and six seconds of video. Listen to “Short Music for Short People” on Fat Wreck Chords – 101 bands playing 30-second songs. Listen to NES music, particularly on SunSoft titles, and then read up on the limitations of the medium. To truly creative people, copyright law, Vine’s six-second cap, and the NES synth aren’t prohibitive; they’re opportunities to push the limits of their respective media.

And what happened? Matt earned $23,000 in [copyright] royalties from iTunes and Spotify. I just wish they told us about his touring and t-shirt sales revenues…

Further, Matt’s model is definitively long-term. And like some parts of the tech world, some works and creations are ahead of their time, or they can otherwise enjoy spikes in demand and popularity many years after their inception. Thus, if** Matt seeks his maximum-entitled copyright protection for his works, he can earn royalties on his creations even if it takes until the year 2042 for North West to use a sample of one of Matt’s songs about poop in what turns out to be the hit single of the summer. As unlikely as that may be, Matt has already indicated that he’s interested in profiting from his efforts, so copyright law effectively encourages such creative risk-taking.

And lastly, not all artists support the retroactive copyright extensions of 1998, AKA “Sonny Bono Act” or “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” Many will agree that public domain is very important to society and that works should not remain under copyright forever.

So yeah, counterpoint, I guess, if you consider your comment a point. Troll.

**Yes, “if.” Copyright protection is optional, not compulsory. And yet, even that one Beatle who said “imagine no possessions” didn’t just throw that into the Creative Commons.