Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
savingcountrymusic.com
savingcountrymusic.com
Engineer makes an invention: Write 30-Page patent application. Multi-year patenting process with USPTO, pay 1000s of $ if DIY, 10x that if using an IP law firm. Multiply by 4x if going international. With luck, patent gets issued 3 years later. It protects you for 25 years, but only if you have deep pockets for an IP lawsuit in case someone does copy you -- and with uncertain outcome.
Artist releases a song: automatically enjoys 100+ years of protection, even for minor samples, hooks, melodic elements. Lawsuits are easily won as long as you can prove you are the copyright holder.
I have my theories about how we ended up in this state of affairs but no jurist with a sliver of common sense can seriously claim that this is fine.
With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours. Someone unaware of your work cannot infringe your copyright. You do not have a monopoly on anything, you are just protected against someone deriving their work from yours directly.
This difference probably factors into how easy it is to win a lawsuit: for a copyright infringement, you need to show they made a copy. You wouldn't be bringing suit in the first place if there were substantial doubt in that area. It also factors into how easy it should be to get a patent vs a copyright: a patent closes off much, much, MUCH more idea-space than a copyright.
That is patently false for music - a songwriter's claim today that they never heard a slightly similar hook from 40 years ago generally doesn't hold in court.
If you have an obscure patent nobody has ever heard of, you can win the suit by showing that the defendant had the same idea you did - you don't need to show their work derives from yours.
If you have an obscure song nobody has ever heard (or even an unpublished one!) you are going to have a difficult time proving infringement for a similar riff.
Perhaps you're most familiar with litigation around very famous songs, like the Under Pressure / Ice Ice famous case? In those cultural-saturation cases the court may make the assumption that the later party could have been exposed to the work of the earlier one, but that is not the case universally.
You are mistaken.
John C. Fogerty famously got sued by John C. Fogerty for sounding too similar to John C. Fogerty.
It's best to criticize each precisely and surgically. Know the terms, know the rules, the exceptions, etc. Know the history, know the original purpose of these laws. That kind of broader knowledge in broader society is what can help. The big corps are interested in having a vague blurry idea around "IP" that just makes you scared and think "wouldn't download a car" and has a chilling effect of thinking that all "that stuff" is electrified and better not touch it, and that it's just natural that there's "intellectual property" and it's just minor details whether it's copyright or patents or trademarks or whatever else. Property rights are ancient. By associating copyright with that, they make it seem that it's also just as fundamental and civilization-grounding as private property, when most of intellectual history had no such concept. Derivative works, tweaking ideas, splicing them in new ways was just normal.
A related disingenuous propaganda term is "content consumption", again creating the association between e.g. reading a book or listening to a song on the one hand and eating food, or using up soap or fuel on the other.
See also:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-intellectual-property-is-...
https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/LT...
https://conversableeconomist.com/2013/03/29/is-intellectual-...
A patent makes it illegal to use a particular idea, by any means. It is a limited-time universal monopoly on a set of specific "claims" (the selected applications of the idea). It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you or not.
A copyright is a prohibition on someone copying you, with certain exceptions where they are allowed to do so ("fair use" or "fair dealing"). Copyrights also, in the USA, bring certain protections against people attempting to use a work in a way you did not intend even where they are not duplicating it.
A trademark is a prohibition on someone causing confusion by copying something you use to identify yourself, or by using/referencing it (without copying) in a context you don't wish.
A trade secret is a criminal prohibition on someone intentionally causing another to divulge certain information that you contractually banned them from divulging.
A security classification is a ban on certain ideas/information being shared with parties that a government agency did not wish them shared with, or used in certain contexts. This is not a protection available to individuals, only to governments.
A license is an intentional weakening of one or more of the above types of protection, potentially with attached civil penalties in the event the bounds of the license are exceeded. It can thus, when accepted, limit behaviour beyond what would normally be allowed by one of the IP types above.
All six of these IP types protect against Person B doing something that is in some way related to an activity Person A did earlier, but they are really quite different in what they cover and how. I don't agree at all they're the same thing.
Patents are there to incentivize making it public how inventions work. Inventors would tend to keep their inventions as trade secrets, in fear that someone else will reap all the profits. This would slow the compounding effect of later inventions building upon previous ones. Therefore, patents give exclusivity to the inventor for a set period. In exchange, during this period competitors and others become aware of how the new tech works and hence they can prepare for the time when the patent expires, and then a host of derivative tech can appear. It has been perverted to an absurd parody where the vast majority of patents are not intented for actual use, never get licensed and simply provide cannon fodder and deterrent stockpiles in the lawyer wars between companies. The patents are so broad and vague that legally speaking tech companies are constantly tramping on each other's ground, resulting in a kind of stalemate truce where they agree not to sue, because the other would countersue.
Copyright is there to incentivize creative authorship and its dissemination to the public. By giving exclusive rights, the author can pull a revenue stream, making cultural/artisitic/intellectual creation more viable and hence spurring intellectual and cultural activity in society. The goal is to make authors incentivized to create. Not to drive up the stock prices of mega-publishers and music labels.
Trademarks are there to avoid confusion for buyers as to the identity of a seller or by falsely implying endorsement.
What's common to these is that they are overwhelmingly there to help broader social interests, a common good, in accordance with the enlightenment, somewhat romantic ideals of the optimist zeitgeist of the time when the concepts were defined. They involve restricting individual rights, such as free speech (you can't recite this or that poem in public). That restriction was done reluctantly, to serve higher purposes, like a thriving intellectual exchange and technological progress on a societal scale. It was not about trying to make things as cushy and profitable for huge conglomerates as possible.
Just FYI, as a layman with no opinion on whether they are "the same thing" in this context, this paragraph sounds self-contradictory. It sounds like you're describing copying somebody's idea, and then you say "It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you", so I ended up confused as to your meaning.
Someone else comes up with the idea of blowing a dust bunny into the air with their breath.
Their idea, which has nothing at all to do with my idea and is certainly not a copy, infringes my claim because what they are doing matches what I've claimed as the core idea in my patent. They didn't "copy" me, for two reasons:
1. Their idea was had independently of mine, with its own creativity 2. Their idea is fundamentally not the same as mine, but because my enumerated claim is sufficiently broad to cover their concept too, it's still infringement
With a copyright, their additional creativity would have made their work not infringe. With a copyright, you can't claim anything broader than the work you actually produced.
But not generally. You can't sell a new Hogwarts-based book with Harry Potter characters. This is both due to copyright and trademarks. But already copyright blocks derivative works even if there's additional creativity with a new plot.
They just can't copy the characters, significant chunks of text, or images.
That's the difference between a copyright and a patent in a nutshell: you copyright an implementation of an idea, while you patent the idea itself.
Whether that means me exploiting having heard your song by playing your song myself, or exploiting your invention I examined by building it myself, they both come down to: statutory fabrication of fictitious "you can't do because they did already" rights, that at common law could have (rightly) only been achieved through keeping the thing a secret (e.g. still present to this day in say trading algorithms, and in software through the now ubiquitous SaaS model) and contacts (i.e. NDAs) flowing from that.
Blurring distinct laws and their nuanced purposes into some generic "I call dibs!" principle is exactly what the propaganda part is. Because that creates a kind blurry haze in people's minds that even fills gaps that none of the existing laws currently block out. So people will feel like "that just feels illegal, but I can't exactly say what it violates". A kind of FUD around doing all manners of free intellectual activity in society.
In the U.K., the design right took its initial form in 1787 and applied to printed patterns on fabrics; so it has been on point for clothing design for over 230 years. (-:
If you put this demented situation to a vote, it'd lose 9-to-1.
Frankly the whole concept of copyright is absolutely stupid though, the equivalent of escalating schoolyard "stop copying me!" to actionable at a court of law. But since when did something being absolutely frothing at the mouth retarded stop it being an entrenched part of the world we live in.
Yet musical compositions are subject to compulsory mechanical copyright licenses at a fixed rate of 12.4 cents or 2.38 cents per minute, whichever is higher [2] for music covers [3] (i.e. same song, different singer/band or even same singer different time). Meaning you can make a cover without permission as long as you pay the copyright holder at the rates specified in the law.
So we already have cheap compulsory licensing for musical compositions which caps damages at a 1/6,000 to 1/240,000 of the DMCA rates. We should just have compulsory mechanical licensing for recordings as well.
If we really want to get crazy, we could even let copyright holders declare a compulsory licensing rate per work then multiply that by some number to get their intellectual property value and then charge them property tax on that intellectual property. So you can set a high compulsory licensing rate, but then you have to pay more property tax on your income generating property or vice versa. This allows valuable works to be protected to support the artists making them, while allowing less valuable works to be easily usable by whoever wants to.
[1] https://uwf.edu/go/legal-and-consumer-info/digital-millenium...
Want to play any popular music in your cinema film? The license can easily cost 25.000 € (for film students that is typically more than the budget).
Smaller labels make better prices tho and sometimes the artist lets you use it for free (if it is their choice to make).
Not a criticism, just an addendum for anyone interested:
In the US, almost every bar/restaurant/venue is an ASCAP licensee, and it is relatively cheap (around $10/year/occupant for all forms of media), so a venue that wants to play live or recorded music, television broadcasts, etc., and seats 100 people would pay about $1000/year.
It's a very good price, and one of the main reasons that at any concert hall or arena, you will hear even huge artists playing covers without having to get them pre-approved.
$1 * 365 is more than the $10 you claimed. 36 seats is a medium sized resteraunt. Also using the song search it has none of the music I listen to so it seems useless.
Edit: I was able to find 1 song. If YouTube could offer such a license I would prefer that since they have a larger catalog of music.
That's not from the DMCA. Those statutory damages were there long before the DMCA. (Also, they can be reduced to $200 in the case of innocent infringement). The DMCA did add some new statutory damages for violations of the new rights DMCA added to US copyright law, such as circumventing protection.
> So we already have cheap compulsory licensing for musical compositions which caps damages at a 1/6,000 to 1/240,000 of the DMCA rates.
There are two things not quite correct here. First, the money you pay the copyright owner under a compulsory license is not damages. It is royalties.
Second, it is not capped. Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work.
If I take that $0.124 compulsory license and my cover of your song sells 5 million copies I'm going to owe you 5 million x $0.124 = $620 000. I suppose as a practical matter it is capped because there are only so many people and most aren't going to by more than one song. The best selling song so far is Bing Cosby's version of Irvine Berlin's "White Christmas" with 50 million sold, so $6 200 000 if that had been under a mechanical license at today's rates.
For statutory damages the number of copies involved only matters in so far as the court might take it into account in deciding where along that $200 - $150 000 range the award should fall.
If I made and sold for example 10 000 unauthorized copies of your work and you found out about 5 000 of them and sued me, asking for statutory damages and won, and then later you found out about that other 5 000 and wanted damages for those to you would be out of luck. The statutory damages award from your first suit covers all my infringement of that work up to the time of that suit.
The rates for compulsory licensing cap your compensation and thus provide a reasonable cap on your compensatory damages.
> Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work.
The most infamous cases were lawsuits against individuals for their individual per-work downloads, or per-work uploads regardless of the number of copies distributed [1][2]. From the perspective of the individual who is unlikely to create more than a handful of copies per work they intend to consume, per-work is largely indistinguishable from per-copy. So, if they made a single copy of a work, which is the most likely case, they are liable for 750$ per-work, yet if musical recordings were subject to the same statutory compulsory licensing as musical compositions, they would only be liable for 0.124$ per copy, a nearly 6000x difference between compensatory and statutory damages for their single copy of a work.
Of course, it could be reasonable to have statutory damages as a punitive measure to dissuade copyright infringement, but the Supreme Court has ruled that punitive damages in excess of a 10:1 ratio with compensatory damages is almost certainly unconstitutional in a lawsuit [3]. That is not binding on Congress with respect to law, but it is certainly troubling that we have decided that music copyright infringement is so heinous as to demand a nearly 600x greater punitive damage ratio compared to what is already at the limits of what is considered constitutional when no specific ratio is specified.
[1] https://www.dcba.org/mpage/vol210209art3
Beato does high-quality, knowledgeable videos that make IMHO legitimate educational use of short audio clips, interleaved with discussion. No one can listen to a Beato video to get the experience of the full song, and the Beato video plausibly promotes people wanting to listen to the full song.
And yet for a lot of IP he can't show the media he's reacting to because it'll immediately and automatically get claimed.
The solution for me, in this specific case, would be for Beato to act against YouTube and take his channel elsewhere. He has enough followers to be able to start his own Peertube server, find a few sponsors and keep going forever.
Businesses/creators need continued distribution, see Nike as an example of what happens when you "take your audience elsewhere to monetize them better/more."
1. People buy the other option (in Nike's case they kept going to footlocker and buying other shoes rather than only buying Nike DTC, in Beato's case they would continue to go to YouTube to discover new guitar content)
2. The business can't get new customers because no one is on the new platform (Nike DTC/Peertube)
It's viable for a split second (covid, "stick it to Youtube cause they suck") then people just go back to living their lives.
He's in a unique market position though because he's got industry respect. Joe Bloggs in his bedroom can't compete with "guitar content" because Dave Gilmore, Pat Matheney and Glynn Johns aren't all going to sit with him for a 2 hour long interview.
People are lazy. If you add even a small complication for people to consume content, then it doesn’t matter how much respect that content creator has, people will just follow someone else instead.
Google knows this; which is why they can screw over content creators on their platform.
I nearly didn’t even open the link because I didn’t want to learn something new before I’d had my morning cup of earl grey. Chances are the average consumer wouldn’t bother — assuming they even discover about this to begin with.
That's all it would take to get a few hundred thousand people to download it, and you'd know that the those who are going through the effort are higher-value subscribers, so it would be even easier to bring better sponsors.
I really don't like arguments based on "I am lazy to do that, therefore everyone is". It's at best defeatist cowardice and at worst a malicious way to support the status quo.
Everything breaks. - Channel makes no money because sponsors don't pay (as much, it's a power law) for 200k subs (being charitable with your 5%. in reality it would be < 50k)
- Guest don't come because the channel is small and they don't get distribution for their projects
- Platform X doesn't pay out as well as YouTube, so you lose more revenue
- The channel can't function because there isn't enough revenue to run the business. Can't hire lawyers when Z Record Label sues you on Platform X.
- Other channels on larger platforms take the space that you filled. The market is not static. Slash starts his own YouTube channel, which has more credibility, and David Gilmour goes on that one instead. See the celebrity podcast/YouTube space for arguments that prominent celebrities don't become creators when the market signals there is money/opportunity available.
- When subscribers churn, there is no one new on the platform to replace them. Churn in this case means they no longer use the app I made them go to, or they no longer subscribe to or pay me. Creator payment churn is MUCH higher than any typical B2B or B2C churn.
Being a creator is like standing up a business on a set of toothpicks. Even if you are Rick Beato (which is why he is so upset)
More importantly (c) why?
Instead of building up someone else's business/platform for free (and put yourself in the same position as you already are). This is why people sell a product. Online courses, have their own app, tequila, merch, live shows, signature guitars, etc. As a creator, you don't go to another platform; you have to own something. Unless it's a purely moral argument, in which case, I can respect that, but it's not a good business decision.
Which is why her saying "Only listen to my version" works, where as he would not. 5m subs is just too small.
You can run a Peertube instance costs for less than $100/month, distribution included. And that's if you insist on running your own.
> with what time.
People publish to multiple platforms already. Adding another one is the least of the concerns.
> Unless it's a purely moral argument, in which case, I can respect that, but it's not a good business decision.
I for one can only respect someone if their decision puts their principles before their business. That's what "Skin in the Game" is all about. Beato can make all the fuss he wants against BMG, but I have no sympathy for him if his actions only goes as far as his dependency on YouTube/Google allows him to go.
I view Beato's stance as rational: he's picking one battle over the other rather than engaging on multiple fronts at once. He's only one man. He has limited social capital, and the conversion rate favors him spending that capital in a sphere of influence that resonates with his audience, fans, and industry contacts and associations. He knows where his bread is buttered, and due to his success and notoriety he may get away with biting the hand that feeds him, but he's a caged tiger as much as he's a cage-bird.
Beato wants to effect change in a specific way. To broaden the scale and scope of his grievance, he would dilute his own impact. I trust that Beato has given these issues some thought as a working artist, as he has a vested interest in helping himself, but he can already negotiate preferred rates because of his built-in audience and pull. His desired relief would benefit all artists working in America, not just Beato himself. To be drawn into a battle on two fronts would be a tactical error. He's wise to focus on the battle he has a chance of turning the tide of. Others have already engaged on the front you advocate for, and those others are better situated to engage there.
This is Beato's fight, as he drew the battle lines. He can't be sidelined so easily by bystanders, like us in the comment section, because us folks don't have skin in the game like Beato does.
There is oodles of research into this topic. It isn’t something I’ve just made up.
It’s why analytics exist to explore website user journeys and then promoting the most important calls to action in prominent places.
It’s why physical store fronts put the doors at the front of the shop rather than on the side (side note: a friend of mine does own a shop and when he had to have the front door closed for repair, he saw a sharp decline in random walk-ins because people didn’t want to use the side door).
It’s why Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn etc remaining dominant platforms in their respective domains despite almost universal dislike for those platforms.
It’s why supermarkets put their product with the highest margin in the centre of the shelves and the lower margin items at the top and bottom.
It’s why being on page 2 of Googles search results are as good as not being in Google at all.
I’d actually love it if your idealistic view were true in practice. I don’t want to depend on GitHub, LinkedIn, YouTube. But that’s where the masses are so I need to use it too.
I already ditched WhatsApp for Signal, but after several years without WhatsApp, I still haven’t converted all my family. So I miss out on sooo much conversations because of my ideals.
What you’re advocating simply doesn’t match the reality of how people shop for content. Be that free stuff on social platforms, nor purchasing physical products in stores. It’s not defeatist to say consumers are lazy. It’s just a sad fact of life. And ignoring that fact doesn’t magically make it untrue.
The problem isn’t that other revenue streams don’t exist. It’s that they’re still dependent on the whims of YouTube to get their brand out.
And unfortunately, these other revenue streams are only more profitable than YouTube for the smallest percentage of video content creators (baring those who specialise in adult content, but that’s a whole other domain of content creation ;) ).
So when grayjay says "Follow Creators, Not Platforms" I'm pretty sure that the minute that regular people on the street know about the existence of "grayjay", they will become essentially also a platform that enshittifies in the same way (cf. https://xkcd.com/927/).
It's a common pattern. Be an aggregator first, then slowly introduce exclusives, and become a competitor that climbed up on the backs of the others. Somewhat similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
> YouTube already was built on the "distributed" premise.
What a load of BS.
Of course they can. If they smell money and sell, they can change it to whatever they want. It's just a client for now.
It's like arguing for Skype back then based on tech aspects. It's P2P! Yes, P2P until it wasn't.
Youtube wasnt distribute in tech, but was in marketing and if you were there around 2007-10, you remember it was much less social-media-ified and felt more direct and raw. Subscribe and get notified. Just a platform.
The only way to avoid that same path is by remaining obscure and small.
I guess every new generation of tech enthusiasts has to get burned to get sufficiently disillusioned.
There is no "Extinguish" for open source applications, systems and protocols. The closest attempt at EEE that one could try to argue was Facebook/Google leveraging XMPP at first for their messenger apps (FB Messenger/Google Talk) and then closing them down, but even that would not be accurate, given that the number of people using "truly open" XMPP has not gone down.
Talking about "branded" software is nonsense. People use what is most convenient and helps them achieve their goals. If there are no significant vendor lock-in, the cost of swithcing from open source vendor to another is essentially zero. GrayJay has no lock-in, all they do is aggregation of different video platforms.
If during the switch you got people to download Grayjay, they will be living their lives like they were, except that some of their subscriptions won't be on YouTube anymore.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLHU0ZUbXX8&t=123s
The beef is less with YouTube and far more with Universal Music Group. After all, it's not as if YouTube has upheld the copyright claims.
The proper outcome is for Universal Music Group to stop the insanity, trying this same thing (reportedly) hundreds of times against the same person across years of that person's video catalogue, and getting the same adverse result every time. (So much for the marketers's claims that "AI" systems learn. (-:)
Unfortunately, there's no obvious pressure point, other than some sort of public boycott of UMG, for making this happen. UMG's lawyers have no financial incentive to stop making claims, and are using robotic tools. YouTube would open a huge can of worms by (say) blanket rejecting copyright claims from UMG, and Google has no incentive for causing this sort of trouble with UMG for itself again. M. Beato doesn't have much in the way of levers to pull, and there's the matter of several other well-known YouTubers reporting (in response to this, but also before) that they continually have to deal with the same thing, which a Beato-only fix would not address.
This one is doable.
And then a tort for wasting everyone's time and ruining the media.
Not seeing how that one would come to pass though.
Who gets to process the copyright strike and tell creators they need to remove the content in order to not have consequences? YouTube.
Who gets to close down the channel even before any lawsuit against a copyright allegation is conducted? YouTube.
Beato is fighting BMG because he sees YouTube as the hand that feeds him, but he could get rid of all the BMG annoyances if he was brave enough to own his distribution channel.
UMG however has not any relationship with the author so they actually can be sued. If they hate their subcontractor YouTube for it, that's their problem.
They're the legal entity on behalf of which blocking is done, after all.
A lot of it is just CYA and enforcement theater. YouTube could pretty much have one dedicated account manager for someone with the subscriber count of Beato who would work as a first-line of defense against frivolous/bogus copyright claims.
> I would expect smaller platforms to adopt similar policies as they grow
But then the content creators who take ownership of their social media presence will by definition be a lot closer to those making these types of decisions, and they will be able to say "I don't think I am infringing on anything, if you really disagree you will have to go to court".
Are there any Youtube alternatives which actually do this, though?
I don't think it actually makes a difference whether Youtube hires the lawyer, or whether Beato hires the lawyer. It comes out of Youtube ad revenues either way. It's better for Beato to be the one to choose who he wants to represent him.
Subscribing to Spotify is feeding the beast. And so is not blocking ads on YT.
Piracy isn't going to starve the bastards. Piracy is helping the bastards, by giving them reason or pretext.
We didn't get there because of piracy.
Good reminder about democracy though. If you just make it about "I'm in power because I voted who's in power (or maybe I will next time)", once every 4 years with your non-lobbyist tiny say, you're actually anti-democracy. Democracy is, and has always been, long before universal access to the ballot box, reliable and consistent resistance to the cunts at the top.
But mayor record labels can go die in a ditch.
I listen to a lot of traditional Irish music and love to do things like shuffling a playlist of all the same tune by different performers.
To do that on Spotify I need to search the tune name, then create a new playlist and manually add them all.
With my local files I can just grep, even the metadata, and pipe it into a playlist for mpv to play instantly.
Charge affordable prices (e.g., $1 per second) and make it easy to use. This would take very little time at all and even if it's dirty, the catalog data and mp3s should exist for most stuff. Add a "this track can't be licensed" when data is missing and offer a "let me know" signup.
Also, podcasters rarely pay for licensed music. There is a ton of high quality royalty free “sound alikes” these days.
I work in tech, but thanks to some stubborn drive for creation my parents instilled in me, I also make music. And honestly, compared to music, even the advertising industry feels cutting-edge. Music is still operating with one foot stuck decades in the past.
Not surprisingly the same review recommended extending copyright lifetimes not reducing them. Strange.
Unfortunately for a lot of smaller artists the economics of touring are not great. 1000 tickets at $25 does not equal $25000 in the artist’s pocket.
The artist will maybe get 70% of those ticket sales (the promoter gets a significant cut) and the artist needs to pay her touring costs out of her share. If you’re an artist going on tour with a four piece band, and tour manager/instrument tech then your daily costs are going to be thousands of dollars.
Everyone needs to be paid from that split and all the travel, accommodation and food costs need to be paid, and sometimes the cost of local support acts is paid from the artist’s share.
The agent who secured the booking gets a percentage, and the manager who looks after the artist’s career gets a percentage. After commissions, $25000 in ticket sales might mean the artist only sees $10000 - before she has paid the costs of the tour. With at least six people to be paid (four musicians and the tour manager plus the artist) and accommodated, fed and moved around, that $10000 really doesn’t go very far.
If it’s a band the economics are no different really - all the band members need to make a living while they are on the road.
And of course if that’s 300 tickets at $20 rather than 1000 at $25 none of these costs scale down, the musicians aren’t going to take less, hotel rooms aren’t going to drop in price.
Pirating the music and going to see the ban play live might actually mean the label says “live brings us no uptick on our recordings, so we are not going to invest in tour support for this artist”.
It's the opposite of a solution.
It’s obvious tech companies as always bowed to one party and listened to them, and didn’t incorporate the user in this. (And to the few that do : thank you)
Genuine question - is it really this severe? Or is this an exaggeration?
also, it does seem a little whiny on Beato’s part. He’s not wrong that allowing the music on his channel is probably a net positive for the artist and the label but at the same time he’s benefiting from the music. if he wasn’t then he would be fine with removing it
In Germany there is a distinction between the selling rights and the creator rights and a company can never be the creator nor can you sell the creator rights.
Artists need exceptional leverage to negotiate a licensing deal instead of a buy out with a reversion option. Most new artists don't have that.
While HN is stuck on its usual obsession with copyright, the reality is the entire ecosystem is bad.
Labels and distributors have the best of all possible worlds. They used to invest in artist development. Now they don't. Most spend very little on promotion, except for household name headliners who are guaranteed earners. Some demand 360 deals where they get a share of all income - sales, plays, touring, and so on.
They're giant corporations run by MBAs whose existence is entirely parasitic.
Radio? Forget about it. Big concerts next to big agents? Nope.
Thing is, breaking through or even is ever harder.
The other thing people seem to forget is that many of the original labels were talent agencies. The reason they promote anyone at all is to try and recoup the investment of supporting all of them. You don't have to empathize with record labels, but modern artists can absolutely "scale" without someone artificially inflating their popularity.
> they used to invest in artist development. Now they don't. Most spend very little on promotion
You seem to be claiming they are providing value.
It they aren't providing any value then artists should not sign up. If the are providing value then it's up to the artist whether or not that value is worth it.
Radio? who listens to radio now-a-days?
Mmm... what? He talks about music. It would be hard to do lectures about paintings, or architecture, without showing anything. How can he demonstrate what he's talking about if he can't play even a very short excerpt of the piece he's commenting?