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Comment by MSFT_Edging | Hacker News Reader

> The music industry figured this out

> Why is this so hard for the film industry

Music industry runs on barely paying any artist that cant fill a stadium. Movie industry runs on constantly re-licensing content to min-max their returns from IP. Music industry can happily barely pay musicians via the spotify model, but the Movie industry can't continually re-license their stuff to a higher bidder if it's all on one site.

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I broadly agree with your assessment, but I think the important takeaway is that these situations are created artificially, usually by dominant market players for their own benefit. There is nothing natural or neccesary with the way these markets work, and it's certainly not unchangeable.

>but I think the important takeaway is that these situations are created artificially

Are they really though? It's easier than ever for an indie creative to create and distribute their works through the many channels. Problem is, people don't spend as much money as a whole on indie works compared to focus-grouped blockbusters.

> Are they really though?

Yes, in the sense that at one point IP laws didn't exist and then we made them up. It stands to reason we could make up something better - maybe something that doesn't routinely banish media from public access.

If you have Indie artists on the music side of the comparison, you should have barely paid tiktokers and YouTubers on the movie side.

Honestly I dont know that I believe that narrative, music labels have been cheating the talent out of the proceeds of their work since Edison phonograph. Labels claiming to the artist that they dont make any money while they use creative accounting to charge any and every expense to the artist and is a long and storied practice in the industry. Artist are expected still to pay x% of sales revenue for "breakage fees" on digital downloads example. Breakage fees having been introduced to cover the loss to the breaking in transit of early brittle shellac phonograph records. ID dont know about you.but tje think the breakage cost of a mp3 file should be on the scale of negligible to nonexistent.

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