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Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

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Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#211

Post by sellyme »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #97
thaumasiotes wrote: post #50

Earlier 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 . Your quotes don't support this analysis. There's plenty of original music available on the internet. Enough to call it an endless amount. Weirdly, you point this out yourself immediately after accusing Patel of a fallac…

There's certainly an endless amount of content on the internet, but it's not an endless amount of content you enjoy or seek out, so paying for the content you like is a way to incentivize the creation of more content that you like in a sea of content that you don't. 720,000 hours of new content is uploaded to Youtube every day, and none of it is the 90 minute movie I want to watch right now.

> it's not an endless amount of content you enjoy

Hard disagree. There's an endless amount of that too. It's just filtering it out from the rest that's the difficult part.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#212

Post by 20after4 »

michaelt wrote: post #89
lopis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the reason why many youtubers on patreon switch to a monthly subscription rather than charging per video. It makes it clearer that we are supporting the creator's livelihood, not buying a token that they produced. Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit? Higher subscription tiers could include merchandising and concert tickets.

> Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit? I have a (completely speculative) theory that the "support the artist to keep creating the work they're giving away for free" model has a ceiling when artists become visibly a lot richer than their fans. After all, what kind of sucker would charitably donate to a multimillionaire's private jet running c…

Plenty of people send money to televangelists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#213

Post by BurningFrog »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #59
rayiner wrote: post #28

The 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…

> 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:…

> 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.

Which is the "labor theory of value" of old man Karl Marx, one of the most thoroughly debunked theories there is.

In this case, I can spend 1000 hours recording a song that no one wants to hear, and I should not get paid for the labor I put in to it.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#214

Post by chillwaves »

jkhdigital wrote: post #202
yks wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suckers or not, but people do donate to visibly rich people, e.g. Trump.

Spread the love around: Nancy Pelosi has a net worth of about $120M, and even Joe Biden is worth $9M. Donating to a national political campaign is usually a donation to a rich person.

Why are you conflating personal wealth with political campaigns?

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#215

Post by skedaddle »

samatman wrote: post #145
packetslave wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one side of the story. TS's side is that Big Machine refused to sell her the rights unless she signed a new contract with them, which she didn't want to do.

Specifically, they wouldn't even negotiate unless she signed an NDA with a nondisparagement clause. Which she wouldn't do, and I wouldn't either: never agree to nondisparagement without substantial consideration.

If this really came down to a nondisparagement clause that would be shocking. Getting to make an offer on the rights to some of the best selling music of all time is itself substantial. This explanation would also diminish the emotional/moral attachment Swift still claims to her earlier works -- owning the masters meant a lot to me, but not as much as this tumblr post? The world of celebrity is bizarre so I don't know, but I think there has to be more to it than that. Either that they were never for sale to her, or the price was too high.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#216

Post by tasogare »

hansvm wrote: post #166
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> L ast I checked, Spotify's cut is 30%. That's a lot, but even with a significant error it's nowhere near the "majority."

It is in fact way way more than the majority because the remaining is split among artists while the cut is kept in totally by Spotify. Spotify is taking 3€ while any given artist would get a few cents at best.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#217

Post by andrewzah »

pydry wrote: post #175
andrewzah wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> randomly penalizing music enjoyers with ruinous fines and lawsuits That's a weird spelling of "people who want to listen to music -without- paying for it". Napster started a conversation about IP and copyright, but I for one am glad it is dead. DCMA is monumentally stupid in its -implementation-, but the idea is not a bad one. There need to be protections for people who make a living by creating music, art, etc. Ye…

>What I'm saying is, we need to pay people for their work. Most musicians don't get paid for their work or get paid a token amount. I don't see what the point is in fighting for Taylor Swift's right to make millions from making music if the average person can't make a living. It's not about quality either. It's about distribution channels.

> I don't see what the point is in fighting for Taylor Swift's right to make millions from making music if the average person can't make a living.

This is a strawman argument. Obviously I would like to see -all- artists get paid a living wage at least for their work. The fact that life isn't fair and TS makes millions isn't my fault, and is not what I'm specifically advocating here.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#218

Post by mannerheim »

tasogare wrote: post #216
hansvm wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> L ast I checked, Spotify's cut is 30%. That's a lot, but even with a significant error it's nowhere near the "majority." It is in fact way way more than the majority because the remaining is split among artists while the cut is kept in totally by Spotify. Spotify is taking 3€ while any given artist would get a few cents at best.

A majority is more than half.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#219

Post by whatever_dude »

protomyth wrote: post #62
soperj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the same thing happen with live versions. The Pixies play "Where is my mind" very differently live, the vocal lines especially. First time I heard it was jarring because of the expectation and I didn't think it was good as the recorded version. Recorded version feels much worse now.

I hate, just hate, the album version of Kiss's God of Thunder, but they speed it up live and it sounds amazing. STP was amazing in the Fargo Civic Center which makes me think the person who mixed their album just hated life because it is noticeably inferior. On the other hand, Aerosmith has sounded like crap the two times I've seen them in concert. It gets weird when you buy the import (for the US) versions of some s…

Tangential, but I've had a somewhat similar experience. Iron Maiden's "Flash of the Blade" used to be my favorite song by the band, but somehow it was not one of their biggest hits. I had it recorded on tape and would listen to it daily. When I finally had money I bought the album it was in, and couldn't not believe how bland the song sounded. Turns out the cassette player I used to play the song was speeding it up - not super noticeable on its own, but obvious if you compared it directly, and the sped up version is MUCH better.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#220

Post by hansvm »

tasogare wrote: post #216
hansvm wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> L ast I checked, Spotify's cut is 30%. That's a lot, but even with a significant error it's nowhere near the "majority." It is in fact way way more than the majority because the remaining is split among artists while the cut is kept in totally by Spotify. Spotify is taking 3€ while any given artist would get a few cents at best.

Kind of, but that's an artifact of not holding enough variables constant. If you were going to distribute $7 in cash to N artists then that's functionally equivalent to distributing $10 to Spotify and watching those N artists equally up to an average number of streams per month. The few main reasons that model isn't quite perfect are:

- You probably watch more artists via Spotify than you would via other methods, so each individual artist is paid less. Note this is less of an issue than it seems because on average there will be proportionally more people watching each of those artists.

- Artists may have cut other deals so they're getting much less than the 70% being distributed to "not Spotify." Note this isn't much different from pre-spotify, but it's a real effect.

- Something I left out completely in my original comment is that you very well might be paying less per month to Spotify than you would for other forms of media. I vaguely recall a stat saying that the opposite has happened mildly (but we pay a lot less for merchandise), but my memory is fuzzy on that point, so somebody who knows more should step in.

That isn't to say that Spotify is better for all artists (it's not), better for most artists (given typical pareto distributions my gut says that's probably also false), or that it's a "net positive" in some ill-defined way (maybe, maybe not, that's not an argument I want to try to make) -- just that Spotify's payment model isn't super complicated or super unfair at a macroscopic level, and it's super easy to construct reasonable scenarios where your dollars would have more positive impact on artists via Spotify than if you just paid those artists cash.

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