Spotify used to seem like a necessary evil for musicians. Now it just seems evil | Hacker News Reader

Spotify used to seem like a necessary evil for musicians. Now it just seems evil

theguardian.com

27 pointsnickcotter14 comments

> I don’t want my songs – some written with survivors of conflict – to enrich people who fund weapons

Says the man whose comfortable existence is entirely predicated on advanced weaponry wielded on his behalf.

Setting aside spotify, this is the philosophy of an child

Just because things have been horrific up to this point, does not mean that we should want them to continue to be horrific.

Advocating for change against the violent factions of the world, is indeed, a good thing to do.

> Just because things have been horrific up to this point, does not mean that we should want them to continue to be horrific

Wrong. Things stopped being horrific precisely because of the overwhelming amount of weaponry produced by capitalist enterprises on behalf of democratic nations. Continuing the process prevents the horrors from returning.

> Advocating for change against the violent factions of the world, is indeed, a good thing to do.

Also wrong. Any "violent faction" that would listen to you is de facto a good faction, so you are either wasting your time or undermining exactly the factions you should be empowering.

.003$ per stream(before other publishing costs) users pay $150 +- year 275 million users 16 billion € a year net no breakdown on how much of the "70% goes to artists" is actualy record labels, and not actualy artists. looks like crazy long odds for an artist to ever earn enough for one meal, and making a living would be litteraly the same odds as a lottery ticket

Who is this? The article doesn't say who wrote it. I have no idea who the picture is. Literally who?

The byline is below the title, and this is at the end:

> David Bridie is an independent musician, producer and installation artist. Across four decades as a band member, solo artist and composer of film and TV soundtracks, he has released more than 30 albums. He is also the founder and artistic director of Wantok Musik Foundation, a not-for-profit music label that records, releases and promotes culturally infused music from Indigenous Australia, Melanesia and Oceania

> I don’t want my songs – some written with survivors of conflict – to enrich people who fund weapons

I pray for his own health that he never finds out where his income tax goes...

You can't choose where your income tax goes, you can choose not to use spotify or put your music on there.

That's my point. I don't understand why you'd undertake performative protests against an idea you can't triumph over. Do you remove your songs from Apple Music because of the Client Side Scanning or Push Notification scandals? Would you remove your songs from Bandcamp because Epic made Fortnite and diminishes the tragedy of real war?

Extrapolated to the extremes of "I don't want megalomaniacs publishing my music" you just end up with nobody ever hearing your songs.

This seems like a very defeatist attitude.

If there was a optimistic angle worth considering, I'd have mentioned it. This gentleman is running an industrial-grade snipe hunt.

I feel like your chosen examples are very disingenuous. If you're comparing data harvesting/leakage and video games to the atrocities caused by Big Military and the direction it's headed, you must be very disconnected from the real human casualty and suffering.

But to answer your point, yes. People have the autonomy to not do business with individuals and corporations that don't align with their values. It's a personal choice. You may not understand it, but if more people had convictions like this the world would likely be an entirely different place.

Well, define "big military" then. Do you mean the military industrial complex? Because famously, the private corporations aren't the ones demanding that we design superweapons or send your loved ones to war. That's congress, that's the Commander-in-Chief. Your elected representatives take the deterministic actions that decide who lives and dies in conflict, otherwise war would be apolitical.

He's well within his rights to protest whatever he wants. Prioritizing a beef with Spotify just seems hardly self-consistent with protesting the technological advancement of the military.

> if more people had convictions like this the world would likely be an entirely different place.

A functioning democracy only requires that people vote. If you want to take serious action towards world disarmament, stop voting pants-on-head insane representatives into power. You could bankrupt every single PMC and military contractor in the world, and governments would invent their own to fill their own security needs.

Some other musician who plays a cover of your song might put it on Spotify. Or maybe they’re just a bad person?

A politician you hate could play it a campaign rally.

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