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Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off
- coraki 2y agoThe statement "Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off" reflects a sentiment shared by many in the creative industries, emphasizing the need for fair compensation and ethical treatment.Addressing these issues requires concerted efforts from multiple stakeholders, including industry leaders, policymakers, advocacy groups, and the creators themselves. By fostering a fair and transparent environment, we can ensure that creative workers receive the respect and compensation they deserve.
- carla456 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yorwba 2y agoPlacing the spam between "receive" and "the respect" is certainly a nice touch.
- pfdietz 2y agoWhat this is saying is that creativity is privileged and (unlike other forms of labor) should be given more than the market says it's worth. Why should non-creatives go along with this?
- MourYother 2y ago[flagged]
- barelyauser 2y ago[flagged]
- anigbrowl 2y agoIt is not only my nature, but human nature. No it isn't. It's the nature of about 30% of people, who can't be happy without knowing that someone else is worse off. Many of the characteristics that you ascribe to stupidity are actually examples of selfishness, and you're leveraging the existence thereof to rationalize your own selfishness. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 Your wealth likely derives from a mixture of raw talent, hard work, luck, and preferential attachment, and imho wealth and fitness (in the technical sense) are poorly correlated in modern society.
- bequanna 2y ago> Your wealth likely derives from a mixture of raw talent, hard work, luck, and preferential attachment This is a disturbing viewpoint to see on HN. We already went down this path (a few times) and it resulted in >100 million deaths in the 20th century.
- anigbrowl 2y agoTry arguing with substance instead of hyperbolic (and specious) comparisons. Preferential attachment is a well-documented economic phenomenon, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment
- bequanna 2y agoThis is a feature, not a bug. In our system, capital tends to concentrate and flow to people who are good stewards of it. Many of the rich train their children to provide value and allocate capital efficiently. This is somehow a bad thing? The comment I responded to was the typical collage freshman “eat the rich” bs which is rooted in communistic ideation. Those ideas are generally worthless and go down a shitty path for both the individual and society. Those ideas result in misery literally every time we try them.
- drpossum 2y agoIt's not market value, it's the forces in the middle skimming off the top as much as they want and then using that to enforce their position as a de facto monopoly. Did you even read the article on how much the market is paying and how much is actually going to artists?
- anigbrowl 2y agoHow about fuck the market, which produces terrible outcomes across the board. It's not the toy 'supply and demand' model of economics classes or anything resembling a pure meritocracy, it's heavily shaped by cartels and asymmetric contractual relations.
- pfdietz 2y agoHow about no? The evidence is that markets are essential. Attempts to use central planning instead have been universally disastrous, for reasons that were predicted ahead of time.
- MourYother 2y ago[flagged]
- bequanna 2y agoCentral planning of anything is generally very inefficient and results in the concentration of power. So far, we haven’t been able to find a way to concentrate power without corruption. The lesson is: only give the government as much control as necessary, never more. In a system that is more socialist, the people forfeit their power to the party. Super easy for one party to dominate in these systems so votes mean little and you enter a doom loop of inefficiency caused by corruption. In a system that is more capitalistic and consumer-based, the people retain a good amount of their power through purchasing choices. It is also tough for any one political party to take complete control, so the people also retain power through votes.
- pjmorris 2y ago> Central planning of anything is generally very inefficient and results in the concentration of power. When corporations take over the central planning, what forces should counteract? Before you say 'market forces', you have to address the present case, where three music owners control 60-70% of the market on terms favorable to them rather than to customers or creators.
- bostik 2y ago> more than the market says it's worth. If you control the market, and have a direct way of influencing what the law considers the market, that is by definition not a competitive (and/or mostly free) market. The name for this scenario is known as "Hobson's Choice"[0]. Also, the word for a market where you have only a couple of buyers (all colluding with each other) is called a monopsony. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice
- Jensson 2y agoThere are billions of buyers, just that most of them don't want to pay that much.
- Dalewyn 2y ago>Why should non-creatives go along with this? We shouldn't. Art has historically been vastly overvalued and I like that its perceived/demanded value has been sharply declining over the past several decades and especially now with the advent of "AI". I'm sorry if anyone reading this is an artist and I just twisted your pantaloons, but artists don't serve any valuable role in society. Artists exist strictly because society can afford to waste surplus time and resources on frivolous occupations, art is an intangible luxury.
- pfdietz 2y agoIndeed. To a large extent, art was a means of displaying your social status, a way of demonstrating your wealth and buffing your ego. It was used as a justification for colonialism and imperialism. Our society is so advanced; look at the art it produces; obviously we're superior so we should dictate what others do.
- anigbrowl 2y agoRight, right, nobody but the social elites ever wanted to decorate anything, be entertained, or engage in cultural practices for mere enjoyment. Folk music? Dancing? mere impositions of social organization. These people think they're having fun, but that's because they lack true consciousness.
- jfengel 2y agoI'd read this but I'm too busy playing video games. I'll read it after I watch this movie.
- MourYother 2y agoI don't think you realize what a hellscape the world without art would be.
- wincy 2y agoWe’d go outside? Derive pleasure from being around people near us instead of seeking external validation and watching shows crafted by Hollywood midwits? Maybe we’d have more hobbies and do sports?
- tom-_- 2y agoNo, the author is saying the share of revenue the distributors (tech, music industry) are receiving is misaligned with the value they're adding. Compare content creators with a SWE. They both produce the product being sold, what percentage of the revenue should they receive?
- lotsofpulp 2y ago> what percentage of the revenue should they receive? Wherever the supply and demand curves intersect. Otherwise, society is less efficient in allocating resources.
- tomrod 2y agoThe deeper question is how much control labor has over its provision of supply (monopoly) and how much control firms have over their demand for labor provisioning (monopsony). Both can be inefficient operators in the Econ 101 view of the world.
- mdorazio 2y agoThis “people should be paid based on the value they create” myth comes up a lot on HN. Compensation is only tied to value creation as a maximum level. The actual compensation level is whatever people are willing to work for while doing good-enough work. If you want to price your work based on value, you need to run your own business.
- ip26 2y agoIt’s a thought experiment. What are the reasons you aren’t paid for the value you create? Can you fix some of them? In this case, it’s postulated the biggest single factor is a monopsony.
- pdonis 2y agoYes, and the only way to fix the monopsony is for creators to own their own distribution channels so they can sell directly to their customers instead of selling to middlemen who take the vast majority of the profits and pay them peanuts.
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- rayiner 2y agoIt’s especially hard to defend given that the barriers to entry for creatives today (thanks to cheap editing equipment and Internet distribution) is extremely low.
- portaouflop 2y agoThe barrier to getting paid is significantly higher though, so in the end it’s more or less the same: if you want to make a living off creative work you’re going to have a hard time
- whimsicalism 2y agolow barrier to entry lowers cost, so this is exactly the desired outcome
- anigbrowl 2y agoBut also quality. For example, YouTube pretty much forces people toward lowest-common-denominator filler content, because if creators don't upload new content frequently enough they'll drop out of recommendation lists even for subscribers. Creative software tools are easily available and distribution is free, but YouTube has a monopoly of information and so creators have very little insight into what/when/how people see the creative product or how revenue is calculated.
- rayiner 2y agoWhat are the barriers to getting paid, in this era of online streaming and PayPal?
- portaouflop 2y agoFinding people who pay you. And good luck surviving off the scraps you get for streaming fees
- pjmorris 2y agoYes, tools are cheaper, but the big barriers to entry remain the hours invested in learning whatever creative craft is at hand.
- roughly 2y ago> more than the market says it's worth. The market’s got nothing to do with it. The music industry is a cartel. Look at the profit margins of the big 3 music companies: that’s a lowball on what the market says the art is worth, but it’s not making it back to the artists.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pdonis 2y ago> more than the market says it's worth It isn't. The market says it's worth a lot. But the vast majority of that "a lot" doesn't go to the actual creators. It goes to middlemen. Unfortunately, the only fix for that, from the creators' point of view, is for them to own the middlemen themselves. But creators generally have neither the time nor the desire to do that, and doing it detracts from their ability to create.
- pfdietz 2y agoWe're talking about two different things. One is the creative product of the artists themselves, the other is the packaged, delivered product purchased by consumers. The latter includes elements not in the former. The market is saying those elements can be worth more than the creative's output.
- pdonis 2y ago> The market is saying those elements can be worth more than the creative's output. No, customers aren't saying that. Customers are just saying that the final packaged, delivered product they receive (today a better description would be the overall service channel through which they receive the products) is worth what they pay for it. They aren't paying the various contributors separately so their payments say nothing about how much they think those individual contributions are worth.
- Jensson 2y agoThey aren't paying for the unpackaged raw product, hence they feel the package is worth more than the content. There are many talented people who produce works worth packaging, not many who want to do all that packaging so it can reach consumers.
- pdonis 2y ago> They aren't paying for the unpackaged raw product Nobody is offering them the unpackaged raw product, at least not for creators that work through the big media companies, so it's impossible to know whether they would pay for it if it were offered by the big media companies, and if so, how much they would pay. Some creators do sell direct to customers over the Internet, or make a living through Patreon contributions or something similar, so the package the big media companies are selling is not the only thing customers are buying. However, it's certainly true that the big media companies do have advantages that they are making full use of. As I said in my original post in this subthread, the only way for creators who don't like the small cut they are getting from the big media companies and want more of the profit for themselves is to do their own distribution instead of doing it through the big media companies. Some are doing that, as I said above, but not many.
- auggierose 2y agoYou clearly didn't read the article, but just the title. What this is saying that creative workers, just as workers in other forms of labor, should consider themselves as workers.
- paulpauper 2y agoYeah this is why despite office jobs sometimes being described as 'soul-crushing' , the alternatives are not that great either. Service sector work means bad managers and bad customers. Creative works means non-paying or overly demanding clients and inconsistency of work/pay. Another problem is success at creative work typically requires top talent . Most people who aspire to be creatives cannot outcompete GPT/AI when it comes to writing for example or graphics design.
- bobthepanda 2y agoDon’t forget nonprofit work, which is often as toxic as corporate culture but with added gaslighting about how you should do more work “for the mission.”
- guccigav 2y agoA job is a job, construction jobs are physically demanding although pay can be competitive for the bar of entry, pilots can be a fun and prestigious career but your trade-off is your sleep schedule and days away from home every week. I vaguely remember Richard Thaler published this research on risk as the determinant for career earning.
- drpossum 2y agoA functional society and government that values creative workers would provide protections against this kind of effective monopoly.
- golergka 2y agoIt just comes down to the fact that music is cheap. Outside of a very small cohort of star artists, musicians just don't create anything that people at large value to any significant extent. Only a very small portion of your fans would be willing to pay for a CD or a T-shirt; most just have a song or two in a playlist somewhere, and if you make your music unavailable on that steaming platform, they won't even notice.
- ip26 2y agoPeople value music; subscriptions are widely successful. However, the platforms (aggregators) have a stronger market position than small artists (content producers). It strikes me as comparable to the Tivo problem, where they built something of real value but had their margins squeezed to nothing by stronger players.
- robinsonb5 2y ago> steaming platform Please tell me you meant to do that? Either way, I'm using it from now on!
- CPLX 2y agoHow about this. Take away all the musicians and their music and see what Spotify and all its software developers are worth by themselves. Now do the opposite. Figured it out yet? Music is one of the most universal and important things in our culture. People define themselves and their identity with it, and most certainly value it and will pay for it. How we structure our economic systems determines if it’s “cheap” or not and who gets the profits from it. It’s certainly not an intrinsic quality.
- largelady97 2y agoSociety is growing out of all that egotistic nonsense. We have built a large corpus of music. We don't need no more music. That problem has been solved. That area has been explored. All the good chord progressions, songs, sounds have been found and are in the corpus. It is quite clear musicians are no longer needed or wanted.
- photochemsyn 2y agoElevator music hell: that's what will come from safety-first social-value-aligned corporate-AI-written song lyrics and music scores. Already autotune and excessive compression have created a dreary modern musical landscape, and live pitch correction is widely used in performances - pretty farcical. I'd rather go back to 80s punk/metal bands playing their barely-in-tune instruments in garages - but it would be fun to see what an open-source LLM fine-tuned on that material would produce. A key condition: The band 'Suicidal Tendencies' could not be excluded on safety-alignment grounds.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoThere are still garage bands with scratchy instruments, it's just called bedroom punk now. Also on Spotify.
- spacecadet 2y agoAnother piece generalizing artist to musicians, while this race to bottom has decimated most other independent creative professions beyond music, for much longer. I thought spotify was going to democratize music?! I laughed then, I still laugh. New boss just like the old boss, someone once said...
- bjornsing 2y ago> You see, the money the Big Three got in the form of [Spotify] dividends, stock sales, etc was theirs to spend as they saw fit. They could share some, all, or none of it with musicians. How can this be legal? Has it been tried in any court? To me it feels unlikely that a court would accept the argument that since the Big Three got paid in something other than money they don’t have to pay royalties to the musicians on that. Otherwise what’s stopping any licensee from just charging their customers in gold instead of dollars, and pay zero royalty?
- foxhop 2y agoI built an app that lets creatives sell their digital and physical goods https://www.makepostsell.com/ https://www.makepostsell.com/ It's open source and public domain, uses stripe for holding card information
- raytopia 2y agoInteresting platform because it's open source does thay mean one could easily move off the platform for any reason. I also see that you don't handle sales tax which is a bummer and is one of the reasons people use a lot of centralized platforms but I get why you don't because it's a nightmare.
- foxhop 2y agoThanks, the process to move off the platform is a process that needs to be built and documented, the data lives in a shared digital ocean bucket, the database uses uuids and we could try dumping only the relevant data out of the shared database. it was built as a multi tenet platform. Future work is supporting api/secret keys to bring your own s3 bucket/digital ocean spaces, while keeping the database shared. otherwise it costs roughly $11/mo to host a copy of the platform ($6 for a virtual server and $5 for the digital ocean space) As for taxes, this will be something that will need to be tackled at some point but so far I've been kicking the can down the road hoping I could find a partner to help figure that out in a clever way that is proper.
- raytopia 2y agoHas anyone ever figured out if there's a way to design the internet so gatekeepers and centralized platforms don't come to dominate everything? Or are we just doomed to see this happen time and time again.
- MattGaiser 2y agoInfrastructure to facilitate exchange isn’t free and it provides a far superior experience for the buyer than buying from individual vendors. So you would need a way to make setting up and maintaining that common infrastructure very low cost.
- roughly 2y agoDoctorow’s written a few books here - not sure if they provide an answer, but he’s been one of the better thinkers in this space: https://craphound.com/shop/ https://craphound.com/shop/ Similarly, I liked Jaron Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future?”, which deals with similar topics: https://www.jaronlanier.com/futurewebresources.html https://www.jaronlanier.com/futurewebresources.html
- navane 2y agoAntitrust regulation? Government regulated infrastructure with many free market players on top? For example: a plaza that is maintained and scheduled by the municipality, with many private business vendors of overlapping goods. Afaik this is econ 101.
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- erikerikson 2y ago> Do you really think that Getty Images likes paying photographers and wants to give them a single penny more than they absolutely have to? Extended, this is how we shut down our economic engines until we all starve. The problem is the acceptance of an adversarial nature in the relationships of economic actors. Yes, locally optional and "rational" in a mind destroying manner, so on, and so forth... > Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking Doctorow says just pick the right side side of the scaled adversarial conflict. It turns out we need to stop being adversarial but that's a hard coordination problem. The scalable and acceptable solution to that is the next industrial revolution scale advancement.
- djoldman 2y agoA fantastic economist-sniping article with lots of spicy invective, proletariate vs bourgeoisie fun, and undercurrents of protectionism. All economic agents (producers, consumers, companies, living people) all want to pay nothing and get everything. There is little new or special here. 1+1 = 2 and generally the sky is blue. That being said, yes, the way for creators to capture more of the economic pie is fairly simple if not easy: join up and negotiate en-masse. Especially in industries with powerful entrenched oligopolies like music.