261–270 of 307 posts
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>As a musician, fuck everything about this Pretty wild to include a comment like this in the testimonials. Sure, you can disagree with the musician on philosophical terms over IP laws and many consumers will always prefer "free", but to put this in your testimonials shows that the developers take pride in the act of pissing off musicians. That just rubs me the wrong way.
I mean, if people like these hate it, it must be really good.
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Musicians are not the consumers, users are the consumers. Some musicians will always be unhappy, this is unavoidable due to complex issues around IP rights, compensation for art, and the length of time it takes to make changes to these systems (not to mention simply how much existing content is out there new and current artists are competing against, attention economy and all that). n=1, I am optimizing for access to…
Your app is living off the work of artists and making it in a way that gives them a way to profit from it costs you nothing, so it is the right thing to do. Show some merch buying options or display a button that allows you to pay for the music as a thank you to the artists or something. Makes you appear better in front of the crowd that would use bandcamp/soundcloud in the first place (so your core demographic) and…
The app just find the music on free sources, probably published by the artists themselves or their agents. How is that living off their work and where do the nuclear developer receive money from the nuclear app users in the process?
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>Eat and weep for a world where we can't just exchange money for food. Youtube sells subscriptions for YouTube Music if you want to be able to listen to the music in the background or without ads. Violating YouTube's terms of service is unethical.
> Violating YouTube's terms of service is unethical. It’s a breach of contract, but whether this contract is ethical is a different question altogether, as is the question of ethics of breaching of unethical contracts.
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Can you explain why TOS violations in general are unethical?
Typically they start with something like: by using this $SERVICE you AGREE to blah-blah-blah ($X) If you agree to $X but then don't do it: you're a liar. The terms might be shit. But if you agree to shit terms you should be bound by shit terms. In the olden days: "I gave my word as a gentleman and a scholar" or "a deals a deal, even with a dirty dealer"[0]. Going back on a deal is not ethical; end of. [0] I think it…
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> If you agree to $X but then don't do it: you're a liar.
You have never been presented any TOS nor agreed to anything if you don't have an account.
If artists and youtube don't want us to use their 1 and 0 the way we want, they can pretty easily lock them under registration and payment. The thing is they don't care to do that, so they cannot complain.
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Interesting to see how much more pro-copyright (and less hacker-like) HackerNews has gotten since then. It's sad.
There's being "pro-copyright" and then there's just the topic of paying artists, and then choosing not to pay them. Which sometimes is bizarrely and belligerently defended like some moral stance (barely even in relation to copyright/piracy), and sometimes bubbles up like tools that not just avoid paying artists, but make it harder to pay artists, even when those artists have something set up that's a far cry from ad…
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I don't know how you can square that with the fact that when people bought records musicians made more money. Your metaphor is also incredibly impersonal. What about stealing a sandwich from a homeless person and saying "well society already fucked them over big time." It's a drop in the ocean compared to all the meals he's already missed for other reasons.
> I don't know how you can square that with the fact that when people bought records musicians made more money. Everyone used to make more money, and anyway this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior, which is my argument. I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to m…
Woah, woah, let's back up here. You made a metaphor about orders of magnitude. I asserted that orders of magnitude on the level of the global environment and the individual human are very different and provided you with a metaphor to illustrate that. I made no suggestion that piracy was theft so you had no need to correct me on this "basic fact."
> Everyone used to make more money
It's not clear what you're saying with this. Maybe we should just continue the trend and say no one should earn any money anymore? Honestly confused by this one.
> this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior
How did we come to the current model? Everyone was happily getting recording contacts with advances for instruments, studio time and touring logistics until one day MegaCorps said "let's instead move to a model where everyone pays the absolute minimum, if anything at all, and then try to split the much lower profits between the same number of actors?"
Come on, I'm happy to criticise companies like Spotify all day but they weren't the driving force in creating the current model and having some of the richest people in our society sit around in forums like this saying maybe musicians shouldn't be paid at all really isn't helping
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As a musician: that's totally fine, we can argue the philosophy of it all day and what the law should or shouldn't be. But right now it is what it is and people are basing their careers off that status quo. There should be some respect for that, no?
No, with that logic we should have outlawed the internet. It's up to you to find a working business model, not up to society to enable the one that you want.
Society has so far agreed to legislate in favour of people monetising their intellectual property.
By all means people should be free to disagree with that for whatever reason but I feel it's a bad look to make fun of the musicians trying to follow the rules and make a living within the bounds of both law and social contract.
> When pressed for reasons what exactly is so bad about Electron, they can rarely offer anything than vaguely mumbled "memory usage" or "b-but it's an entire browser" (both of which have not been true for years, for example Electron's memory usage has improved dramatically, but the meme stuck) I downloaded Nuclear (the AppImage, if that matters) and booted it up. Instant 300MB RAM usage. I think I'll pass.
300 MB is 1.25% of my RAM. An application using 1.25% of my RAM seems reasonable.
When so many little tools that you normally keep running in the background, it starts adding up. Not to mention that not everyone has that much RAM. Until recently, Apple still shipped Macbooks with 8GB RAM.
I've also started having issues with my Windows partition filling up with these applications. Again, no one application is a problem, it's the trend that's the problem.
No single raindrop is responsible for the flood.
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> I don't know how you can square that with the fact that when people bought records musicians made more money. Everyone used to make more money, and anyway this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior, which is my argument. I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to m…
> I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to me why this basic fact of piracy needs to be restated so often Woah, woah, let's back up here. You made a metaphor about orders of magnitude. I asserted that orders of magnitude on the level of the global environment and the individual human are very different and provided you with a metaphor to illustrate that. I made no suggestion that pira…
Basically yes. Except for the "happily" bit before. Even the biggest artists were always getting shafted by the labels, is it surprising that the labels would fuck their artists over even more given the chance? Taylor Swift's fight with the label may legendary but there's thousands of working musicians out there scraping by getting credits on movies and bigger band releases (jazz and whatnot) and they remain as poor as they ever have, from vinyl through to streaming. So I just don't think it's ever been something that random consumers really influence, it's always been the labels fucking over the artists, and that's where my scale argument comes from.
Me downloading a song has nothing to do with record labels spending the last six decades writing progressively more predatory contracts, fighting every new technology until they can find a way to capture value from it at the expense of their artists, and working with streaming companies to extract every slice of margin they can until the artist gets their $.20 paycheck on ten thousand listens.
This argument I don't like: a company found a way to exploit someone so as to sell people something cheaper and then people bought the cheaper thing. It's thus the consumer's fault that the other people got exploited. I see it all the time and that falls under the same umbrella of what I'm arguing against, the idea that corporations are immune to criticism because they're just profit generating algorithms and actually it's on us to make the world better by not buying what they're selling. Why not just cut out the middle man literally and stop the exploitative behavior?
So far as I know nobody here is arguing musicians shouldn't get paid. I'm arguing the opposite.
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Your app is living off the work of artists and making it in a way that gives them a way to profit from it costs you nothing, so it is the right thing to do. Show some merch buying options or display a button that allows you to pay for the music as a thank you to the artists or something. Makes you appear better in front of the crowd that would use bandcamp/soundcloud in the first place (so your core demographic) and…
> Your app is living off the work of artists and making it in a way that gives them a way to profit from it costs you nothing, so it is the right thing to do. The app just find the music on free sources, probably published by the artists themselves or their agents. How is that living off their work and where do the nuclear developer receive money from the nuclear app users in the process?
And that means such an app enters a certain relationship with these musicians. This relationship can be symbiotic (good) or parasitic (bad).