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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

This argument crops up on every discussion of this topic. Why is it always people who work in the arts always told their work isn't worthy of payment except when delivered under certain conditions? If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers.

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I don't know about you, but I'm paid to perform(much like a live musician I suppose). I don't get residuals on my performance. I don't list myself as the writer or composer of my code and receive payment if someone uses or derives their own work from mine. My employer might.

I haven't seen anyone here saying musicians shouldn't get paid when they perform for an audience or for a certain purpose (let's say a commercial or soundtrack)

Not a great comparison. We are talking about musicians getting paid for composing music, not for performing. If you want to go with this analogy, then you would note that you DO get paid for the composition (of the software) but not its performance (when it runs on people's computers). Musicians, on the other hand, cannot make money composing anymore, but they can still make money for performing it.

And if you are an indie dev, you probably do make money from the software in its commodified form. And if you are not an indie dev, then your high salary is because someone else makes a lot of money from the software's commodified form (even if that form today is as a service). The point of the article is that musicians can no longer make any money from the commodified (in this regard meaning recorded) form of their music.

Saying there isn't a market for something is not the same as saying they aren't worthy of being paid.

There obviously is a market for songwriting and composition, but anger over excessive copyright (eg Disney style life+90) has drastically undermined all copyright. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and is justified (above and in other comments below) on the idea that music lacks utility.

You're right -- I think the reason this is so contentious is that the market for recorded music didn't collapse, to the degree it did, due to lack of demand; it collapsed due to the marginal cost of reproduction dropping to effectively nothing. I'm not making a moral argument here, lest market libertarians prepare to jump -- I'm not saying the market as it existed should have been propped up artificially. I'm just making the observation that "there is no market for recorded music" is a very different statement than "there is no market for horse-drawn carriages." People are listening to recorded music as much as ever, by some measures more so; we just don't expect to have to pay more than ten bucks a month for All The Music.

Spotify could pay far more for each stream than it does. But it chooses not to, and the money mysteriously disappears into the bank accounts of the management team, assorted investors and Spotify's owners - which include the major record companies.

The arts publishing/management/distribution businesses have always been about relentlessly screwing value out of creators, usually by leveraging differences in political and corporate power to intimidate and bully creators into "voluntarily" signing over their income in return for access to various walled-garden markets.

Streaming media have really taken it to a new level.

You're absolutely right! Spotify could pay far more per stream than it does.

Spotify currently spends 79% of its revenues on royalties. How much more do you think they should spend?

While this is probably an Unpopular Opinion™, I think the heart of the problem is ultimately that streaming services undercharge. There's no objective reason to believe that their current price is correct, and the fact that Spotify loses money while artists think they're being underpaid seems to strongly suggest that the price is too low. But consumers now believe that $10/month -- less than the price that a single CD generally is, even on Amazon -- is the Objectively Correct Price, and everyone is stuck.

> If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers.

You're absolutely right! Artists, programmers, attorneys, and doctors are all exactly the same. They should get paid under the circumstances where someone with money finds their work to be valuable. Some portion of each specialty will find that others value their work enough to allow them to live by their work alone.

Is it perhaps possible that the relative size of this portion might differ between specialties? Perhaps in a way that reflects the relative number of people willing and able to do the work, and possibly also reflective of the level of demand?

> If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers.

Pretty sure that RMS is advocating for that kind of vision.

Too bad he can't figure out how to apply it to real world commodities.

"> If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers."

"Pretty sure that RMS is advocating for that kind of vision."

That's a common misconception. He actually has no problem with programmers making money.

The GNU Project has an article on this, which starts by saying:

"Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible--just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

"Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can."

More here:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.

with subtext being > "good luck if somebody attempts to undercut your prices though."

Its a kind of pointless quote though because the GPL requires that after the first person buys your software they can legally put it up online for free and now you have lost your sales.

Yes, I'm familiar with that, but if said software is distributed under the GPL, one essentially gets to charge for the first sale. So programmers get paid for e.g. contract work, or custom one-offs, but not for writing retail software.

The corresponding model for artists is the Wu-tang clan selling the sole copy of their album to Martin Shkreli.

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