Doing something highly illegal and finding a "community" and sharing it with a "friend" would be a stupid move. Don't ever disclose your name if you do something like this, unless you are in a safe country.
What I find interesting is the wildly differing approach to piracy between the RIAA and the MPAA. The music industry’s current approach is to make their product as available everywhere as much as possible so that it requires far greater effort to pirate the media than to otherwise consume it. As a result piracy is rarer than it used to be and they are making more money than they used to. The movie industry still acts the way the music industry did in the 90s.
Exactly this. And not only they do more money with digital content, see how concerts are always full and prices skyrocketed due to the demand!
The movie industry has surely more costs that music one, _but_ they act like children who lost their toys. And the book industry isn't that far away too.. a lot of content is behind stupid DRMs and what happens if the license server disappears one day?
Minor nitpick, "when" the license server disappears one day. They have no reason to do right by their customers when they go out of business, break old infrastructure that "only a small percentage of users were using", or just feel like they can get away with it and sell you the same product again on their new platform.
It has happened before and it will happen again, modern video games are notorious for this, while you can still play multiplayer games from the early 00s.
And let's not get started with content being outright ripped from our digital products, such as soundtracks being removed from video games after their opaque licensing deals expire, even though you supposedly "own" them in your digital library. Or old movies & TV episodes being removed because they're politically incorrect in the current age.
Almost certainly one of the things that allows streaming to be priced in a range that's palatable for consumers is that most artists make less money than ever. At $50/month, it presumably wouldn't fly. As it is, it's probably priced in about the range that a lot of people spent on physical media in pre-Napster days. (And streaming seems not to be a money printing press for at least some of the streaming services either.)
ADDED: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-revenues-by-...
Paid streaming is somewhat lower than peak CD but about the same as peak vinyl (inflation adjusted). There are peaks and valleys but consumer music spend hasn't changed that much over time.
Compare it to any other profession. Let's say a bricklayer decides to go work for a company. He works the entire year and builds houses for many people. Then he's paid a hundred dollars. He'd be an idiot to keep doing it. And he says that if he started his own brick laying business he wouldn't get even a single client. Okay, but why keep doing this?
People pursue creative pursuits for a lot of different reasons, including personal fulfillment. But you pretty much have to win the lottery to make a decent full-time living off of it. People may somewhat enjoy laying bricks--but it's a job they expect to make a living at. If they can't, they'll try to do something else.
If it's for personal fulfilment, artists can be happy with the sales they can make on their own, even if the numbers are small. Or even give their music away for free, if they want to get as many listeners as possible. But what is the sense in letting a billion dollar company exploit you and make bank on your work, while paying you almost nothing in return?
Imagine if other professions were like that? "Just keep laying the bricks for free for my company, and maybe one day you'll be a famous bricklayer and I'll pay you millions".
If musicians were actually left without their music, like the bricklayer, I'd agree with you and I think so would most people. But conversely, if a bricklayer really loved building houses, spent a great deal of time building houses, owned all of them himself and they were empty and he was doing nothing with them, and a company came up to him and said "hey, we like your houses, we have a business letting people go on tours through houses and we make money off it, would you let us run tours through your houses in exchange for a cut of the profits, which will probably be very small but could be large?" then I don't think you can be too scandalised by him taking the deal and making at least some money off these houses that he'd already built and was doing nothing with! Even if you think selling photos of the houses directly to customers is a better model! Especially since he can still do that!
Of course, generally people make music because they like making music, and streaming is a way to share it. If it connects with people, and they blow up, great. But if that’s the only drive they’ll probably have a bad time.
The same could be said about GitHub… why would anyone put their code up there for free, or work on these hobby projects, when they aren’t making money from it, or just get $100 in donations per year? It’s fun, the people enjoy it, they want to share the work they’ve done, and for some it’s a way to advertise themselves and what they can do.
Not everything needs to make someone a multimillionaire, especially in the arts.
I'm talking specifically about the artists that are complaining about getting a raw deal from Spotify. And I agree 0% with your assessment that just because they are not happy with a hundred dollars per year means that they demanded to be multimillionaires. Maybe people just should to get their fair share for their work?
I am friends with some career musicians and I am forced to pirate their music if I want to listen to it, because they refuse to sell their music online and only have it on streaming services. Which gives them almost nothing in return.
ghaff already covered why: because Spotify is the distribution channel.
40 years ago, they would've put their music on the radio. Today, they put it on Spotify. Why? Because if they don't, very few people are ever going to even know they exist.
And if you think the fact that Spotify is giving them a terrible deal means they shouldn't engage with them, then I'll point to any of a dozen other examples today of massive corporations profiting excessively off of people who have very little choice but to engage with them. Being able to choose to do otherwise, and remain in the music business, is a very privileged position to be in.
If you're not getting paid, you're not doing "business".
Yes, there are many other examples of companies having exploratory practices the same way as Spotify. That still does not explain very well why people put up with it.
If a farmer exploits a migrant worker, the migrant worker gets paid enough for shelter and food. He is depending on that job for surviving. When artists are exploited by Spotify, the money they usually receive is nowhere close to paying for shelter or food, so they have to survive by other means anyway. Keeping their music on Spotify or removing it from Spotify doesn't make any difference for their livelihood.
Somewhat different situation than the Spotify case which is arguably mostly an advertising channel while corporate gigs actually pay directly. But creatives of all stripes doing things they'd rather not do so they can live, do what they want to do, and have a sliver of a sliver of a chance to breakout is extremely common.
They clearly need new business models. Selling copies of infinitely abundant data in the age of networked computers just isn't gonna work out.
There's a couple spreadsheets on their royalties for songs and their streaming revenue broken out by region, then by provider. It's for multiple items that get a couple million listens a year, one song has 7 million in one month in the UK, of which "she" sees 50% revenue. Totally payout for the 7 million month? 54 cents USD.
These are songs for a mid 00s - early 10s animated TV series.
You consume it by going to youtube and playing the video.
You "pirate" it by saving the youtube video.
Passing the -x flag to youtube-dl will ignore the video and save just the audio.
It's very little additional effort.
Movies are not doing well with any alternate revenue streams yet. Ticket sales and merch are way down.
"That secrecy, however, comes with a psychological cost. Most people love being recognized for the work that they do, and yet you cannot take any credit for this in real life. Even simple things can be challenging, like friends asking you what you have been up to"
So sure, it is more safe, to always keep it a secret. But it is more fun to do things together, we are social beings after all. But yes, if the "together" gets too big and the whole project more popularity, getting caught is only a question of time. The licence holding companies do work with (private) undercover investigators. At least for music and movies. Not sure if the book rights companies are playing in the same league.
Once you have to switch to crypto for funding things get very hard as Average Joe doesn't know a damned thing about how to send you a chunk of Monero.
A "community" is the weakest link in their chain, it seems. Even if you get your OpSec 100% tight (very, very hard, if not impractical), the human factor is never securable.