I'm more offended by the idea that we should sit quiet and not do anything just because the status quo set up the rules in their favor.
The immoral part here is not using pirated content to build the initial catalog. The immoral part is that their success came by aligning with the exploiters (the labels) and not the exploited artists.
Let's do something then. You lead the way and I'll follow.
Let's build it and get a bunch of people using it and show the world that the pirates are willing to pay the artists more than Spotify is. At such a point, why wouldn't everyone avast payments to Spotify and hoist the jolly roger in the name of paying artists more?
If someone lead in that direction, would you follow? Would you use the player that made the payments happen? Would you seed the torrents that made the player work?
We can make this super simple: we can still keep the subscription model, we just need to change the revenue sharing system. Let's just charge a base monthly fee for the streaming service itself (say $1/month) and let's add a monthly "pay what you want" amount where 100% of the value goes specifically to the artists you choose.
So, let's say that I pledge to give $10/month, and I spread that around some 10-15 artists, This means that 90% of the money I am putting into the system is going to the artists. Someone wants to give $20/month, it would mean 95% of the money going to the "right" hands. We wouldn't have to argue about what the "right" hands are because that is defined directly by the people voting with their wallets.
I'm just saying that paying the artist and handling the bits are totally separate things and if we want to challenge the existing model we should use something that decouples them in a way that demonstrates that the bad deal that artists are getting from Spotify is not the only option.
I have setup this system where people can set up how much they want to pay each artist per month (out of a fixed budget), and anyone that signs up to my service [0] gets an account on our Funkwhale server [1] where they can upload and promote their work. I take zero commission from these payouts, the only thing I need is to have content creators who prefer to pay a flat $29/year to have this instead of giving out 8%-12% of their earnings to Patreon.
If anyone else could share any other radio stations who still have living human disc jockeys, I would love to check them out. DJs are an amazing resource which should be cherished.
I mean come on, this is all amazing. Forget the music recommendation machine algos:
https://www.kcrw.com/music/articles/pachyman-samia-steel-woo...
The next logical step is for one of us to make a Spotify clone which leverages these human DJs, and gives credit with links to station and artist Bandcamp.
https://claude.ai/share/7c277bf6-eb65-4148-979d-f76ee6027fb0
[0] : https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-a-zero-commi...
Tidal pays them more.
Bandcamp pays them even more and lets them run their own storefront.
Not Spotify's fault that artists sign bad deals.