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Here's how I deal with users who steal

pud.com

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Re: Here's how I deal with users who steal

#181

Post by nfoz »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #180
nfoz wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying is not wrong, your business model was wrong. Shame on you for causing feelings of shame amongst your users while you try to condition them against what should be an acceptable and moral action: sharing software and sharing their religious texts. Copyright should be abolished, and this is a moral issue.

Shame on you for judging. This was their business model. The software didn't exist; open source didn't create it. Wrong or not, there they were, like millions before them, creating value and wanting to be paid for it. I know you are trolling, but you made it a moral issue not me.

I'm not trolling, it is a harmful business model that antagonizes their users. We will disagree, and that's fine.

Re: Here's how I deal with users who steal

#182

Post by nakodari »

You are running a business, sooner or later your bottom line will be affected. What you should so is inform the Scholarship account holders that $19.99 will be deducted from their total earning of one year. This way it will be a win-win scenario. They get a free account upfront and they pay you later. You are still getting paid in the end!

Re: Here's how I deal with users who steal

#183

Post by jasallen »

tedks wrote: post #175
chm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My little finger tells me you would have received less calls if the company sold video games, or pornography, for example.

It depends on the video game or the porn in question. A Bible is going to prime for social/moral thoughts and feelings in a very significant way. For a religious person I doubt there's anything that could make attitudes about morality more accessible, and accessibility is almost the whole story for behavior. I think if a video game loading screen told you "Piracy is WRONG!" it would be ineffective in GTA, neutral in…

"political feminist porn". That's a thing???

Re: Here's how I deal with users who steal

#185

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

femto wrote: post #18

How about adding an ongoing option to allow scholarship account holders to voluntarily convert to a full account and return their freebie to a pool, so it can be offered to another struggling musician? Such an option would allow users to treat a scholarship as a temporary measure, that they can chose to use, whilst getting established.

This implies that the author will add an upper limit to the number of these accounts (and that the limit will be low enough to actually matter), being potentially unfair to people who are being denied the option (or at least inequitable when compared with the people who received it). It also places a burden on the author to actively prune free accounts that aren't being used, lest they all end up in the hands of non-users.

Re: Here's how I deal with users who steal

#186

Post by newrenowhore »

Confession: I totally faked the referrals on distrokid, using 5 dispostable.com emails, and was frankly a little surprised when it worked. Strangely, I don't see the "scholarship" plan as an option when I log in, but maybe it only applies to new phonies?

At any rate props to you pud, for so many reasons... it's a fantastic model and a great product execution. It's the first product that encourages casual music distribution - but that's exactly why I didn't, and probably won't, pay for it.

I have 2 albums up on tunecore, that actually generate revenue. These are albums - professionally recorded, produced, etc. - that I spent money creating, and that I make money back from. I picked tunecore because they were the best thing available at the time, but if I were to do another big release, I'd use them again (despite the fact that I'm not thrilled with the company at the moment because Jeff Price is a great guy and they totally screwed him). And at the end of the day, it's because they have the most distribution partners, and because they send me a check every month. tunecore is for music that I want people to buy.

Then Distrokid came out, and I celebrated. I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but musicians make tons of songs that never see the light of day. Maybe the song isn't entirely finished, maybe it's not good enough to pay for mastering, maybe it's part of a musical direction the musician changed his or her mind on. I've got a ton of these, and these are what I'm using distrokid for. I'm not really promoting these tracks, I'm not expecting a great return from them. A lot of them are unfinished experiments or lo-fi fun, nothing market-worthy. But I can put these up for my friends, other musicians, etc. to hear on Spotify at a higher quality than soundcloud can provide.

As soon as I make $19.99 from distrokid, I'll buy the yearly, more as a thank you than anything else. But until then, I'm probably going to keep my phony free account.

And pud - if you can match tunecore's number of distributors and earnings reporting... well, "disruption" doesn't even scratch the surface.

Re: Here's how I deal with users who steal

#187

Post by pioul »

If you're going to play the "nice guy" card, don't offer the "scholarship" plan only to cheaters, while trying to guilt trip them along the way.

Letting people use your product for free if they can't afford it is certainly a nice thought, but then you should give that opportunity to everybody.

Re: Here's how I deal with users who steal

#188

Post by ye »

mistercow wrote: post #153
ye wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence is actually to the contrary. The incarceration rates of atheists vs christians in the US are quite telling.

There are two problems with that: 1. I don't think the data actually exists. The commonly cited figure of 0.2% atheists is extremely dubious. 2. There are too many confounding factors and hidden variables. A plurality of Hindus speak Hindi, but believing in Hinduism neither causes, nor is caused by speaking Hindi. Likewise, if atheists are underrepresented in prisons, there are just too many simple demographic explan…

Your opinion about the cited figure is much more dubious than the data we got from an independent research analyst who didn't care for the data.

Re: Here's how I deal with users who steal

#189

Post by ibudiallo »

danielpal wrote: post #13

This is the sort of thing that sounds reasonably nice and we all wish we could do. However it stops working really fast. I also have a web service and we used to let people get away with this sort of stuff. First year it worked. Second year, the amount of fraud was impacting bottom line and some of this users turned out to be the ones that used "support" the most. So we started banning bad users and blocking their su…

I think the best thing to do is to remove that Scholarship program. In the long run it will be a something people will use just to avoid paying you. Let those who are struggling figure out the system on their own. When they get better financially they will pay you (hopefully).

Re: Here's how I deal with users who steal

#190

Post by rgsteele »

brainfed wrote: post #37
hristov wrote: post #28

Since I am a little lazy, can someone explain to me why this service is necessary. Does apple not allow musicians to upload their music to itunes?

No you have to go through a "publisher" of some sort who has an agreement with Apple. Previously sites like CD Baby or Reverbnation offered this service to musicians but they charge annual fees to keep your stuff up on the store. When Distrokid launched he said on Reddit that there was no need for people to pay these annual fees and he wanted to create a cheaper option.

You've got this a little backwards. CD Baby, for example, charges per album (currently $49) to sell your music through a number of digital distributors (and they also provide distribution for physical CDs and vinyl records). It's just a one-time fee, but you have to pay it for each album you sell.

Distrokid, on the other hand, does charge an annual fee, but that's for an unlimited number of albums.

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