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The music industry wasn't just handing out blanket streaming rights until Spotify showed up. All the other services of the era sucked -- their libraries were pa

The music industry wasn't just handing out blanket streaming rights until Spotify showed up. All the other services of the era sucked -- their libraries were patchy and music streaming looked very much like TV streaming is today where every show lives under a different provider. It took freaking Apple to convince the music industry to allow single track sales and thats why we were in that state until the mid 2010's when Spotify came in and started to clean house. The music industry was not looking to break the stranglehold they had on CD sales. Someone had to come in with a 'shoot first ask questions later' attitude to get to where we are today. Uber and Lyft did what they did for the same reason -- the (oftentimes mafia-backed) taxi cartels had a monopoly on pricing and taxi medallions and the only realistic way to break that was to operate illegally. I think you will find that the law (and copyright) to be extremely overrated. Copyright, in particular, should not exist in its current form, especially with digital data that is not bound by the laws of physics or physicality, to say nothing of the various entities which have carved out most of the royalties that an artist can make for themselves.

digging 3y ago
I'm probably more on your side that you think WRT the law and copyright law but let's not pretend Spotify, Uber, and Lyft are doing some social good. They're greed-driven corporations (a bit redundant, but it's especially true for them). They may have partially broken up the walls around their particular industries, but not to democratize them, just to take ownership of whatever they can grab. And in doing so, each has failed to realize better solutions for people. Uber & Lyft have increased our dependence on wasteful, dangerous, expensive personal vehicles. Spotify is a worse model than Bandcamp for indie artists. It's also a worse model than pretty much every other streaming service in that it pays so little to artists. So, yeah I don't like it when rich people break the law to get more rich at society's expense. We should be breaking the law to make society better.
- pdntspa 3y ago
  Ergo, piracy and buying music on bandcamp. Still very viable options. I am close to publishing an EP on bandcamp myself. But I cannot deny how handy Spotify has been with musical pursuits. Spotify may rule the roost but we still have Bandcamp, Beatport, JunoDownload, Amazon Music, iTunes, Discogs marketplace, and others. And I would say Spotify is doing a social good. As a nobody artist, being able to point people to stuff on Spotify is really compelling. Any other way I'd have to force people into either buying or using an app they are unfamiliar with just to listen to it. That said I am not trying to make money from music, that is just foolish.
  - digging 3y ago
    > And I would say Spotify is doing a social good. As a nobody artist, being able to point people to stuff on Spotify is really compelling. Any other way I'd have to force people into either buying or using an app they are unfamiliar with just to listen to it. Well, I understand where you're coming from here, but that's not really Spotify doing a social good, it's just the inevitable effect of their cultural dominance. Everybody[1] has Spotify. But they've taken that position due to their unethical growth plan. Anyway, I've realized that we're discussing multiple things, not one thing. Spotify can be bad for artists who want to make money off their art, while being good for those who don't want/need to make money from music. [1] I don't have Spotify.
wwweston 3y ago
This was not Spotify vs CD sales. By 2005 everybody (even the labels) knew the writing was on the wall and physical media was going to be legacy niche. Digital retail grew fast from there (faster than CDs replacing tapes for a few years) and by 2011 (still limping through the trench of the 2008 crash) the yearly revenue was not only growing it was outdoing physical media and rising. Not just Apple. Amazon, Google, Bandcamp, Bleep, half a dozen others plus artists and indie networks experimenting with direct marketing and retailing. The physical vs digital fight was over at all levels of industry strategy when Spotify was founded and smartphones were a rumor, and music was well on track to a complete digital transition by the time the monster escaped scandinavia. What Spotify actually did was cannibalize digital retail. Because of course it did: it used massive capitalization AND ignoring pesky laws/policies about actually compensating people creating the work Spotify's service depends on to give that work away to consumers for essentially free, until they'd created that expectation in the market and had enough pull as a channel to buddy up with labels (and the ironic thing is it's not even clear how profitable they can be, maybe leading the charge to the bottom has downsides). > Copyright, in particular, should not exist in its current form, especially with digital data that is not bound by the laws of physics or physicality Copyright conventions become more important in the face of falling barriers to reproduction and transmission, not less. That's how they got created in the first place: physical copying got industrialized and could take place with scale and ease that was unheard of before then. And the rationales behind them are still solid today, because they're about the economics of creation, not distribution.
- pdntspa 3y ago
  The economics of creation are meaningless if distribution lacks physical scarcity. That is the entire problem with copyright in the digital age -- it is physically impossible to control (i.e. prevent) consumption once the consumer has the data, and for IP like music this is impossible to control. Sure, we can attach DRM and technological controls to our work, we can form massive databases of royalties distribution, we can falsely moralize until our faces turn blue, we can even try to craft laws and legislation to get what we ant. But all these things are meaningless in the digital land of infinite plenty to a determined enough adversary, and some music fans are adamant (yet also kind enough to share with others) If copyright (and DRM) was enforced the way some wanted, we wouldn't have a rich history of remixes, recontextualizations, or bootlegs that allow a work to live on far past its shelf-life. Memes would be a shallow husk of what they are today. We wouldn't have many, many genres of music, and things like the Amen break wouldn't exist and we'd all be worse off for it. For that reason copyright needs to be abolished. There are other ways of monetizing intellectual property. Once a given work is released to the public, its creators have literally zero control over it, despite the technological artifices we construct otherwise.

digging 3y ago

I'm probably more on your side that you think WRT the law and copyright law but let's not pretend Spotify, Uber, and Lyft are doing some social good. They're greed-driven corporations (a bit redundant, but it's especially true for them). They may have partially broken up the walls around their particular industries, but not to democratize them, just to take ownership of whatever they can grab. And in doing so, each has failed to realize better solutions for people. Uber & Lyft have increased our dependence on wasteful, dangerous, expensive personal vehicles. Spotify is a worse model than Bandcamp for indie artists. It's also a worse model than pretty much every other streaming service in that it pays so little to artists. So, yeah I don't like it when rich people break the law to get more rich at society's expense. We should be breaking the law to make society better.

pdntspa 3y ago
Ergo, piracy and buying music on bandcamp. Still very viable options. I am close to publishing an EP on bandcamp myself. But I cannot deny how handy Spotify has been with musical pursuits. Spotify may rule the roost but we still have Bandcamp, Beatport, JunoDownload, Amazon Music, iTunes, Discogs marketplace, and others. And I would say Spotify is doing a social good. As a nobody artist, being able to point people to stuff on Spotify is really compelling. Any other way I'd have to force people into either buying or using an app they are unfamiliar with just to listen to it. That said I am not trying to make money from music, that is just foolish.
- digging 3y ago
  > And I would say Spotify is doing a social good. As a nobody artist, being able to point people to stuff on Spotify is really compelling. Any other way I'd have to force people into either buying or using an app they are unfamiliar with just to listen to it. Well, I understand where you're coming from here, but that's not really Spotify doing a social good, it's just the inevitable effect of their cultural dominance. Everybody[1] has Spotify. But they've taken that position due to their unethical growth plan. Anyway, I've realized that we're discussing multiple things, not one thing. Spotify can be bad for artists who want to make money off their art, while being good for those who don't want/need to make money from music. [1] I don't have Spotify.

wwweston 3y ago

This was not Spotify vs CD sales. By 2005 everybody (even the labels) knew the writing was on the wall and physical media was going to be legacy niche. Digital retail grew fast from there (faster than CDs replacing tapes for a few years) and by 2011 (still limping through the trench of the 2008 crash) the yearly revenue was not only growing it was outdoing physical media and rising. Not just Apple. Amazon, Google, Bandcamp, Bleep, half a dozen others plus artists and indie networks experimenting with direct marketing and retailing. The physical vs digital fight was over at all levels of industry strategy when Spotify was founded and smartphones were a rumor, and music was well on track to a complete digital transition by the time the monster escaped scandinavia. What Spotify actually did was cannibalize digital retail. Because of course it did: it used massive capitalization AND ignoring pesky laws/policies about actually compensating people creating the work Spotify's service depends on to give that work away to consumers for essentially free, until they'd created that expectation in the market and had enough pull as a channel to buddy up with labels (and the ironic thing is it's not even clear how profitable they can be, maybe leading the charge to the bottom has downsides). > Copyright, in particular, should not exist in its current form, especially with digital data that is not bound by the laws of physics or physicality Copyright conventions become more important in the face of falling barriers to reproduction and transmission, not less. That's how they got created in the first place: physical copying got industrialized and could take place with scale and ease that was unheard of before then. And the rationales behind them are still solid today, because they're about the economics of creation, not distribution.

pdntspa 3y ago
The economics of creation are meaningless if distribution lacks physical scarcity. That is the entire problem with copyright in the digital age -- it is physically impossible to control (i.e. prevent) consumption once the consumer has the data, and for IP like music this is impossible to control. Sure, we can attach DRM and technological controls to our work, we can form massive databases of royalties distribution, we can falsely moralize until our faces turn blue, we can even try to craft laws and legislation to get what we ant. But all these things are meaningless in the digital land of infinite plenty to a determined enough adversary, and some music fans are adamant (yet also kind enough to share with others) If copyright (and DRM) was enforced the way some wanted, we wouldn't have a rich history of remixes, recontextualizations, or bootlegs that allow a work to live on far past its shelf-life. Memes would be a shallow husk of what they are today. We wouldn't have many, many genres of music, and things like the Amen break wouldn't exist and we'd all be worse off for it. For that reason copyright needs to be abolished. There are other ways of monetizing intellectual property. Once a given work is released to the public, its creators have literally zero control over it, despite the technological artifices we construct otherwise.