Not really? If the testimonials are true, then simply making the app itself is an act of hostility.
The parent comment is putting it as nicely as it can be put. If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work. There is no honor system in music or data and there never will be.
People have been recording concerts for decades. Often with a bit of help from the sound crew, which can probably be discouraged by musicians with enough influence, but if the only allowed way to hear a song is to attend a concert, lots of people would rather have a recording that a fan made and distributed.
I'm just tired of this technolibertarian mindset of "it's not wrong because no one is stopping me from doing it". There is no "honor system" in life either and if you see that as permission to be an asshole, that just makes you an asshole. And if your best defense against being accused of being an asshole is some form of "they couldn't stop me", then you're tacitly admitting to being an asshole.
If 10 people live in a lake and I fish more than everyone I will be better off that others. But then everyone else will seek the same individual short-term success because my first step in being an asshole was not punished. We will all end up starving in this scenario. A central authority agreed by all to manage this situation fairly is the way out. Rules agreed to in common beforehand and enforced by a neutral party.
The common thief is an example. Also pirating games and movies is another example.
And he wasn't just wrong for the hell of it. He used it to argue against immigration and for coercive population control, not to promote environmental stewardship. His model erases the role of governance, culture, and cooperation, reducing human behavior to a simplistic race to depletion.
In reality, the commons don’t fail because they’re shared. They fail when they’re mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them.
I would go so far to say that the only way this concept has ever come close to being "correct" is the culturally inert modern Western world which has replaced everyone's souls with aimless desires for products and cheap dopamine hits, far from anything approaching our natural state.
Scale being necessary seems to be unique to capitalism and state capitalism (Marxist industrialization requirements).
Maybe it was necessary before, I don't know but it's moot. We certainly have achieved post scarcity now and there should be no issues leveraging the tools our ancestors have given us to ensure it's distributed well.
Being an asshole is the opposite of success.
Unless you think life is a video game and the score is tallied in dollar signs. In which case, you've already lost.
If that made me an asshole, then 11-year-old me was a supervillain bumping Aphex Twin. Oftentimes I think HN forgets to consider the 99% when contemplating ethics over sous-vide.
As I said multiple times now, I understand the consumer desire for "free" and what makes someone an asshole is not simply that behavior. It is the glee the developers take in that behavior and the moral grandstanding you are doing in your comment here pretending that you're participating in class warfare by download an mp3.
Draw out this line of reasoning long enough, and one could argue that Richard Stallman is the worst human alive for "moral grandstanding" the software industry and taking glee in destroying software jobs with copyleft licensing. But more accurately, he ushered in the information age for everyone and prevented it from being cordoned-off behind a proprietary paywall. Yes, he predicated Napster and ThePirateBay and 4chan and all the horrible examples you're apt to draw upon. But he also invariably pushed technology forward - we're better people, that we aren't slaving away remaking the Cairo library for the 30,000th time. Common access to at least some information enables a great deal of art and provides countless value to would-be artists.
I'd like to think that the entire human race is bettered with access to information. It would certainly be idyllic if we could compensate artists, authors and scientists along the way, but humanity would be ruined if all information came at-cost. I am willing to fight for a world where individuals have free access to information, and I reckon my tools are more powerful than the publishers who seek to thwart me. I won't stop when the musicians scream out bloody murder, and if you think that's the most immoral thing imaginable then don't ask how 15-year-old me found the money to afford Jimmy John's.
The person they're responding to has repeatedly said this is not their position.
Nonsense like this is where I leave the conversation. You can't deny the accusations of moral grandstanding in the same breath you say this. I commented directly on the topic being discussed in a specific HN thread. That does not mean I think this is the most important issue on the planet and the non-sequitur of contrasting a discussion of IP law with children in Gaza being firebombed is just straight up offensive. The "karma sink" here isn't voicing your "ethos", it is you.
Add to that that not all musicians are Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but might just as well have to fight to survive, living from Spotify payout to gig revenue as well.
I sympathise with people trying to get access to culture by all means, but we cannot wholesale morally legitimise freeloading because of that. We all get to enjoy a broad cultural landscape, but that can only exist if most people pay for content.
Copyright infringement is a civil offense, not criminal. Or in other jurisdictions, it’s not an offense at all, but rather priced in to the costs of recordable media and storage media/devices.
~1000$ to ~12000$ a year:
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/19/zoe-keating-spot...
It is a massive problem. It's the rich poor divide with propoganda fucking over the genuine little people in favour of the richer/established/more connected people. Human life is like this. Call it out if you see it if you value truth over greed.
The future is built on the past. Claimed "Ownership" of the past fucks up the present for the established powers over creativity (e.g. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act). AI just takes it to a whole 'nother level.
[0] https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/unauthorized-rap-samples/
Its truly the case that if it wasnt for radio and the legal frameworks developed to deliver radio we would probably be looking at incredibly heavy gatekeeping for music.
Humans in general are better off with tools like this. And I for one am glad that these developers are showing off who is angry.
Heck things could be a lot better right now if it wasnt for Metallica.
The mere reproduction of a previous performance is not additional work for the artist and so does not require compensation: to demand royalties undermines the fundamental structure of art for most of history.
But right now it is what it is and people are basing their careers off that status quo. There should be some respect for that, no?
Not really. Like when my friend scolded me the other day for not finishing the dessert I ordered - "trash is burned here, you're contributing to excess methane production."
May I be flogged for my excess methane production. I will present myself with no resistance, so long as the floggings are delivered in a linear scale mapping to amount of methane produced. As soon as all the time in the universe is spent flogging the decision makers at all the oil and gas companies, I'm right there.
People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked.
Your metaphor is also incredibly impersonal. What about stealing a sandwich from a homeless person and saying "well society already fucked them over big time." It's a drop in the ocean compared to all the meals he's already missed for other reasons.
Everyone used to make more money, and anyway this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior, which is my argument.
I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to me why this basic fact of piracy needs to be restated so often but I guess I'll do it again: Stealing a sandwich from a homeless person deprives a homeless person of a sandwich. Downloading a song deprives nobody of nothing - they can still sell the song. You can't reasonably compare these two completely different actions. You can make other arguments against piracy if you want but it simply isn't theft.
Also my original was talking about orders of magnitudes difference. Burning my leftover pastry being the equivalent of like, a millisecond of the methane output of Chevron. Stealing a sandwich from a homeless person is 1 / 336580 vs, what, do I gotta do the math here to show how astronomically small my output is compared to chevron?
Woah, woah, let's back up here. You made a metaphor about orders of magnitude. I asserted that orders of magnitude on the level of the global environment and the individual human are very different and provided you with a metaphor to illustrate that. I made no suggestion that piracy was theft so you had no need to correct me on this "basic fact."
> Everyone used to make more money
It's not clear what you're saying with this. Maybe we should just continue the trend and say no one should earn any money anymore? Honestly confused by this one.
> this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior
How did we come to the current model? Everyone was happily getting recording contacts with advances for instruments, studio time and touring logistics until one day MegaCorps said "let's instead move to a model where everyone pays the absolute minimum, if anything at all, and then try to split the much lower profits between the same number of actors?"
Come on, I'm happy to criticise companies like Spotify all day but they weren't the driving force in creating the current model and having some of the richest people in our society sit around in forums like this saying maybe musicians shouldn't be paid at all really isn't helping
Basically yes. Except for the "happily" bit before. Even the biggest artists were always getting shafted by the labels, is it surprising that the labels would fuck their artists over even more given the chance? Taylor Swift's fight with the label may legendary but there's thousands of working musicians out there scraping by getting credits on movies and bigger band releases (jazz and whatnot) and they remain as poor as they ever have, from vinyl through to streaming. So I just don't think it's ever been something that random consumers really influence, it's always been the labels fucking over the artists, and that's where my scale argument comes from.
Me downloading a song has nothing to do with record labels spending the last six decades writing progressively more predatory contracts, fighting every new technology until they can find a way to capture value from it at the expense of their artists, and working with streaming companies to extract every slice of margin they can until the artist gets their $.20 paycheck on ten thousand listens.
This argument I don't like: a company found a way to exploit someone so as to sell people something cheaper and then people bought the cheaper thing. It's thus the consumer's fault that the other people got exploited. I see it all the time and that falls under the same umbrella of what I'm arguing against, the idea that corporations are immune to criticism because they're just profit generating algorithms and actually it's on us to make the world better by not buying what they're selling. Why not just cut out the middle man literally and stop the exploitative behavior?
So far as I know nobody here is arguing musicians shouldn't get paid. I'm arguing the opposite.
Astonishingly ignorant hot take. Music is what MUSICIANS DO. Some of them are also performers, many are not. What they create is the same as what a painter does, or even a chef or architect. However it is not a physical good so people with tiny brains think that means "iT's FreEEe!!1!" when each musical instrument used costs money, the recording cost money, the distribution cost money, the filing/registration costs money, and then there's all the years of time and effort spent learning how to do all of this.
The fact of the matter is that right now music is treated very similarly to software. There is ownership and copyright, and being able to make a digital copy for minimal cost/effort does not magically remove that ownership.
If you don't like it then you should change the laws. It's like being mad at cops because of the speed limit, when the likely culprits are your local city council.
My personal belief is that systems that allow people to get paid when they're not working are not sustainable, and therefore intellectual property has a fundamental flaw. The end game for musicians is to perform live and use their recordings as advertisements for that. That makes them very similar to jobs I've held my whole life where the second I stop showing up for work is the second I stop getting paid.
Could not agree more.
Society has so far agreed to legislate in favour of people monetising their intellectual property.
By all means people should be free to disagree with that for whatever reason but I feel it's a bad look to make fun of the musicians trying to follow the rules and make a living within the bounds of both law and social contract.
Personally I will never use this software and would actively advocate against it if only to counter the attitude you’re presenting.
But mainly because artists should be able to make a living and it’s already hard enough with the meager pennies or less they get from current PAID streaming services.
[1] Spotify Alternatives That Pay Artists... - https://cutoffthespigot.substack.com/p/spotify-alternatives-...
[2] How To Support Artists As They Withdraw From Spotify - https://www.nylon.com/entertainment/delete-spotify-alternati...
Similarly here. It is not about the act of people listening to the music for free. If this was a problem, a musician would just restrict access to those tracks. It is about a spirit of taking without giving back, which could be understood as: "Haha you idiots, thanks for providing it for free, I am not paying then". A bit like stopping to watch a street performer, and instead of clapping and (eventually) tossing a coin going like: "We are in a public space, I don't need to pay, idiot. Your own fault!".
Technically correct, but ethically wrong and shows they don't value the work of artists. This is just about words and showing some respect, not about money. And since words and showing respect literally cost nothing this makes the insult even greater.
Ethically wrong to watch a street performer but not toss a coin? I do agree that it is ethically virtuous to toss the coin, but ethically wrong not to? I'm not seeing it.
I am not saying anyone who listens voluntarily for 30 seconds and doesn't pay a handsome amount is a monster. What I said is that listening, enjoying it and then telling them: "Stupid musician, their fault for giving me the choice to pay, so I don't" makes you a bad person.
There are a thousand ethically sound reasons why you wouldn't toss a coin, you could not have one, you could be broke, you could misunderstand the situation, you could have a cultural background where this is uncommon and street performers are getting their share in a different way etc.
But enjoying the fruit of their work and then maligning them for giving it to you for free is not only rude, but yes: ethically wrong.
Meanwhile most online ads are supporting multinational corporations that already may earn money with your browsing data and try to manipulate your choices every step. All while delivering their ads in a way that makes it a threat to not block them. That isn't remotely the same. If you need my money to survive, give me the choice to pay instead at least.
The exact same software could have been marketed as something to discover new music, for free and the musicians would be mostly okay with it.
"Why are you mad? We all die eventually!"
Show some merch buying options or display a button that allows you to pay for the music as a thank you to the artists or something. Makes you appear better in front of the crowd that would use bandcamp/soundcloud in the first place (so your core demographic) and supports the artists.
I am listening to music on bandcamp/soundcloud because I love music and this is a place where you can find new interesting music — not because it is free there. And in my experience as someone who sells on bandcamp many listeners share that spirit.
The app just find the music on free sources, probably published by the artists themselves or their agents. How is that living off their work and where do the nuclear developer receive money from the nuclear app users in the process?
And that means such an app enters a certain relationship with these musicians. This relationship can be symbiotic (good) or parasitic (bad).
Yeah but if you want to sell cheese it's probably a good idea to maintain a good relationship with farmers.
If that's what you think then why don't we just close down all the studios and instrument shops. We've got enough, no need to keep producing it?
You can copy and distributed the cheese freely but the farmer still has to spend money taking care of and housing the cows, milking the cows, going through the whole processes of churning and pasteurising and everything else, then packaging it and disturbing it to where you can initially find it.
Now after all that you come along and make your perfect atomic copy and walk away saying "Well screw you, you should have no say in any of this..."
Then what? What's the incentive to produce and distribute new cheese? You really think it doesn't matter because you already have cheese from the past? Because there's a lot to be said about cheese that captures the spirit of the zeitgeist...(Ok that last bit didn't work in the metaphor)
And no, in this analogy the farmer doesn't have to keep working for us to have enough cheese - only if someone specifically wants a new kind of cheese. We don't need to bend reality in order to make information scarce for that.
From what I understand the _farmers_ themselves are distributing their _cheese_ freely on various website and this tool is just a glorified search engine to find them more easily. Not sure why the _farmers_ would complain?
You can Google search for pirated music too. It's not 'Fuck Google' for indexing these, its 'Fuck those sites' for hosting it, right?
n=1, I am optimizing for access to as much content as possible while providing as little economic benefit to corporations as possible (ie Spotify) while still supporting the artists I enjoy (whether that's via venmo, paypal, buying their vinyl, buying their digital versions from bandcamp, etc). I also enjoy cheeky devs/builders, can't take any of this too seriously, we're all dead eventually.