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Comment by shams93 | Hacker News Reader

On a logical level it should be treated the same as broadcast radio, however it gets hazy because you can store playlists and play tracks on demand so its really not clear cut. With radio you can hear the song if it happens to be playing but there is no on demand, no playlists.

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There is replay; you can search many radio stations playlist for a specific title and play it.

What about Youtube? It seems most / all music is on YT, what licence do they use? Streaming services seem a lot like YT.

I think only music owners are allowed to post to YT, so they don't need a license like Spotify would.

But you see, the thing is with commercial music is that the music owner is not a single entity. There is a composer, if there are lyrics there is a lyricist, if it was translated then there is a translator, if it’s a cover or remix there is an arranger, there is a publisher that published the music, there might be a sub-publisher, then there is a record label… One of the main reasons behind the existence of this complex system of rights is the complex ownership structure of the copyright and related rights.

Isn't this the reason vevo exists? youtube pays a single royalty based on playback and leaves it to the uploader to split it up between all the interested parties.

Yes, that’s a common arrangement.

> But you see, the thing is with commercial music is that the music owner is not a single entity.

Great example, but you don't always have to split everything up 100 different ways, either.

There is commercial music in almost every genre owned entirely by the songwriter/composer/artist.

Nope! You can totally pay for royalties and the entire right to perform on YouTube. It’s usually automatic.

You are allowed to post covers on YouTube, which requires a performance license payment.

Covers are a compulsory license, so there is no way to disallow a cover from being posted if the license fees are paid.

YouTube is different though because as soon as you have visuals accompanying the audio you are in sync rights territory which is the kind of royalty that e.g. television broadcasters pay. Same goes for Twitch.

> YouTube is different though because as soon as you have visuals accompanying the audio you are in sync rights territory which is the kind of royalty that e.g. television broadcasters pay. Same goes for Twitch.

There are endless uploads to YouTube with a static title slide accompanied by a popular song. I see them constantly when searching for genuine music videos from my adolescence. Infringement seems pretty clear in these particular cases.

This is obviously distinct from Spotify’s streaming business, of course. I’m only attempting to address this specific subtopic.

Google provides a mechanism for copyright owners to claim those videos and either get advertising rights to them or remove them.

YouTube don't need a license because they say they are covered by safe harbors / DMCA, so the record companies have negotiated separate agreements with YouTube. The fact that safe harbors were designed for passive intermediaries like ISPs and not a service like YT that promotes and makes money and gets value from all the music people upload (including record companies) is glossed over by YouTube.

Functionally, for the consumer, streaming is mostly identical to a recording. Want to listen to a song? Press play. The storage just happens to be on some server somewhere.

Except a recording is mine permanently and physically

True, but most users don't seem to mind. Arguably, streaming is just a better storage medium for most users. Until the company providing the service screws its customers over, if course. I doubt that possibility weighs very heavily into many consumers' buying choices.

But the relative cost one would be willing to pay varies.

Would I pay a streaming service $10 a month for 10 tracks, that I can only listen to on their service, but which I get unlimited plays of so long as I subscribe to their service? Hell no.

Would I purchase an album of 10 songs, that are mine into perpetuity to listen to, make reasonable copies of, fair use of, etc, for $10? Yes.

Would I pay a streaming company for on demand access to a broad catalog of songs? Yes.

But note how my consumption and value varies.

The thing is, streaming services are, fundamentally, gainining 'per listen' value, and that model is reflected into how they're paying rightsholders. That is, the more I listen to a track, the more value it collects for the owner.

A purchasing model is how many purchases. Listens are not really correlated to that (at least, not to the price). That is, one user may listen to the purchased album 100 times, the other may listen to one song 100 times, and one user may listen to the album 1000 times. All paid the same, all generated the rightsholders the same.

As such, I think treating streaming as a storage medium would be...poorly thought out. Not least of all because at that point you could make a strong case that the streaming service should be paying every rightsholder for every subscriber; they are, after all, -storing- that music for the new subscriber; nevermind if the subscriber ever listens to it or not.

The key difference is your rights, isn't it? After all, this is a legal issue.

I permanently have the right to listen to a CD I own as many times as I want.

With Spotify, as far as I'm aware, they can yank any part of the catalog without anything owed to me as a listener. If I wake up tomorrow and the only thing available is John Cage's 4'33", I have no recourse. Spotify isn't offering me storage space.

Not entirely. You get a CD, and a licence to reproduce it under certain conditions. If you purchase a music CD, your rights to reproduce it can legally be revoked (though I can't think of any cases where this has actually happened).

Perhaps, more importantly, it's easier for Spotify to enforce this, than a CD-making company.

You hold a physical artifact on which some data can be extracted and interpreted by a device build for that purpose, but the legality of you playing the data isn't implicitly tied up to the ownership of the artifact holding the data. That is what the licensing scheme is. The common assumption is to think that because you hold the storage, you are therefore entitled to decode the data held on it, but the laws about IP are there to limit this and allow to extract value from you using the device.

Otherwise, you could just legally extract the bits downloaded onto your computer and keep the music files you have just streamed from Spotify or any equivalent service.

It's just a really accommodating radio station that always plays your requests, no?

Well, now we're getting into the question of what the intent is behind having different pricing and licensing for broadcast and distribution of recordings.

How are jukeboxes licensed?

Guessing that would fall under "performance" as well, but each jukebox would be separately licensed. In the case of something like Spotify, it's n jukeboxes, where n is the number of total users. Of course, that's absurd, since most Spotify accounts are listened to a single user.

I think the reality is that over 20 years after the development of Real Player, we still don't have a good legal framework to discuss streaming.

I think you are right, there are two types of scenarios: streaming and offline play.

I would think Spotify would need both types of licenses, or disable offline play for songs they don't/won't license.

You can record the radio.

Yeah, but that was before they thought that was a problem.

"This mixtape thing will never take off"

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