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> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? The problem

> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? The problem I see is that there's just too much supply compared to demand, thus the price of content is literally zero. Even the monetization models that are (still) available are on borrowed time. Ultimately there's no easy way to profit off something that is already plentiful and that there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically out there.

AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
> there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically out there This is the concept that is most frequently left out of otherwise thoughtful analyses on the topic at hand. Although I would not label the motivation as purely altruistic, what many people fail to realize is that people who create art of any kind, and have honest motivations for doing so, are going to be doing it no matter the profit potential. Personally, I am a music composer [0] and I must make music. I am so unconcerned by profit that I have given all of my work away for free for more than a decade. I do all of my album releases on a podcast feed so that people never have to pay money, accept the terms of service of Spotify, or be raped by ad tech just to hear my work. To me, payment is the fact that people heard my work. On that metric alone, SoundCloud has given me a lot more "payment" than any other online service out there, since it was so apparent when people did engage with my work, and those engagements were very meaningful to me on the whole. [0]: https://multipli.city https://multipli.city
- registeredcorn 4y ago
  I'm interested to know, if it isn't too personal, what kind of work do you do to bring in income? There's a few passions that I have/have had, but I've found it hard to devote the time to any of them because I tend to feel very drained after doing work on things that I don't particularly care about.
  - AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
    I do media engineering related stuff, things related to media codecs, DSP, and p2p networking. The work I do during my day job is often somehow relevant to my music work. For example, I used to work in VR, which enabled me to begin exploring ambisonics in my music.
    - registeredcorn 4y ago
      Very cool! Thanks.

AndrewUnmuted 4y ago

> there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically out there This is the concept that is most frequently left out of otherwise thoughtful analyses on the topic at hand. Although I would not label the motivation as purely altruistic, what many people fail to realize is that people who create art of any kind, and have honest motivations for doing so, are going to be doing it no matter the profit potential. Personally, I am a music composer [0] and I must make music. I am so unconcerned by profit that I have given all of my work away for free for more than a decade. I do all of my album releases on a podcast feed so that people never have to pay money, accept the terms of service of Spotify, or be raped by ad tech just to hear my work. To me, payment is the fact that people heard my work. On that metric alone, SoundCloud has given me a lot more "payment" than any other online service out there, since it was so apparent when people did engage with my work, and those engagements were very meaningful to me on the whole. [0]: https://multipli.city https://multipli.city

registeredcorn 4y ago
I'm interested to know, if it isn't too personal, what kind of work do you do to bring in income? There's a few passions that I have/have had, but I've found it hard to devote the time to any of them because I tend to feel very drained after doing work on things that I don't particularly care about.
- AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
  I do media engineering related stuff, things related to media codecs, DSP, and p2p networking. The work I do during my day job is often somehow relevant to my music work. For example, I used to work in VR, which enabled me to begin exploring ambisonics in my music.
  - registeredcorn 4y ago
    Very cool! Thanks.