Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. For a DIGITAL product! That's insane.
Props to Sanderson, and props to all the other people with integrity.
This is a kind of sentiment I wish was not exceptional. People often talk about how one day they may have enough, and _then_ they'll help others -- but it's rare to see someone (especially with less than a billion dollars) say out loud that they did it, and in the same breath they start helping. (At a certain time, Kaladin wouldn't believe this kind of guy exists!)
That said, I do find it kind of ironic that he made a secret deal with Spotify, which has its own pitiful history of payouts to artists. But atleast free accounts get access to the books as well.
A generous assumption is hardbacks at $25 a pop. That would put an average author at 5k to 7.5k in a year... under the very improbable assumption of 100% of sticker price going to the author.
Spotify and the music world has a distinctly different problem. Last I read, the vast majority of their revenue is going to their licensing deals. The license-holders then don't pay much to the artists. You can blame Spotify for this if you choose, and many artists like to publicly, but as with many things in music it comes back to the labels.
Gosh, I don't know. This is quite a claim.
First off is the obvious question: who is a musician? High school band? Play Friday nights at the local pub? Or are we talking "survives exclusively on record sales" / "is a member of a symphony"? That's a lot of selection bias. Almost nobody publishing rubbish is surviving off that income.
Second, "musician" is actually conflating two things: songwriting/composition and performance. Composition is the thing that really bears direct comparison, and I'd venture a guess you've not even heard all the awful songs out there because nobody with any talent is interested in performing them (unlike the ease with which anyone can publish total rubbish).
Finally, if you consider the size of the corpus -- all songs vs all English text -- it's pretty clear which one is easier to curate (covers in music are super common, which is probably not an accident).
Just anecdotally, I saw a video on reddit the other day of an African dictator casually wetting himself. But what was really striking to me was how absolutely awful the state band was.
I found the link:
https://old.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/znske2/...
One thing that was pretty clear was that our audiobooks were at the mercy of publishing houses / content owners, and a lot of restrictions came from licensing deals (geographic reastrictions, time-based, formats, etc), so I'm inclined to assume that the low cut for authors may be due to publishers wanting a big cut of the sales.
That said, there was a floor which we were not allowed on, and I believe that was the sales floor, so there could have been a whole other side to this company that I was not exposed to.
I think what actually happened is that they convinced Amazon that there was more money in audiobooks than they thought, and it wasn't worth using it as a feature to sell kindles. Now Amazon knows how much money is in audiobooks and they aren't sharing. Are they surprised?
Copilot and chatgpt are going to replace me, so I say this with all humility, don't protect jobs from AI. They are saving us effort we can spend on other things. This is just industrialization taken another step.
This is true on a long time scale. On a medium-to-short time scale it will lead to the biggest concentration of wealth we've ever seen.
Human narrators do things like use different inflection depending on who’s speaking.
It's all possible but I doubt it'll be here in 10 years.
Plus, the narrator does a great job of pronouncing names with a french accent (at least, it sounds legit to me, a non-french speaking person). I wonder how a computer voice would do with speaking English with a distinct French accent. Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?
On a similar note, Sanderson's own books in "graphic audio" format (multiple voice actors, sound effects, music, etc) are a wonderful piece of art and is my preferred way to consume audiobooks when possible. I don't see that being replaced with AI any time soon.
If you can get a synthesized voice to speak French in a French accent, you can also get it to speak English in a French accent. That part's easy.
> Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?
For this, I assume you'd just annotate each word.
Is it just me or is this nuts? The only time I've seen restricted access is when there are security concerns (national security, special equipment, etc).
I was sad about that; listening to sales had reminded me of my grandmother.
Why?
And why would big publishers be able to dictate payment terms to unaffiliated indie authors? sounds like illegal price fixing if true.
Also, who are the creators? I mean, does the author of the book have to share that piece of the cake with the narrator as well? that makes the cut even lower.
And, indeed, this is done. If I'm remembering correctly, Hardy Boys and such were done this way, with the actual writer paid in a different way.
I agree it feels like this could be easy to argue one way or another. I am willing to assert it is often not simple and many of the complications are from pushing simple solutions.
How so?
>how Disney tried to not pay a Star Wars writer.
the star wars writer is just a contract worker. He doesn't own star wars etc. But he should still get paid according to the agreement disney inherited.
You will quickly get into situations where corporations own things, and then all semblance of personal ownership and control are questionable, at best.
None of this explicitly follows from first principles, it's all just negotiation for what, through the vehicle of contract law, will get enforced by social convention and the fist of the government.
Absolutely. But there are many more people who can voice audiobooks than there are high quality writers, and the writer's work is being the primary author of the work. It doesn't make any sense for the owner to give % of the profit unless the narrator would attract business on their own.
As an example, R.C. Bray narrated The Martian by Andy Weir, and I loved his narration so much I looked for other books that Bray had narrated. One such book was Planetside by Michael Mammay, which was Mammay's first and only book at the time. I have since read all 5 of his books, and he's now one of my favourite authors.
There's not real any intrinsic difference between a recorded performance of a song someone else wrote and recorded narration of a book someone else wrote. The audiobook recording has its own copyright, which can be owned by the narrator. It's usually not though, being recorded for hire with the narrator ceding all rights.
negative. if you're covering a song in copyright you need a license agreement from the owner if you intend to monotize it. You own a copyright to your version but you can't make money from it.
[0]: https://help.songtrust.com/knowledge/what-is-a-compulsory-li...
What prevents anyone from building a company that gives authors 50% or even 75% cut? From the technical standpoint, an app to download/listen for audio is not a big feat. One may host and serve audio files via any Bandwidth Alliance[1] CDN and keep the bill quite low, it is just audio, in the end. I'd say, a viable prototype is just a couple of months of work for a team of two-three people with day jobs.
That’s it. You could definitely create this service, but you’d have to be very good at building a company in a market with big incumbents.
Maybe “pay creators more” is enough, or maybe consumers don’t really care where their money goes. You’d have to figure that out!
But are you willing to dedicate the next 3-5+ years of your life to this problem? Is anyone?
With adequate DRM? It definitely is a big feat.
Just distributing the files, without any type of encryption, is far from trivial. The fact you link to Cloudflare demonstrates you know you can't host the servers yourself =)
Almost anything for ten users is trivial, doing it at scale is hard work.
Any CDN with their own object storage will hanlde heavy lifting of audio, it is not a big deal and not that expensive to the point of making a garden variety CDN on Digital Ocean or other cloud provider nonsensical.
I have to research about DRM, but isn't it goes out of the box on Android and iOS?
This is based on a good knowledge of the size of audiobooks, good knowledge of the price of network transfer, and a reasonable guess on the number of books sold.
Marketing, payroll, royalties, and operations. In that order.
Network transfer fees would come out of operations, and are probably less than 10% of same.
Sanderson is distributing raw audio to all backers, so he clearly doesn't think so.
Authors have to sell where the listeners are. They're on Audible, and that's the problem.
I'd feel much more comfortable talking about net profits for everyone involved here. Audible got me hooked, specifically, by not expecting me to pay 40+ for a book.
Audible has pushed margins to near zero. Not just the cut to the artists, but also theirs. Before audible, if I wanted an audio book, it was easily 50 or so bucks. Nowadays, I usually pick up the audiobook for 7 or so as an add on to the book purchase. If that were to go back, I'd stop buying audiobooks. I'd wager I'm not alone in that. Yes, even $15 may be high enough to make me stop.
As I've said elsewhere, I'm very interested in knowing what the net cut for artists is, through audible. If the artists could get 70% of a cut, but that causes sales to drop to 10%, suddenly it doesn't sound so good to get a larger cut.
And it would be one thing if the publishing world wasn't known for artificial price inflation. But, that ship sailed a long time ago.
It's Amazon, what do you expect? They can't make an Amazon Basics of a book you wrote and steal all your profit so they have to do it this way.
I’m not a fan of this perspective because it can sound like people believe it’s the company who is behaving wrongly, and they want a form of charity from it. They want Audible to give up profit because they don’t l feel it’s fair. If Audible isn’t worth 60-75%, don’t use it to distribute your media. Which is probably not a viable option. I think this leads to the real complaint candidates:
“Audible has a monopoly over audiobook creation/distribution by breaking laws, and should be dealt with by the government.”
“Audible has a monopoly without breaking laws but I think there should be laws.”
“I don’t like how capitalism works.”
“Capitalism isn’t working in my favour this time.”
Audible isn’t the right audience for any of these complaints.
If Audible’s service isn’t worth anywhere near that much, they either are acting in a way where government should intervene, or there’s a deliciously ripe opportunity for another business to thrive if they can overcome the inertia of the incumbent.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the creators should take home the bulk, and I bet, on intuition alone, that there’s plenty of money to run a music service at a fraction of the take.
That's the valid complaint here. There's not enough competition for Audible, so they can afford to charge extortionate prices. More competition is good, so that's what Sanderson invests in. Sounds like an awesome move to me.
Perhaps I’m muddied in semantics, but I don’t think the complaint can be “Audible exploits people.” I think it is, “someone needs to exploit the opportunity Audible has presented by charging so much.”
There's a lot of ways you can do that. By introducing regulation, competition, empowering people, or even banning corporations. The first two seem to be the most popular in our society.
It seems that for some combination of legal and technical reasons it's very hard to beat an incumbent in these industries. Maybe it's just that the economies of scale are so good, I don't know. but when you think about it, everything involved is man-made, the very concept of intellectual property itself is a human invention. Patents, copyrights etc. all just stuff we cooked up. If we have defined it to be a self-reinforcing monopoly-generating thing, maybe we should redefine it.
Yes, I do think the government should intervene, but is that realistic? How often does the US file antitrust suits against big tech companies or their subsidiaries? I've seen lawsuits to block mergers/acquisitions, but the last time I remember actually breaking up an existing monopoly as an option on the table was Microsoft over 20 years ago.
I dont see any deliciously ripe business opportunity here. If you want to compete with Audible, you need to attract authors to your platform. Yes, you can try luring them with a more generous share of the profits. But you will run into a brick wall because the sheer size of Audible's user base means that authors have bigger potential earnings there even though Audible takes an extortionate cut. And you won't be able to match Audible's user base until you have a similarly large/diverse selection of authors and works to choose from.
The only way to break the chicken and egg problem is to come with a huge amount of capital that allows you bribe authors/users onto your platform by selling at a loss while you build up volume. Which, of course, is exactly how Audible built its monopoly in the first place. But back then it was an emerging market and the competitors were smaller and less entrenched. Audible feels comfortable taking an extortionate cut now precisely because it knows that no one else has both the capital and the will to compete with them. This is not something that I would bin under "the free market working as it should."
I'm surpised that some people still don't recognize the playbook. This is 20th century tech strategy. Amazon was already doing this with physical books in the 90s - it shouldn't be the least bit surprising that they are doing it again with digital audiobooks.
But there are almost always other social dynamics at play, true free markets are rare. You can generally "like how capitalism works" and not believe that markets will optimally solve every problem all the time.
Also, "the market" is an abstraction. What actually kills companies? People stop using their product. Criticism/boycotting is a market force. Capitalism requires informed consumers and this is consumers sharing information.
Markets also take time. Even if you believe the market will solve a problem, it will take time for the "bad" company to die and other firms to take it's place.