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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Musicians are not the consumers, but it's their work being consumed and this software would have no purpose without them. And to be clear, my problem isn't that this software upset some musicians. It's that the developers highlighting that fact as part of their marketing suggests they take pride in angering musicians. That is a level of disrespect that goes way beyond the sort of passive consumer level disrespect of wanting something for free. It's active hostility compared to mild selfishness.

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It is one musician whose negative comment is displayed along with people complaining that the whole thing is slow garbage. You might be reading too much into it.

One musician can be ripped off and not compensated and have to take the 'big guys' to court on the off-chance they find out about their work being used despite the (fucked up) copyright laws [0].

It is a massive problem. It's the rich poor divide with propoganda fucking over the genuine little people in favour of the richer/established/more connected people. Human life is like this. Call it out if you see it if you value truth over greed.

The future is built on the past. Claimed "Ownership" of the past fucks up the present for the established powers over creativity (e.g. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act). AI just takes it to a whole 'nother level.

[0] https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/unauthorized-rap-samples/

I think it’s just funny to post bad reviews.

I am kind of sick of Musicians complaining that culture is so accessible.

Its truly the case that if it wasnt for radio and the legal frameworks developed to deliver radio we would probably be looking at incredibly heavy gatekeeping for music.

Humans in general are better off with tools like this. And I for one am glad that these developers are showing off who is angry.

Heck things could be a lot better right now if it wasnt for Metallica.

I like Pete Seeger’s paraphrase of his father: “Plagiarism is basic to all culture”. I think we underestimate the damage to society at large when “remixing” the work of others is legally fraught.

The mere reproduction of a previous performance is not additional work for the artist and so does not require compensation: to demand royalties undermines the fundamental structure of art for most of history.

As a musician: that's totally fine, we can argue the philosophy of it all day and what the law should or shouldn't be.

But right now it is what it is and people are basing their careers off that status quo. There should be some respect for that, no?

> There should be some respect for that, no?

Not really. Like when my friend scolded me the other day for not finishing the dessert I ordered - "trash is burned here, you're contributing to excess methane production."

May I be flogged for my excess methane production. I will present myself with no resistance, so long as the floggings are delivered in a linear scale mapping to amount of methane produced. As soon as all the time in the universe is spent flogging the decision makers at all the oil and gas companies, I'm right there.

People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked.

I don't know how you can square that with the fact that when people bought records musicians made more money.

Your metaphor is also incredibly impersonal. What about stealing a sandwich from a homeless person and saying "well society already fucked them over big time." It's a drop in the ocean compared to all the meals he's already missed for other reasons.

> I don't know how you can square that with the fact that when people bought records musicians made more money.

Everyone used to make more money, and anyway this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior, which is my argument.

I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to me why this basic fact of piracy needs to be restated so often but I guess I'll do it again: Stealing a sandwich from a homeless person deprives a homeless person of a sandwich. Downloading a song deprives nobody of nothing - they can still sell the song. You can't reasonably compare these two completely different actions. You can make other arguments against piracy if you want but it simply isn't theft.

Also my original was talking about orders of magnitudes difference. Burning my leftover pastry being the equivalent of like, a millisecond of the methane output of Chevron. Stealing a sandwich from a homeless person is 1 / 336580 vs, what, do I gotta do the math here to show how astronomically small my output is compared to chevron?

> I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to me why this basic fact of piracy needs to be restated so often

Woah, woah, let's back up here. You made a metaphor about orders of magnitude. I asserted that orders of magnitude on the level of the global environment and the individual human are very different and provided you with a metaphor to illustrate that. I made no suggestion that piracy was theft so you had no need to correct me on this "basic fact."

> Everyone used to make more money

It's not clear what you're saying with this. Maybe we should just continue the trend and say no one should earn any money anymore? Honestly confused by this one.

> this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior

How did we come to the current model? Everyone was happily getting recording contacts with advances for instruments, studio time and touring logistics until one day MegaCorps said "let's instead move to a model where everyone pays the absolute minimum, if anything at all, and then try to split the much lower profits between the same number of actors?"

Come on, I'm happy to criticise companies like Spotify all day but they weren't the driving force in creating the current model and having some of the richest people in our society sit around in forums like this saying maybe musicians shouldn't be paid at all really isn't helping

> Everyone was happily getting recording contacts with advances for instruments, studio time and touring logistics until one day MegaCorps said "let's instead move to a model where everyone pays the absolute minimum, if anything at all, and then try to split the much lower profits between the same number of actors?"

Basically yes. Except for the "happily" bit before. Even the biggest artists were always getting shafted by the labels, is it surprising that the labels would fuck their artists over even more given the chance? Taylor Swift's fight with the label may legendary but there's thousands of working musicians out there scraping by getting credits on movies and bigger band releases (jazz and whatnot) and they remain as poor as they ever have, from vinyl through to streaming. So I just don't think it's ever been something that random consumers really influence, it's always been the labels fucking over the artists, and that's where my scale argument comes from.

Me downloading a song has nothing to do with record labels spending the last six decades writing progressively more predatory contracts, fighting every new technology until they can find a way to capture value from it at the expense of their artists, and working with streaming companies to extract every slice of margin they can until the artist gets their $.20 paycheck on ten thousand listens.

This argument I don't like: a company found a way to exploit someone so as to sell people something cheaper and then people bought the cheaper thing. It's thus the consumer's fault that the other people got exploited. I see it all the time and that falls under the same umbrella of what I'm arguing against, the idea that corporations are immune to criticism because they're just profit generating algorithms and actually it's on us to make the world better by not buying what they're selling. Why not just cut out the middle man literally and stop the exploitative behavior?

So far as I know nobody here is arguing musicians shouldn't get paid. I'm arguing the opposite.

> People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked.

Astonishingly ignorant hot take. Music is what MUSICIANS DO. Some of them are also performers, many are not. What they create is the same as what a painter does, or even a chef or architect. However it is not a physical good so people with tiny brains think that means "iT's FreEEe!!1!" when each musical instrument used costs money, the recording cost money, the distribution cost money, the filing/registration costs money, and then there's all the years of time and effort spent learning how to do all of this.

The fact of the matter is that right now music is treated very similarly to software. There is ownership and copyright, and being able to make a digital copy for minimal cost/effort does not magically remove that ownership.

If you don't like it then you should change the laws. It's like being mad at cops because of the speed limit, when the likely culprits are your local city council.

I think you're misunderstanding the point GP was trying to make. Artists and musicians in particular seem to think that copyright is their friend. Because, in theory, it's a mechanism by which a revenue stream could appear when you produce artwork. But copyright is not the musician's friend at all. It's a mechanism by which record labels consolidate power as the middlemen and route revenue to their executives with very little money ever going to artists. and with every technological shift, the labels find a way to give less and less to the consumer and give less and less to the artists. So now it's extremely unusual for somebody that's a fan of some music to actually purchase that music, and artists are getting paid less and less when people do listen to their music.

My personal belief is that systems that allow people to get paid when they're not working are not sustainable, and therefore intellectual property has a fundamental flaw. The end game for musicians is to perform live and use their recordings as advertisements for that. That makes them very similar to jobs I've held my whole life where the second I stop showing up for work is the second I stop getting paid.

That's a pretty nice fundamental law. Explains the rot that occurs with land ownership as well. Really, stopping wealth accretion via non-action would probably help with some of the nastier outcomes of a regulated market economy. I suppose it's probably too late for us, however. Revolution, ahoy!

It's literally the whole thing about labor vs. capital.

haha, I swear I read Marx and Engels, but it was 25 years ago. So I suppose the problem we find ourselves in now is the feedback loop of capital sources being so well endowed there's no risk of investment to create more capital.

>My personal belief is that systems that allow people to get paid when they're not working are not sustainable, and therefore intellectual property has a fundamental flaw. The end game for musicians is to perform live and use their recordings as advertisements for that. That makes them very similar to jobs I've held my whole life where the second I stop showing up for work is the second I stop getting paid.

Could not agree more.

Sure, and "piracy" is part of the status quo. Show some respect for my total disrespect of IP laws and your livelihood.

Do you feel that putting the quote from the musician in the testimonials was respectful?

If its legit feedback, the musician wanted it to be seen, why would it not be?

No, with that logic we should have outlawed the internet. It's up to you to find a working business model, not up to society to enable the one that you want.

Maybe you could explain that logical continuation because I don't follow you.

Society has so far agreed to legislate in favour of people monetising their intellectual property.

By all means people should be free to disagree with that for whatever reason but I feel it's a bad look to make fun of the musicians trying to follow the rules and make a living within the bounds of both law and social contract.

Some people think that music should mainly be a task for artists, and not for careerists in the entertainment industrial complex.

How are these artists paying for their instruments and studios?

I don't see the relevance.

> It's active hostility

Not really? If the testimonials are true, then simply making the app itself is an act of hostility.

The parent comment is putting it as nicely as it can be put. If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work. There is no honor system in music or data and there never will be.

>The parent comment is putting it as nicely as it can be put. If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work. There is no honor system in music or data and there never will be.

I'm just tired of this technolibertarian mindset of "it's not wrong because no one is stopping me from doing it". There is no "honor system" in life either and if you see that as permission to be an asshole, that just makes you an asshole. And if your best defense against being accused of being an asshole is some form of "they couldn't stop me", then you're tacitly admitting to being an asshole.

Then maybe we'll never see eye-to-eye. I grew up with an iTunes account, but I never spent my money on music. Some weeks my family lived paycheck-to-paycheck, some nights skipping dinner. I downloaded my music off YouTube to my 2005 HP Compaq, put it on my iTunes library and synced it to my iPod Shuffle. Didn't weigh on my conscience when I pirated video games or FL Studio either, not then and not now.

If that made me an asshole, then 11-year-old me was a supervillain bumping Aphex Twin. Oftentimes I think HN forgets to consider the 99% when contemplating ethics over sous-vide.

Our legal and economic systems just don’t work that way, being poor is no excuse for doing something illegal.

Add to that that not all musicians are Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but might just as well have to fight to survive, living from Spotify payout to gig revenue as well.

I sympathise with people trying to get access to culture by all means, but we cannot wholesale morally legitimise freeloading because of that. We all get to enjoy a broad cultural landscape, but that can only exist if most people pay for content.

> Our legal and economic systems just don’t work that way, being poor is no excuse for doing something illegal.

Copyright infringement is a civil offense, not criminal. Or in other jurisdictions, it’s not an offense at all, but rather priced in to the costs of recordable media and storage media/devices.

> Spotify payout

~1000$ to ~12000$ a year:

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/19/zoe-keating-spot...

Unfortunately the winds are not blowing in your preferred direction. We are being shown time and time again and in increasing frequency that being an asshole is the best way to succeed.

That short-term individual success is at the expense of the wider long-term success.

If 10 people live in a lake and I fish more than everyone I will be better off that others. But then everyone else will seek the same individual short-term success because my first step in being an asshole was not punished. We will all end up starving in this scenario. A central authority agreed by all to manage this situation fairly is the way out. Rules agreed to in common beforehand and enforced by a neutral party.

You're missing the key next step where after you get yours you start figuring out ways to deny others from getting theirs either through bullying, state-supported violence or legal means :)

Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.

It's only a tragedy if everyone acts the same way. If a few act against the grain then it's no longer a tragedy.

The common thief is an example. Also pirating games and movies is another example.

Tragedy of the Commons is bullshit. Just one pessimistic, selfish asshole penning out a manifesto on how everyone is just as miserable and awful as he is. It assumes that individuals, left to their own devices, will inevitably over-consume shared resources out of selfishness. But this narrative ignores centuries of evidence to the contrary: communities around the world have sustainably managed commons through norms, trust, and mutual accountability.

And he wasn't just wrong for the hell of it. He used it to argue against immigration and for coercive population control, not to promote environmental stewardship. His model erases the role of governance, culture, and cooperation, reducing human behavior to a simplistic race to depletion.

In reality, the commons don’t fail because they’re shared. They fail when they’re mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them.

I would go so far to say that the only way this concept has ever come close to being "correct" is the culturally inert modern Western world which has replaced everyone's souls with aimless desires for products and cheap dopamine hits, far from anything approaching our natural state.

They have demonstrably not - they have generally failed until introducing capitalism-eseque cooperation. "They fail when they're mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them" - yes, these are obvious natural consequences of scale.

Not really. It didn't happen in syndicalized Spain. It didn't happen for millennia in ancient cities.

Scale being necessary seems to be unique to capitalism and state capitalism (Marxist industrialization requirements).

Maybe it was necessary before, I don't know but it's moot. We certainly have achieved post scarcity now and there should be no issues leveraging the tools our ancestors have given us to ensure it's distributed well.

Yeah but that would make all the people who are rich because they own things very sad, so instead we're just gonna starve shitloads of people to death next to piles of food daily and call it rational.

History bears out the truth of what you say. Native Americans managed the commons in communal ownership so well that some of their permaculture existed through to today, untended.

being an asshole is the best way to succeed.

Being an asshole is the opposite of success.

Unless you think life is a video game and the score is tallied in dollar signs. In which case, you've already lost.

this is very naively reductive. it's been shown time and time again throughout human history that being an asshole/ruthless/competitive leads to better outcomes for you and the people around you that you care about.

humans are not bonobos. sitting around being nice to each other is not what got us to be the apex species on the planet. people break rules (social norms or legal laws) to get ahead, it is happening continually around you and can't just wish it out of existence.

Some people seem to think that because they don't want to be assholes that assholes have no reproductive usefulness, and I'm not sure that's valuable.

Dawkins in The Selfish Gene demonstrated through experiments that society collapses when everyone is an asshole. It also collapses when everyone is nice. There's an optimum ratio (~23% assholes to the rest) that leads to long-term sustainability.

This in opposition to millennia of human history, which should teach us that the surest path to human success is cooperation. Why else would we have invented language?

> If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work.

People have been recording concerts for decades. Often with a bit of help from the sound crew, which can probably be discouraged by musicians with enough influence, but if the only allowed way to hear a song is to attend a concert, lots of people would rather have a recording that a fan made and distributed.

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