5 ms·

If even people reaching a truly stupidly huge number of people don't get even close to making a living (I get more than that off a few hundred people on Patreon

If even people reaching a truly stupidly huge number of people don't get even close to making a living (I get more than that off a few hundred people on Patreon for the work that I do), in a situation where those operating the streaming services are renting out entire floors of office buildings in Manhattan, your question is disingenuous. Just because some of us are eking out a sort of existence in the new era doesn't make it a functional system. I would be perfectly happy to see it become 'this is the Star Trek future, your entire compensation is the satisfaction of a job well done and being personally liked for what you've created', if our world operated on some sort of UBI and we didn't have to have our performance linked to survival at all. Under those circumstances, things naturally shift down the Maslow hierarchy of needs, and people take for granted that they'll live, and get desperate for validation and popularity, that being what they lack. I have NO problem with a world that completely unlinks money from performance, because I'm not a free-market capitalist type demanding that financial reward behave like a 'meritocracy'. Self-evidently it doesn't anyway, so literally nothing of value is lost. BUT, we have that completely decoupled world and yet demand that people pay for even the most frugal living with money they got somebody to give them, in a world where people simply can't and don't do that anymore. Silicon Valley clever-boffins: come up with some disruptive alternative really fast. We don't have time to mess around, and what these songwriters face is the same fate waiting for all of us, in turn, including you. How about abolishing money and replacing it entirely with 'likes'?

WalterBright 9y ago
> abolishing money Communes have been tried, voluntary ones and forcible ones, over and over. They never work out. People just aren't wired up that way. > Star Trek is an imaginary utopia. You can always make things work when writing a script.
- Retric 9y ago
  I know of several Communes that worked just fine for 20+ years. What's interesting is not that they die off, but that the form so naturally. To survive they need to be like collage fraternity's and focus on new membership regularly, but naturally occurring Communes don't have that drive out of thin air. Monastic orders for example can be stable over hundreds of years, but to pull that off they need a focus on new membership. They fail not when the last member dies, but when nobody signed on 20 years before then. PS: There are ideological reasons that people oppose communes, and many had significant issues. However, the jump from 6 young people sharing rent, to 20 young people living together is not that difficult. And at 20 people economy of scale kicks in where buying in bulk saves money but meticulous record keeping is not worth the effort.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Another thread suggested I check out a long lived commune in the US, so I did. It turns out that it was indeed long lived, but the average member only stayed a year and a half before moving on. The larger point is, in America, anyone can form a commune or choose to live in one. There's no law against it. What you don't get to do is force people to join and prevent them from leaving. There seem to be orders of magnitude more people advocating communes than are willing to live in them.
    - Retric 9y ago
      Interesting, I would simply be cautious that publicity is not sought out by many communities. Also, people can have significant financial incentives for these places to break apart so communal property may be sold off. PS: I am not personally interested in living on one. However, I do know people who have for ~30 years and see a host of upsides and downsides.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        > people can have significant financial incentives Of course. People who believe they will be better off leave the commune. Those tend to be the highest producers. What's left are the low producers, and that can't sustain the commune, so it collapses. The next obvious step is to prevent the high producers from leaving, and history shows how that plays out.
        Retric 9y ago
        I think you are assuming people make their money inside the community. That's far less efficient than having an outside job and enjoying significantly lower cost of living and a low effort social life. Rent, food, house supplies, utilities, cable etc for ~500-600$/month/person + regular parties etc. It's often the low producers without significant retirement savings who have larger incentives. ~100k can be a lot of money or almost meaningless very easily.
- rrivers 9y ago
  Respectfully I disagree with your assessments. Abolishing money does not need to exist only in a commune format; currency is a mode of exchange that exists because there is a natural scarcity of resources. Currency allows us all a medium to acquire what we want; usually as a result of personal investment of some source. Star Trek, while imaginary, is a technological utopia and I would argue that we are not that far off from the beginning of that type of society. Since we're on HN i'll assume you're familiar with Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns and the consistent and predictable exponential tech growth. As we make advances in energy, nanotech, robotics, and genetics the problems that plague society today won't be relevant to the people of tomorrow. If we aren't working towards Utopian society as a collective then the fault is ours, because working towards anything else is just a failure of imagination. Of course this assumes the political will and foresight to address the challenges and growing pains that come along with the transition.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    People will always want more. It's just the way we are. Consider the state of the poor in the US today. It is far, far better by any measure than the state of the poor in medieval times, Roman times, etc. Yet the conventional opinion is it is not remotely good enough. By today's standards, the Star Trek universe is a utopia. But by the standards of the inhabitants of that universe, they may regard the state of their poor in crisis terms.
- alasdair_ 9y ago
  >Communes have been tried, voluntary ones and forcible ones, over and over. They never work out. People just aren't wired up that way. Communes from the 60's still exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hog_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hog_Farm
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    "Members have their own jobs and bank accounts," https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-a-2001-08-07-25-hog/395182.html https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-a-2001-08-07-25-hog/395182.ht...
NathanKP 9y ago
The problem is the middlemen and the way the revenue is distributed through them. Someone who produces and uploads their own video that reaches a stupidly huge number of people will make bank guaranteed, just like someone who is reaching their audience directly through Patreon. On average you should be able to get $5-$10 per 1000 YouTube video views if it is on your own monetized channel. So that 35 million views probably generated around $245,000 dollars for someone. Probably most of it ended up in the hands of the record label that owns the YouTube account, and by the time they finished taking their cut the final $200 made it back to the song writer. My point is that new methods of distribution flattens the distribution and gives you the potential to make much more money if you spend the time to build your own thing rather than going with a record label.
- jasode 9y ago
  >On average you should be able to get $5-$10 per 1000 YouTube video views if it is on your own monetized channel. So that 35 million views probably generated around $245,000 dollars for someone. Not disputing your numbers but just putting it out there that Hank Green estimated $2-per-1000.[1] That calculates 35m views to be ~$70k. Google also recently changed its engagement algorithms and everybody's views and monetization went way down. I'm not sure what the latest 2017 cpm estimates would be. That Hank Green estimate was from 2015. [1] https://medium.com/@hankgreen/the-1-000-cpm-f92717506a4b https://medium.com/@hankgreen/the-1-000-cpm-f92717506a4b
  - kthejoker2 9y ago
    One data point, my wife's channel has averaged $1.14 per 1000 views in 2017.
  - NathanKP 9y ago
    From what I heard it is/was $5-$10 per 1000 if your video is eligible for the high value video pre-roll ads. If you only get text AdSense ads then it is about $1 per 1000. Either way, my point is that a 35 million view YouTube video generates a lot more than $200 dollars for someone. Even if you take the minimum of $1 per 1000 you are still looking at $35,000 of ad revenue. That ad money must be going somewhere, even if creators don't get it. So YouTube isn't to blame, its the people who are skimming off so much money that only $200 is left for the writer
csallen 9y ago
Simply reaching huge numbers of people in and of itself isn't necessarily valuable. They may listen to what you've produced and enjoy it. But are they paying to listen? Did they buy the track or sign up for a subscription? Are advertisers paying to be featured alongside the song, or to use it in their commercials? If not, maybe your song isn't so valuable. If those listeners could easily listen to some other song for free, then maybe your song isn't so valuable. And this is talking about the whole song. If you're just the writer, it's even more stark. How good of a writer do you need to be to write a hit Justin Bieber song? If you didn't exist, how easy would it be to find another writer who could write a hit for Justin or some other star? I would guess that what's really bringing money to the table is Justin's star power, not the uniquely amazing abilities of a single writer. So 20% seems generous.
- kthejoker2 9y ago
  To your last point, it's not quite like that. What happens is the Andre Lindalls of the world re cord demos. The artists listen To the demos and more or less "bid" on them. Top tier artists get top tier songs. Or rather they get songs they think will be hits. So there is a hierarchy among songwriters even for pop stars, it's definitely not a vast ZMP pool.
look_lookatme 9y ago
> If even people reaching a truly stupidly huge number of people don't get even close to making a living (I get more than that off a few hundred people on Patreon for the work that I do), in a situation where those operating the streaming services are renting out entire floors of office buildings in Manhattan, your question is disingenuous. Seems like a weird detail to fixate on. Plenty more money has been spent on office space (whole buildings, even) by music industry and music industry adjacent companies that acted as gatekeepers and ensured only a hand-selected few ever made a living off their songs. > I have NO problem with a world that completely unlinks money from performance, because I'm not a free-market capitalist type demanding that financial reward behave like a 'meritocracy'. I also have no problem with this, but I think creative people won't be sharing our opinion anytime soon.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  I think the point is the middlemen are clearly rolling in revenue, while the content creator is barely scraping by. That suggests the content really is valuable, and the profits just aren't making it to the artist for some reason. (unless you believe marketing & distribution is all of the value)

WalterBright 9y ago

> abolishing money Communes have been tried, voluntary ones and forcible ones, over and over. They never work out. People just aren't wired up that way. > Star Trek is an imaginary utopia. You can always make things work when writing a script.

Retric 9y ago
I know of several Communes that worked just fine for 20+ years. What's interesting is not that they die off, but that the form so naturally. To survive they need to be like collage fraternity's and focus on new membership regularly, but naturally occurring Communes don't have that drive out of thin air. Monastic orders for example can be stable over hundreds of years, but to pull that off they need a focus on new membership. They fail not when the last member dies, but when nobody signed on 20 years before then. PS: There are ideological reasons that people oppose communes, and many had significant issues. However, the jump from 6 young people sharing rent, to 20 young people living together is not that difficult. And at 20 people economy of scale kicks in where buying in bulk saves money but meticulous record keeping is not worth the effort.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Another thread suggested I check out a long lived commune in the US, so I did. It turns out that it was indeed long lived, but the average member only stayed a year and a half before moving on. The larger point is, in America, anyone can form a commune or choose to live in one. There's no law against it. What you don't get to do is force people to join and prevent them from leaving. There seem to be orders of magnitude more people advocating communes than are willing to live in them.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Interesting, I would simply be cautious that publicity is not sought out by many communities. Also, people can have significant financial incentives for these places to break apart so communal property may be sold off. PS: I am not personally interested in living on one. However, I do know people who have for ~30 years and see a host of upsides and downsides.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      > people can have significant financial incentives Of course. People who believe they will be better off leave the commune. Those tend to be the highest producers. What's left are the low producers, and that can't sustain the commune, so it collapses. The next obvious step is to prevent the high producers from leaving, and history shows how that plays out.
      - Retric 9y ago
        I think you are assuming people make their money inside the community. That's far less efficient than having an outside job and enjoying significantly lower cost of living and a low effort social life. Rent, food, house supplies, utilities, cable etc for ~500-600$/month/person + regular parties etc. It's often the low producers without significant retirement savings who have larger incentives. ~100k can be a lot of money or almost meaningless very easily.
rrivers 9y ago
Respectfully I disagree with your assessments. Abolishing money does not need to exist only in a commune format; currency is a mode of exchange that exists because there is a natural scarcity of resources. Currency allows us all a medium to acquire what we want; usually as a result of personal investment of some source. Star Trek, while imaginary, is a technological utopia and I would argue that we are not that far off from the beginning of that type of society. Since we're on HN i'll assume you're familiar with Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns and the consistent and predictable exponential tech growth. As we make advances in energy, nanotech, robotics, and genetics the problems that plague society today won't be relevant to the people of tomorrow. If we aren't working towards Utopian society as a collective then the fault is ours, because working towards anything else is just a failure of imagination. Of course this assumes the political will and foresight to address the challenges and growing pains that come along with the transition.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  People will always want more. It's just the way we are. Consider the state of the poor in the US today. It is far, far better by any measure than the state of the poor in medieval times, Roman times, etc. Yet the conventional opinion is it is not remotely good enough. By today's standards, the Star Trek universe is a utopia. But by the standards of the inhabitants of that universe, they may regard the state of their poor in crisis terms.
alasdair_ 9y ago
>Communes have been tried, voluntary ones and forcible ones, over and over. They never work out. People just aren't wired up that way. Communes from the 60's still exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hog_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hog_Farm
- WalterBright 9y ago
  "Members have their own jobs and bank accounts," https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-a-2001-08-07-25-hog/395182.html https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-a-2001-08-07-25-hog/395182.ht...

NathanKP 9y ago

The problem is the middlemen and the way the revenue is distributed through them. Someone who produces and uploads their own video that reaches a stupidly huge number of people will make bank guaranteed, just like someone who is reaching their audience directly through Patreon. On average you should be able to get $5-$10 per 1000 YouTube video views if it is on your own monetized channel. So that 35 million views probably generated around $245,000 dollars for someone. Probably most of it ended up in the hands of the record label that owns the YouTube account, and by the time they finished taking their cut the final $200 made it back to the song writer. My point is that new methods of distribution flattens the distribution and gives you the potential to make much more money if you spend the time to build your own thing rather than going with a record label.

jasode 9y ago
>On average you should be able to get $5-$10 per 1000 YouTube video views if it is on your own monetized channel. So that 35 million views probably generated around $245,000 dollars for someone. Not disputing your numbers but just putting it out there that Hank Green estimated $2-per-1000.[1] That calculates 35m views to be ~$70k. Google also recently changed its engagement algorithms and everybody's views and monetization went way down. I'm not sure what the latest 2017 cpm estimates would be. That Hank Green estimate was from 2015. [1] https://medium.com/@hankgreen/the-1-000-cpm-f92717506a4b https://medium.com/@hankgreen/the-1-000-cpm-f92717506a4b
- kthejoker2 9y ago
  One data point, my wife's channel has averaged $1.14 per 1000 views in 2017.
- NathanKP 9y ago
  From what I heard it is/was $5-$10 per 1000 if your video is eligible for the high value video pre-roll ads. If you only get text AdSense ads then it is about $1 per 1000. Either way, my point is that a 35 million view YouTube video generates a lot more than $200 dollars for someone. Even if you take the minimum of $1 per 1000 you are still looking at $35,000 of ad revenue. That ad money must be going somewhere, even if creators don't get it. So YouTube isn't to blame, its the people who are skimming off so much money that only $200 is left for the writer

csallen 9y ago

Simply reaching huge numbers of people in and of itself isn't necessarily valuable. They may listen to what you've produced and enjoy it. But are they paying to listen? Did they buy the track or sign up for a subscription? Are advertisers paying to be featured alongside the song, or to use it in their commercials? If not, maybe your song isn't so valuable. If those listeners could easily listen to some other song for free, then maybe your song isn't so valuable. And this is talking about the whole song. If you're just the writer, it's even more stark. How good of a writer do you need to be to write a hit Justin Bieber song? If you didn't exist, how easy would it be to find another writer who could write a hit for Justin or some other star? I would guess that what's really bringing money to the table is Justin's star power, not the uniquely amazing abilities of a single writer. So 20% seems generous.

kthejoker2 9y ago
To your last point, it's not quite like that. What happens is the Andre Lindalls of the world re cord demos. The artists listen To the demos and more or less "bid" on them. Top tier artists get top tier songs. Or rather they get songs they think will be hits. So there is a hierarchy among songwriters even for pop stars, it's definitely not a vast ZMP pool.

look_lookatme 9y ago

> If even people reaching a truly stupidly huge number of people don't get even close to making a living (I get more than that off a few hundred people on Patreon for the work that I do), in a situation where those operating the streaming services are renting out entire floors of office buildings in Manhattan, your question is disingenuous. Seems like a weird detail to fixate on. Plenty more money has been spent on office space (whole buildings, even) by music industry and music industry adjacent companies that acted as gatekeepers and ensured only a hand-selected few ever made a living off their songs. > I have NO problem with a world that completely unlinks money from performance, because I'm not a free-market capitalist type demanding that financial reward behave like a 'meritocracy'. I also have no problem with this, but I think creative people won't be sharing our opinion anytime soon.

sliverstorm 9y ago
I think the point is the middlemen are clearly rolling in revenue, while the content creator is barely scraping by. That suggests the content really is valuable, and the profits just aren't making it to the artist for some reason. (unless you believe marketing & distribution is all of the value)