Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're talking about legally listening to music you have access to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how to engage with the suggestion that this is theft (on the part of the consumers anyway).

If you have the means and inclination to pay more I strongly urge people to pay more also. There are issues with the intermediaries, but there is no practical way for people who can't afford $1000/yr to support the artists they like legally, while still being able to listen to them.

So if your suggestion is that someone who can afford $90/year should only have access to the albums they can afford to purchase through bandcamp because those support the artists more directly, I strongly disagree. This just further creates a wedge between the wealthy and regular working class people.

Are you suggesting poor people make do with the few albums they can purchase from bandcamp and then whatever they can listen to on the radio? On youtube? Because I fail to see how those are any less 'theft' than just paying spotify and listening there.

edit: I'm actually legitimately confused about what your idea is here and I'd like to understand. It seems like we're both coming at this from an anti-capitalist perspective, but your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts doesn't seem to align with any anti-capitalist ideology I'm aware of.

Or are you just opposed to the consolidation of the distribution channels which exploit the working class (artists in this case) but somehow haven't drawn the connection that this is a condition of late-stage capitalism?

If so, I'd recommend listening to some content by the wonderful Cory Doctorow

Also, if, once a year, every spotify listener picked one band they liked at random, and paid them the amount of an annual Spotify subscription ($132), there'd be a hell of a lot more money in artist's pockets than there is currently.

There are 8 million artists on Spotify, and 551 million monthly active users. That's $9000 per band on average per year. The 99.9th percentile band on Spotify makes $50K, and the 80th percentile artist makes $0. If we split the money across the 20% currently making any money at all, that's $45K per year per band. Therefore, the "pirate + directly pay one band at random" strategy would fund ~100 times more artists then Spotify does.

Also, if Spotify went bankrupt tomorrow and 100% of their users switched to pure piracy, we'd only lose roughly 15K below-minimum-wage jobs globally. There are currently 36,000 Spotify listeners for every band being paid what would be a median income for one person. If a tiny fraction of them decided to go to concerts or donate to appropriate non-profits, etc, it'd be a net gain of jobs for artists.

Note: There are only 220M premium subscriptions, so my numbers are a bit inflated. Ignoring the 330M ad supported listeners would lead to numbers that are too low. Also, I assumed people would pay for a spotify subscription which is more than the assumed $90.

Maybe divide everything I said by two?

Link to subscriber numbers:

https://www.statista.com/chart/15697/spotify-user-growth/

I think you're missing a few relevant things:

An annual spotify subscription in the U.S. is $99 (possibly less with boxing day deals and such), but I'd assume the majority of subscribers are outside the U.S. where prices are lower across the board.

But 6M of those artists may be AI-generated filler content, possibly published by bots. I don't think the correct idea is to divide the potential money people can spend by the number of artists. There should be some connection with what people are actually choosing to listen to, anything else would reward opportunistic publishers of low-effort, uninspired music (and encourage people to do even more of this).

Which then brings up the problem: If people were to fund one artist they listen to (lets say an artist they choose to listen to rather than an artist they accidentally listened to a song by once), are they going to choose at random from their list of such artists? How do they then get that list to pick from? How do they discover new music to potentially listen to more of in the first place

Apps like Spotify, (or OSS like YouSpot that piggybacks on Spotify) are both valid answers to those questions.

Then you have the dilemma of who's paying the cost of the bandwidth, and the development costs.

If you want to be fair, I think people should be encouraged to pay what they comfortably can with their budgets. They're using the infrastructure and platform of spotify (or similar) for discovery, so Spotify or similar should reasonably expect some money to cover costs and pay their devs. Then they can also pay any number of random artists whenever the mood strikes them.

If they can't afford spotify, they can still use YouSpot, kick the YouSpot devs one or several dollar per year, and then purchase music from their preferred artists up to the amount comfortable for them.

Using YouSpot is the closest actual thing to 'stealing' btw, because they're actually consuming a resource (bandwidth and server time) that's intended for subscribers, from a company that pays for it. Add to that, by using their software (and spotify's upstream), if they're not financially supporting the YouSpot devs and the Spotify devs for the work they're consuming then we're back to the initial claim (which I already said I disagree with) that consuming something that can be 'copied' ad infinitum without paying the producer is theft.

But I think any of the above are reasonable options for people who want to maximize the support of creators of the things they consume while staying within their means

I mostly listen to long-tail artists, so if I were to pick one at random, it would probably be in the 80-99.9th percentile group. (Assuming 80% of Spotify's catalog is spam -- that could be, but I don't use Spotify, and have never encountered spam any of their competitors).

This would pull some revenue away from the > 99.9th percentile artists, but that's OK with me.

I'm more worried that, even if we count jobs that are way below minimum wage, Spotify is only supporting 15K bands worldwide. That rounds to zero when compared to their listener base and their revenue.

Anyway, I pay more than just a streaming subscription annually, but I went with an estimate of what's going into just Spotify for my calculations. I'm not convinced there'd be much societal impact (in terms of artists not being paid) if they disappeared tomorrow.

Then you're probably the rare exception who would likely benefit independent artists more by just randomly picking a few every year.

If everyone just pirated and picked a few musicians to support directly every year, the overwhelming majority of people would pick from the 16,000 in the 99.8th percentile on spotify, and the majority of the hundreds of thousands of artists in the 80th - 99.8th percentiles would see no income whatsoever from digital distribution.

> These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're talking about legally listening to music you have access to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how to engage with the suggestion that this is theft.

It being legal doesn't do much about its unfairness.

> For the average person who can maybe comfortably afford $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more viable way to support the musicians they listen to than buying 4-9 albums

The option that you describe as the best for people who can't put more than 90$ a year on music (which is perfectly fine), is going through a subscription service, because even if a lesser amount of that money goes directly to artists, more of them get to see a bit of it.

I disagree with that, because you don't know for sure where your money is going, as all of this distribution system around streaming services is pretty opaque. As far as I know, the money from subscriptions on Spotify is not equally distributed among the artists that a user listens to. Bigger artists tend to get more per play than smaller ones.

The other option would be to spend that same amount on buying albums each year on a service like Bandcamp, which is known to distribute the money in a more direct and transparent way, and where artists actually have more control over what and how they want to sell.

It definitely means making a choice about what to buy, but it is still better than letting an obscure algorithm make that choice for you.

We should also consider that we can favor artists who are in need over those who are already earning large amounts. This is the opposite of what streaming services seems to be doing.

> your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts

This is not my idea and I didn't say that. I criticize those who waste their time chasing the "theft", who they blame for being the origin of the artists being poorly paid, when the subscription model being proposed as the best solution is actually far from it and could also be considered as theft when you put out the numbers of how much artists are asking for their work.

> This is not my idea and I didn't say that. I criticize those who waste their time chasing the "theft", who they blame for being the origin of the artists being poorly paid,

Oh well if this is truly the point you wanted to make, then we're in agreement.

Earlier I was responding to:

> > jsnell: In the plan where you buy music and only listen to the music you bought you don't need [YouSpot] at all.

> drewdevault: I feel like pretending that you're supporting your favorite artists by listening them on Spotify is a bit more of an appropriate comparison [to not supporting the artists]

I wasn't saying either of these things are better, simply pointing out that paying for spotify is going to support a broad selection of artists a little bit, while paying through bandcamp is going to support a narrow selection of artists a lot, and that both are desirable:

> You're supporting the artists you listen to more uniformly (via spotify) though ... you could support all the artists you listen to by paying for a spotify/itunes/whatever subscription and using that as your primary listening service, while also purchasing their music via bandcamp.

Aka both is better than just buying the music of a few artists through bandcamp while listening to everyone through piracy or YouSpot. That doesn't mean I disagree with anyone choosing to go the piracy + focused bandcamp patronage route.

You jumped in with:

> Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make anyone less of a robber.

Which I took to mean "no actually, just paying Spotify is theft".

If the 80% of people with a limited entertainment budget pick their top 5 artists to support every year, the virtuosos of music are going to benefit, while the "B-tier" and "C-tier" artists who people still like to listen to are going to suffer a lot more.

Paying for Spotify, or more aptly, Tidal (which seemingly pays artists the most) is probably the most realistic way that's accessible to a lot of people, to support the artists they listen to in a way that tracks their actual listening preferences. Yes, buy music in addition to that if you can, but if everyone chooses a few artists to support directly, it's still going to result in many musicians getting unfairly compensated despite lots of people enjoying their music, so I disagree with the idea that it's better to spend $90 on bandcamp in a year vs. $90 on spotify in a year, if it is a choice of one or the other.

Better in some ways sure, because you're disintermediating the streaming platforms, but worse in equitable distribution, which will disproportionately impact artists who are liked by many but "top-10"ed by few

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