You wouldn't download an NFT
Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
161–170 of 245 posts
Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's literally what charging for the copies does, though. People just want something for nothing. I pay about 10€/mo for Spotify. A significant portion of my use of the service is devoted to artists that are dead. They can't put time and effort into producing music. They can't be reimbursed for the time and effort they've already put into it. I could bury the gold with them, but they wouldn't have any use for it…
> I pay about 10€/mo for Spotify. Consider not; the majority of that money just goes to Spotify. If, every month, you paid 10€ to a random artist you liked (or split 10€ between all of them), the artists would receive probably more than two orders of magnitude more money. (If I remember correctly, anyway.) Of course, this assumes you can get the music elsewhere. If Spotify's too convenient to give up, there are sever…
A quick google says that spotify pays at least $0.003 per stream to an artist. So your $10 pays for 3333 streams per month, or just over 100 a day. I probably don't average 100 streams per day, but I definitely average over 10. I'm not sure its as bad a deal for the artist as you may think. It's not two orders of magnitude bad, at least.
Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
#163FWIW, this phenomenon is not new under the sun. I observe that we are experiencing a McLuhan Tetrad retrieval of it via our modern ~ Internet media artifact.
For example, I experienced (preferentially) buying, in the 1970s, LotR paperbacks with Tolkien's picture on the back cover with his authorial economic plea -- see his statement, below, in this citation ...
from "Tolkien: Lord of the Royalties" at https://ansible.uk/sfx/tolkien.html > Eventually the authorized edition appeared with Tolkien's stern message: "Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other."
This was bad publicity for Ace, who eventually caved in, paid Tolkien royalties, and promised not to reprint. also referring to this circumstance is a Library of Congress blog post: J.R.R. Tolkien – Paperbacks and Copyright November 24, 2014 by Margaret Wood https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/11/j-r-r-tolkien-paperbacks-a...
Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 irrelevant point about digital copies of music. Obviously these are two different things! Yes, they are two different things. The problem is that artists (and record labels) want to get paid for the non-scarce thing: the copies, and not for the actually scarce thing:…
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"
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.
Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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 ab…
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?
Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's literally what charging for the copies does, though. People just want something for nothing. I pay about 10€/mo for Spotify. A significant portion of my use of the service is devoted to artists that are dead. They can't put time and effort into producing music. They can't be reimbursed for the time and effort they've already put into it. I could bury the gold with them, but they wouldn't have any use for it…
> I pay about 10€/mo for Spotify. Consider not; the majority of that money just goes to Spotify. If, every month, you paid 10€ to a random artist you liked (or split 10€ between all of them), the artists would receive probably more than two orders of magnitude more money. (If I remember correctly, anyway.) Of course, this assumes you can get the music elsewhere. If Spotify's too convenient to give up, there are sever…
> the majority of that money just goes to Spotify
Last I checked, Spotify's cut is 30%. That's a lot, but even with a significant error it's nowhere near the "majority."
> If, every month, you paid 10€ to a random artist you liked (or split 10€ between all of them), the artists would receive probably more than two orders of magnitude more money.
That's a function of how popular your favorite artists are and how much you listen to them. No matter how unknown they are, if you listen to an average number of streams per month then they'll get at least 70% of your 10€/mo -- a far cry from two orders of magnitude. If your favorite artists are much above average popularity then they'll make more with the Spotify arrangement than if you gave them cash even if you don't listen to them at all.
There's still a kernel of truth in what you're pointing out -- at some point in the fairly recent past you had to buy the music outright no matter how often you would listen to it, so if there exists a long tail of musicians who aren't listened to much but whose music would have been paid for in a record/tape/CD/itunes market (and I suspect there does) then Spotify is going to be much worse for them.
Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
#167You wouldn't download an NFT
Technically, you cannot download an NFT. It's a distributed consensus that you cannot ever truly put your arms around (unless you're running a testnet and operate all of the nodes).
Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
#168The quote from Nilay Patel's Vox article hits on one of my pet peeves. > Nilay Patel wrote in Vox: > "Taylor makes a nice little argument in favor of paying for music. 'Music is art,' she says, 'and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.' > This is an impressively-constructed syllogism. It is also deeply, deeply wrong.... On the internet, there’s no scarcit…
I don't think Nilay was talking about digital copies. The abundance of music on the internet has hurt artists like Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift's album wouldn't even be in the top 10 sales of 80's albums. It looks even worse if you consider the US had 100 million less people than now (nearly a third less).
Taylor Swift will have her music reviewed and cultural impact discussed on NYTimes, LA Times, and numerous major publications that do not ordinarily review music.
Increased supply of music via Bandcamp/Spotify/Soundcloud has almost no impact on artists that already dominate the charts. They can simply pay Spotify to blanket their app with ads for their new music. Spotify took some flack for their OTT promotion of Drake's 2018 album [0], but long term, Drake and the other 'market leaders' came out on top.
Some small band hit languishing in the middle of a 100-song playlist is never going to be able to win against that.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/spotify-users-push-back-at...
Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ultimately it has value because people agree it has value. This feels like a pyramid scheme. What makes it different?
The old object-observer duality. Where is the value in this case? It is in the observer, not in the object. It goes in a different layer. The problem there is that culture, social conventions, shared fictions and so on can be manipulated/twisted/adapted to some agenda or interest, and that includes what we feel valuable or not, without minding of what is really behind (like with bitcoins and similar). Once we took th…
Tulip Mania
Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's literally what charging for the copies does, though. People just want something for nothing. I pay about 10€/mo for Spotify. A significant portion of my use of the service is devoted to artists that are dead. They can't put time and effort into producing music. They can't be reimbursed for the time and effort they've already put into it. I could bury the gold with them, but they wouldn't have any use for it…
> I pay about 10€/mo for Spotify. Consider not; the majority of that money just goes to Spotify. If, every month, you paid 10€ to a random artist you liked (or split 10€ between all of them), the artists would receive probably more than two orders of magnitude more money. (If I remember correctly, anyway.) Of course, this assumes you can get the music elsewhere. If Spotify's too convenient to give up, there are sever…
Spotify pays a lot more than radio plays, and radio plays reach a lot more people. From this POV, artists aren't that hard done by.
Spotify plays a lot less per play, on average, than most albums sold. From this POV, artists are pretty hard done by.
If you're a fan, buy the album (i.e. pay even for the music you don't like as much). If you only listen to the music ambiently, stream and don't feel too guilty about it.