The stories you hear about an artist getting pennies on millions of listens are because of their record deals and the credits on their work. You can’t solve this with software: artists enter these deals long before software is involved.
I’d argue that Spotify (and YouTube and TikTok etc) have done more for musicians because they’ve made it very easy to make a living when you have a core listener base. Software has not rescued major label artists from major label contracts because… how can it?
If only they'd give me an address (of a smart contact which would distribute the funds appropriately. I want to pay the parties whose names I don't know also, provided they're involved in actually creating the art.)
Didn't Spotify recently stop paying any royalties for tracks with less than 1k streams?
A (relatively) small audience would be made up of tens of thousands of listeners generating millions of streams. There are many, many independent artists that fall into this group.
I don't know much at all about the music industry, so I don't really have a conclusion from those data, but that seems low. It also does put a (not insignificant) number on the independents accomplishing what you describe.
There isn't.
I fail to see how piracy helps artists today.
Do you also fail to see how investment in technology that prevents certain groups from getting certain information harms everyone tomorrow? It's not like they'd have retool completely if they pivoted from censoring Finding Nemo because you're the wrong kind of customer to censoring political dissent because you're the wrong kind of citizen. The tech from the former can be reused in the latter and there's more money in the latter.
That pivot hasn't happened yet because the DRM hooks aren't in deeply enough. People would work around it. Piracy helps because it creates a space for us to fight back against that sort of thing. It keeps the set of people who can circumvent censorship large and it keeps them in practice.
At the end of the day, protecting an artist paycheck is just not as important as protecting user freedom. We can have both, but paying the streaming platforms and hoping they spend that money wisely is not the way to get there.
Not in my book but thanks for the perspective.
I feel my freedom to enjoy some music someone made on their own time has zero priority over said artist paying their bills.
I don't want to live in a world where there are no channels not controlled by a third party, and that's the world the content industry is building. Entertainment is just a stepping stone for them.
But we all know running a business has costs that aren’t salary.
Artists who sign to major labels get promotion and other assistance that costs money. That’s the trade off.
And they’re making less money than before because people pirated with Napster. Just look at music industry revenue charts. It only just recently exceeded pre-Napster levels and that is before adjusting for inflation. The average person is spending less money on music than they did in the 90s.
A new release CD was like $17 in 1995. So that’s $34 today. That would buy you one album. Today that buys you 3 months of listening to unlimited music.
So the price of Spotify is like when someone only buys 4 CDs every year.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/05/arts/pennies-that-add-up-...
But if things were otherwise? Then yes, the users should either walk away or they should circumvent whatever handcuffs I'm hypothetically building for them.
In that scenario, I'd absolutely participate in cutting my employer out of the loop so that I could do less evil work and instead get paid directly by the people who benefit from what I'm working on, and I hope you would too.
Also, you seem to me implying that a malware author and a shelf stocker are equally culpable for the actions of their employer, which is an odd sort of moral stance to take. Treating your users like enemies is a rather direct thing, and working for someone who behaves badly in some dimension unrelated to your work is quite another.
If there was a way to configure my players to fingerprint the content and send money to the artist as I play it (or probably at the end of the month, so the total spend for that month is configurable) I'd use it. Payment should be irrespective of where you got the bits. I'm trying to build such a thing.
But until a better way exists, I'm not going to feel bad about my occasional piracy in the meantime.