10 ms·

> How does such an obvious fallacy command such purchase among smart people? Swift is talking about "music" as an original work. Patel responds with an irreleva

• karpierz 6y ago
  Artists want to be paid proportional to impact; how many people are interacting with the work. I'd love to move to a world where media is funded in advance (regardless of effort) and then released for free, but I don't think that pricing music based on effort, as though it were a factory good is desirable.
• lopis 6y ago
  That's the reason why many youtubers on patreon switch to a monthly subscription rather than charging per video. It makes it clearer that we are supporting the creator's livelihood, not buying a token that they produced. Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit? Higher subscription tiers could include merchandising and concert tickets.
  • michaelt 6y ago
    > Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit? I have a (completely speculative) theory that the "support the artist to keep creating the work they're giving away for free" model has a ceiling when artists become visibly a lot richer than their fans. After all, what kind of sucker would charitably donate to a multimillionaire's private jet running costs?
    • llbeansandrice 6y ago
      That sounds like a feature, not a bug.
    • eindiran 6y ago
      Even if this is true, the ceiling is very high. Look at the current top earners on Patreon, with a known per month figure: https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators * Chapo Trap House, 3 hosts - 170k/month * The Tim Dillon Show, 1 host - 121k/month * AdeptusSteve (I couldn't figure out how many people, possibly 1 guy making some sort of porn game?) - 103k/month * Flagrant 2, 2 hosts - 98k/month * Tiny Meat Gang, 2 hosts - 82k/month * Cum Town, 3 hosts - 81k/month Note that the dollar amounts of most of the people on that list aren't visible and I cut them off at 80k/month. People are willingly chipping in to help creators making 1M/year, not including sponsorships, live shows, etc. And there are some multimillionaires that could likely make it work. If the Spotify deal hadn't happened, Joe Rogan almost certainly could have. Unrelated comment about the list: of the Patreon categories, podcasters are predictably over-represented. But I am surprised by the number of "adult games" on the list. I didn't realize how popular these were.
      • BitwiseFool 6y ago
        Part of me finds it ironic that so many leftist podcasts rake in big bucks on Patreon.
        • runarberg 6y ago
          Why? Do socialists not deserve to earn the value of their work?
          • savanaly 6y ago
            It's not that they don't deserve it, it's that it's ironic.
            • 6y ago
  • stuart78 6y ago
    Bandcamp offers a subscription service [0] for just this purpose. I've thought about it for one or two, and $5/mo or whatever doesn't sound much, but it pretty quickly adds up across music, newsletters, patreons, etc... i need an aggregator for paying all of my content aggregators. [0] https://bandcamp.com/subscriptions https://bandcamp.com/subscriptions
  • TylerE 6y ago
    Neil Young has done pretty much exactly that. https://neilyoungarchives.com/ https://neilyoungarchives.com/
  • chihuahua 6y ago
    I think with an estimated net worth of $360,000,000 Taylor Swift could just relax and produce music as she sees fit, without any need for subscriptions.
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    > That's the reason why many youtubers on patreon switch to a monthly subscription rather than charging per video. Well, that or it’s just more user friendly. It’s hard to plan my finances if I don’t know how much I’ll be paying (since I don’t know, and have no control over, how many creations someone will make next month).
• jasode 6y ago
  >The solution then would be to find a way to charge not for the copies, but for the time effort that the artist put into the production of the music. But this method would be anti-consumer for many buyers of music because the final quality of a song does not always correlate with effort. - low effort but high value: a musician can have a flash of inspiration and come up with a catchy chorus melody and great intro hook on a synth in 15 minutes. They then record the vocals in 2 or 3 takes and thus the whole song is done in less than a day. This ends up being a hit song. - high effort but low value: an artist struggles for weeks and months on composing a song with many rewrites. The producer brings in a dozen other co-writers to help finish it. When they go to record, they record 100 different takes of the vocal and then construct the final vocal by splicing in syllable-by-syllable from the different takes. Very laborious. And yet, the final result is music that's heavily produced but lacks an addictive chorus and does not compel repeat listens. A lot of movies and its sequels are like that. The original on a shoestring budget had a better story and a magic quality but the new sequel with a $200 million budget and an army of special fx artists ends up creating a dud.
  • Sebb767 6y ago
    Also, repeatability does not necessarily correlate with quality. John Cages works or an AAA movie are surely of high quality, but it's fine experiencing them once. Compare that to quite a few (even cheap) songs, which I've listened to hundreds of times
• squeaky-clean 6y ago
  I don't really see how this is possible for an independent artist unless I go the route of "Once this Kickstarter reaches $10k I'll release my song for free"
  • lupire 6y ago
    That's called a bounty and it's one of the open source software business models. It has a freeloader problem, though. An alternative is to drop price over time but give refunds/royalties to earlier buyers, so they always lay a little less than later buyers.
    • squeaky-clean 6y ago
      The bounty model only works when a few individuals (businesses in that case) are very interested in the result. I'm not aware of any projects that run on a bounty model and also take small payment from thousands of sources to make it happen. Unless you have some super-fans willing to drop a lot of money, or price your bounty incredibly low [0], I don't see this working for a song. The alternative solution doesn't address the above commenter's problem that you shouldn't charge for copies of music, but for the creation of it in the first place. [0] And yeah, I realize expecting a high bounty is kind of hypocritical for an indie musician. I've made maybe $50 from my music sales/streaming over the past decade, so why should I be asking a bounty bigger than a few dollars for any song? Well, because with the bounty model I'm setting a ceiling for what I can earn from my work, which doesn't exist on a pay-each-download model. Maybe over the next 10 years I'll only earn another $50 from music, maybe I won't, but I don't want to lock that in. Also, I am going to make my music regardless of any sort of bounty. The payment is just for whether or not I release the music. Open Source projects typically use the bounty to pay a developer to work on the project. They don't develop an entire project and then withhold release until they get payment. Software doing it feels necessary. A musician doing it feels stingy. It just doesn't feel like a comparable model to me.
• majormajor 6y ago
  > The solution then would be to find a way to charge not for the copies, but for the time effort that the artist put into the production of the music. That's literally what charging for the copies does, though. People just want something for nothing. Claiming you want to "take the copy for free but pay separately for the time" when you aren't willing to pay for the copy so that there is some reimbursment for the time is an exercise in wankery. (You aren't just paying for the time, anyway. You're paying for talent, etc. A genius who creates something better in 5 minutes than someone else does in a year is still someone you'd rather compensate...)
  • samatman 6y ago
    That's fine, and you're right about the economic incentive to charge for copies. I happen to resent the use of legal force to do so, and I'm not alone. I belong to the Napster generation, where the muscle arm of the copyright industry destroyed one of the most promising new applications for the Internet, instead of rolling with it and reaching some kind of mutually-beneficial arrangment. We're all still pretty mad about that when we think on it. Like it or not, NFTs represent a way out of this. Taylor Swift has trufans, she could easily cut a limited-issue NFT for her new recording of Fearless, with a smart contract which pays a residual every time it's resold. If she wanted to. Probably not the right time in the hype cycle for her to get on board, there are unsolved questions in terms of user experience. But the option is there, and if it becomes sufficiently widespread we can do away with the whole tawdry cycle of DMCA requests and randomly penalizing music enjoyers with ruinous fines and lawsuits. That would be all to the good.
    • prox 6y ago
      What’s your take on BitClout?
    • bradleyjg 6y ago
      The sense of entitlement in this comment is pretty shocking. The only justification I see in here is “I want”. That’s it. You (“and I'm not alone”) want certain things and so the world needs to accommodate you. If it doesn’t—-you are telling us you’ll just do what you want anyway. How is this anything other than sociopathic?
• bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >The problem is that artists (and record labels) want to get paid for the non-scarce thing: the copies, of course one could argue that the way to gauge the value of the artist's time and effort is by how many copies people want of what they produced. I am not arguing this is a good way of estimating value, but there are lots of people who do make this argument, and it should be addressed. note - I guess it should be time and ability, effort is generally another measure of time.
• analog31 6y ago
  The time and effort of artists isn't exactly scarce either, if you treat it as a commodity. In my view, artists of every generation have had to figure out a hack that lets them earn a living while also pursuing their art. Possibly the greatest threat to the income of rank-and-file musicians right now is the decline in church attendance. I know a lot of musicians, and virtually all of them who earn a decent middle class living earn more than half of their income from teaching classical music to children. The other half comes from a spouse with a day job. ;-)
• TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  Another way of solving this problem is to first make sure every person in society has what they need for survival without needing to pay for it. Then you don’t have to pay artists anything and they can do what they enjoy and survive and we can all benefit from the way that computers can duplicate value for free. It’s a kind of inside out or upside down economics that I have been thinking about a lot lately. And personally I think this can be done in a totally voluntary way without a state drawing taxes and paying a UBI (though a UBI may help cut a path towards this future).
• BurningFrog 6y ago
  > The solution then would be to find a way to charge not for the copies, but for the time effort that the artist put into the production of the music. Which is the "labor theory of value" of old man Karl Marx, one of the most thoroughly debunked theories there is. In this case, I can spend 1000 hours recording a song that no one wants to hear, and I should not get paid for the labor I put in to it.