11 ms·

You say that it is better to pay 90$ for 1000$ worth of goods than to pay nothing. This is a false dilemma, there is a third choice that is paying only what you

by etaweb 3y ago

You say that it is better to pay 90$ for 1000$ worth of goods than to pay nothing. This is a false dilemma, there is a third choice that is paying only what you can afford. Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make anyone less of a robber. A lot of people here would rather blame those who steal better than they do, than question the industry that allows artists work to be sold off. Furthermore, I would say that most people using Spotify and alike services do it only for convenience, but certainly not to "support the artists".

pcthrowaway 3y ago
These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're talking about legally listening to music you have access to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how to engage with the suggestion that this is theft (on the part of the consumers anyway). If you have the means and inclination to pay more I strongly urge people to pay more also. There are issues with the intermediaries, but there is no practical way for people who can't afford $1000/yr to support the artists they like legally, while still being able to listen to them. So if your suggestion is that someone who can afford $90/year should only have access to the albums they can afford to purchase through bandcamp because those support the artists more directly, I strongly disagree. This just further creates a wedge between the wealthy and regular working class people. Are you suggesting poor people make do with the few albums they can purchase from bandcamp and then whatever they can listen to on the radio? On youtube? Because I fail to see how those are any less 'theft' than just paying spotify and listening there. edit: I'm actually legitimately confused about what your idea is here and I'd like to understand. It seems like we're both coming at this from an anti-capitalist perspective, but your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts doesn't seem to align with any anti-capitalist ideology I'm aware of. Or are you just opposed to the consolidation of the distribution channels which exploit the working class (artists in this case) but somehow haven't drawn the connection that this is a condition of late-stage capitalism? If so, I'd recommend listening to some content by the wonderful Cory Doctorow
- hedora 3y ago
  Also, if, once a year, every spotify listener picked one band they liked at random, and paid them the amount of an annual Spotify subscription ($132), there'd be a hell of a lot more money in artist's pockets than there is currently. There are 8 million artists on Spotify, and 551 million monthly active users. That's $9000 per band on average per year. The 99.9th percentile band on Spotify makes $50K, and the 80th percentile artist makes $0. If we split the money across the 20% currently making any money at all, that's $45K per year per band. Therefore, the "pirate + directly pay one band at random" strategy would fund ~100 times more artists then Spotify does. Also, if Spotify went bankrupt tomorrow and 100% of their users switched to pure piracy, we'd only lose roughly 15K below-minimum-wage jobs globally. There are currently 36,000 Spotify listeners for every band being paid what would be a median income for one person. If a tiny fraction of them decided to go to concerts or donate to appropriate non-profits, etc, it'd be a net gain of jobs for artists. Note: There are only 220M premium subscriptions, so my numbers are a bit inflated. Ignoring the 330M ad supported listeners would lead to numbers that are too low. Also, I assumed people would pay for a spotify subscription which is more than the assumed $90. Maybe divide everything I said by two? Link to subscriber numbers: https://www.statista.com/chart/15697/spotify-user-growth/ https://www.statista.com/chart/15697/spotify-user-growth/
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    I think you're missing a few relevant things: An annual spotify subscription in the U.S. is $99 (possibly less with boxing day deals and such), but I'd assume the majority of subscribers are outside the U.S. where prices are lower across the board. But 6M of those artists may be AI-generated filler content, possibly published by bots. I don't think the correct idea is to divide the potential money people can spend by the number of artists. There should be some connection with what people are actually choosing to listen to, anything else would reward opportunistic publishers of low-effort, uninspired music (and encourage people to do even more of this). Which then brings up the problem: If people were to fund one artist they listen to (lets say an artist they choose to listen to rather than an artist they accidentally listened to a song by once), are they going to choose at random from their list of such artists? How do they then get that list to pick from? How do they discover new music to potentially listen to more of in the first place Apps like Spotify, (or OSS like YouSpot that piggybacks on Spotify) are both valid answers to those questions. Then you have the dilemma of who's paying the cost of the bandwidth, and the development costs. If you want to be fair, I think people should be encouraged to pay what they comfortably can with their budgets. They're using the infrastructure and platform of spotify (or similar) for discovery, so Spotify or similar should reasonably expect some money to cover costs and pay their devs. Then they can also pay any number of random artists whenever the mood strikes them. If they can't afford spotify, they can still use YouSpot, kick the YouSpot devs one or several dollar per year, and then purchase music from their preferred artists up to the amount comfortable for them. Using YouSpot is the closest actual thing to 'stealing' btw, because they're actually consuming a resource (bandwidth and server time) that's intended for subscribers, from a company that pays for it. Add to that, by using their software (and spotify's upstream), if they're not financially supporting the YouSpot devs and the Spotify devs for the work they're consuming then we're back to the initial claim (which I already said I disagree with) that consuming something that can be 'copied' ad infinitum without paying the producer is theft. But I think any of the above are reasonable options for people who want to maximize the support of creators of the things they consume while staying within their means
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by etaweb 3y ago

pcthrowaway 3y ago

These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're talking about legally listening to music you have access to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how to engage with the suggestion that this is theft (on the part of the consumers anyway). If you have the means and inclination to pay more I strongly urge people to pay more also. There are issues with the intermediaries, but there is no practical way for people who can't afford $1000/yr to support the artists they like legally, while still being able to listen to them. So if your suggestion is that someone who can afford $90/year should only have access to the albums they can afford to purchase through bandcamp because those support the artists more directly, I strongly disagree. This just further creates a wedge between the wealthy and regular working class people. Are you suggesting poor people make do with the few albums they can purchase from bandcamp and then whatever they can listen to on the radio? On youtube? Because I fail to see how those are any less 'theft' than just paying spotify and listening there. edit: I'm actually legitimately confused about what your idea is here and I'd like to understand. It seems like we're both coming at this from an anti-capitalist perspective, but your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts doesn't seem to align with any anti-capitalist ideology I'm aware of. Or are you just opposed to the consolidation of the distribution channels which exploit the working class (artists in this case) but somehow haven't drawn the connection that this is a condition of late-stage capitalism? If so, I'd recommend listening to some content by the wonderful Cory Doctorow

hedora 3y ago
Also, if, once a year, every spotify listener picked one band they liked at random, and paid them the amount of an annual Spotify subscription ($132), there'd be a hell of a lot more money in artist's pockets than there is currently. There are 8 million artists on Spotify, and 551 million monthly active users. That's $9000 per band on average per year. The 99.9th percentile band on Spotify makes $50K, and the 80th percentile artist makes $0. If we split the money across the 20% currently making any money at all, that's $45K per year per band. Therefore, the "pirate + directly pay one band at random" strategy would fund ~100 times more artists then Spotify does. Also, if Spotify went bankrupt tomorrow and 100% of their users switched to pure piracy, we'd only lose roughly 15K below-minimum-wage jobs globally. There are currently 36,000 Spotify listeners for every band being paid what would be a median income for one person. If a tiny fraction of them decided to go to concerts or donate to appropriate non-profits, etc, it'd be a net gain of jobs for artists. Note: There are only 220M premium subscriptions, so my numbers are a bit inflated. Ignoring the 330M ad supported listeners would lead to numbers that are too low. Also, I assumed people would pay for a spotify subscription which is more than the assumed $90. Maybe divide everything I said by two? Link to subscriber numbers: https://www.statista.com/chart/15697/spotify-user-growth/ https://www.statista.com/chart/15697/spotify-user-growth/
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  I think you're missing a few relevant things: An annual spotify subscription in the U.S. is $99 (possibly less with boxing day deals and such), but I'd assume the majority of subscribers are outside the U.S. where prices are lower across the board. But 6M of those artists may be AI-generated filler content, possibly published by bots. I don't think the correct idea is to divide the potential money people can spend by the number of artists. There should be some connection with what people are actually choosing to listen to, anything else would reward opportunistic publishers of low-effort, uninspired music (and encourage people to do even more of this). Which then brings up the problem: If people were to fund one artist they listen to (lets say an artist they choose to listen to rather than an artist they accidentally listened to a song by once), are they going to choose at random from their list of such artists? How do they then get that list to pick from? How do they discover new music to potentially listen to more of in the first place Apps like Spotify, (or OSS like YouSpot that piggybacks on Spotify) are both valid answers to those questions. Then you have the dilemma of who's paying the cost of the bandwidth, and the development costs. If you want to be fair, I think people should be encouraged to pay what they comfortably can with their budgets. They're using the infrastructure and platform of spotify (or similar) for discovery, so Spotify or similar should reasonably expect some money to cover costs and pay their devs. Then they can also pay any number of random artists whenever the mood strikes them. If they can't afford spotify, they can still use YouSpot, kick the YouSpot devs one or several dollar per year, and then purchase music from their preferred artists up to the amount comfortable for them. Using YouSpot is the closest actual thing to 'stealing' btw, because they're actually consuming a resource (bandwidth and server time) that's intended for subscribers, from a company that pays for it. Add to that, by using their software (and spotify's upstream), if they're not financially supporting the YouSpot devs and the Spotify devs for the work they're consuming then we're back to the initial claim (which I already said I disagree with) that consuming something that can be 'copied' ad infinitum without paying the producer is theft. But I think any of the above are reasonable options for people who want to maximize the support of creators of the things they consume while staying within their means

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]