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Have you considered that most of the money goes to the label rather than to the artist? [1][2]

Unless you're paying them directly, you're still not paying the artist. Streaming and piracy don't even come close to the drain that labels put on income flow to artists. Artists made just about $23.40 for every $1000 their songs sold for in 2010, according to TechDirt [2].

I wish the world were as you described. But it's not. SOPA came close to destroying free speech online instead of guaranteeing artists their fair share.

[1]: http://www.bradsucks.net/archives/2007/05/22/where-your-musi... (an indie/marketplace artist's view)

[2]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml (standard industry view)

Techdirt leans pro-piracy, just as torrentfreak does. I'll pay for my content in whichever fashion gets the artist paid the most - makes no difference to me. And I am not just talking about music. TV, Movies, etc. It's content as an entire class. All content companies are getting smashed against the backdrop of piracy.

I'll do whatever I can to support content creators.

> Techdirt leans pro-piracy

Does that make it OK for artists to get 2.34% of what listeners pay for the music they make? Or does it make TechDirt's figures wrong? If so, how?

> Or were you not paying for anything already, and then came across that info which now justified your position?

I am not striking, but I agree with everything s/he wrote. And, as it happens, I do pay for all the music and video and software I acquire. So it is simply not true that holding the opinions s/he expressed is always a rationalization for not liking to pay for things.

(And: do you actually have any evidence that striking pirates things rather than paying for them? Or do you just assume that anyone who takes a position opposing yours must be a pirate?)

Is it legal for artists to sell virtual goods directly to fans, or are those rights locked up in record company contracts? That would allow separation of payment from distribution.

TPP/TTIP/RECP leaks suggest the criminalization of non-commercial copyright infringement, where prosecution will be possible even if the copyright holder does not want to prosecute, e.g. fanzines.

Can we develop a payment mechanism which moves funds from audience to artist for virtual goods, with no exchange of music (which can be obtained on any channel), but which provides a non-forgeable "protection from being prosecuted"? This would return control to the artist.

Unbundle the music license payment from music delivery payment.

If labels were so abusive artists wouldn't use them. It's not like setting up a label is hard.

The reason labels have such high overheads is the same as for movie studios . They subsidise a lot of non-Taylor Swifts music that don't end up being profitable. The costs of the failures end up impacting the profits of the successes. The flip side is - lots of artists get studio time and songwriting time even if they haven't already proven themselves.

Labels put up all the capital (in the Techdirt example, they're getting a return of about 1.5:1 on a hypothetical investment of $4.4 million) but a lot of their bets don't work out, so the acts that do sell well are to some degree subsidizing the ones that don't. This doesn't make as much sense in a world of flatened low-cost distribution channels, but many digiterati have never given much thought to the economics of physical media production. IF you look at the balance sheets of media companies you see their profit margins tend to be in line with other industries - looking at it from the perspective of what actually flows back to shareholders rather than from the perspective of an individual band. After all, if a label puts out an album and it bombs, the loss falls on the label - the artist/band doesn't have any further obligation once the terms of the contract are fulfilled. In this sense, publishers act like VCs for the arts.

Labels put up all the capital

For Taylor Swift, sure. But there is an increasing number of musicians owning their own recording equipment and producing pro-level recordings out of their home (just like starting a software business out of your home is increasingly common).

For these people, they put up the capital. While I won't condone piracy of any copyrighted works at all, it's not reasonable to assume that all musical artists are impacted by copyright infringement in the same way.

Home producers may well be absolutely thrilled to make a few thousand dollars in sales a year, in order to continue funding their own work. Why take that away from them through piracy?

[There's also the argument that small act home producers should be thrilled to get the exposure even if nobody is paying for their recordings. As a home producer myself, I find a small amount of comfort in that, but professional-level recording and music equipment isn't cheap... I'll fund it with other income as needed, but I'd rather have my music outfit be self-sustaining.]

Totally agree. I just wanted to refute the argument that whether artists go unpaid doesn't matter because more of the pain will fall on the labels, which is a popular but fallacious argument.

Piracy was never look at as a real crime. The "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign wouldn't have been launched if piracy was generally equated with a crime in society.

To me the end result would be simple: The average user would have to pay more for their content

People aren't exactly burning the money they would have otherwise spend on such content; they aren't going to stop paying their rent because they have less free music. The discretionary income of the median person is simply not that high, and a rich person won't start buying hundreds of albums to make up for the ones the working class can't afford.

And people listening to less music instead of pirating may be more just or moral or whatever, but it doesn't pay the artists' bill anymore than piracy does.

I may be old school - I pay for things, I am happy to pay for things.

I, on the other hand, am new school, part of a generation with 25%+ unemployment and many more in precarious jobs. It's not that we don't like to pay for things - it's that's often simply not an option.

If SOPA had passed, we would've just go back to sneakernet sharing.

Of course "not paying for things" is an option. Nobody has a human right to Taylor Swift's music. If you can't buy it then just go listen to the radio, or use Spotify's ad supported service, or do something else.

I pay for all the movies I watch via iTunes. I never pirate movies. Most of the music I listen to is internet radio (i.e. it is free but with the artists permission). Some of my friends consider me odd, and watch more movies than I do, but that's OK.

To play devil's advocate, no artist has a human right to payment for a digital copy - or any copy, for that matter - either. It's a negotiated arrangement, not a fundamental truth.

Of course "not paying for things" is an option

That's not what I said, please read again.

Nobody has a human right to Taylor Swift's music. If you can't buy it then just go listen to the radio, or use Spotify's ad supported service, or do something else.

Sure. That's why I said it might be more just and moral. Please read my post attentively before replying.

But how many artists has your self-sacrifice of not pirating actually helped, compared to someone who spends the same amount but also pirates?

> use Spotify's ad supported service

I do believe that in Taylor Swift's case, you can't; at least not all of it. She didn't put her latest album on Spotify either. Honestly, I've got little sympathy for her: she's the most famous and successful singer-songwriter in the last decade by far, and these sorts of stunts don't really endear her in my eyes. But she doesn't care, 'cause haters gonna hate hate hate, right?

> on a forum of content creators

I'm not a "content creator", I'm a developer. What I do has a lot more in common with what a plumber or an electrician does than with what Taylor Swift does. My programs are not expressions of my soul, they're well-crafted tools to solve a particular problem that I have either a) been paid to solve, or b) hope to sell to somebody else to solve their problem.

I don't think you can pin it all on piracy; it's just the usual race-to-the-bottom. The App Store has had a constant (low) piracy rate ever since the first jailbreak, and nevertheless free-to-play revenue is 80% and increasing.

Music is always competing with its back catalog, and old music weathers the years a lot better than old video games.

> These streaming services came around as an alternative to piracy and not paying anything for content anywhere.

Maybe I'm an edge case, but I bought music until I got a Spotify subscription. Now the only time I buy is when it's not available (for instance, Tech N9ne latest album was on iTunes a week or two before Spotify)

*rite of passage

Here is a better model of paying artists:

- If artist sells music on a DRM-free downloading service like bandcamp.com, support them

- Otherwise let them starve

Which artist doesn't sell music DRM-free? iTunes is 100% DRM-free. Ditto Amazon, Google Play, &c. CDs are also DRM-free.