Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes

If some legislator or public interest lawyer would like to fix some of the DMCA shortcomings or abuses, I think Rick Beato would be a good poster child for legitimate fair use.

Beato does high-quality, knowledgeable videos that make IMHO legitimate educational use of short audio clips, interleaved with discussion. No one can listen to a Beato video to get the experience of the full song, and the Beato video plausibly promotes people wanting to listen to the full song.

Unless you’re a big artist most tours break even at best, but more often lose money. That loss is sometimes supported by the label investing some money because tours can be a good way to market music and find new audiences. A lot of venues also take big commissions on merch, squeezing the profitability on that part of the business.

Unfortunately for a lot of smaller artists the economics of touring are not great. 1000 tickets at $25 does not equal $25000 in the artist’s pocket.

The artist will maybe get 70% of those ticket sales (the promoter gets a significant cut) and the artist needs to pay her touring costs out of her share. If you’re an artist going on tour with a four piece band, and tour manager/instrument tech then your daily costs are going to be thousands of dollars.

Everyone needs to be paid from that split and all the travel, accommodation and food costs need to be paid, and sometimes the cost of local support acts is paid from the artist’s share.

The agent who secured the booking gets a percentage, and the manager who looks after the artist’s career gets a percentage. After commissions, $25000 in ticket sales might mean the artist only sees $10000 - before she has paid the costs of the tour. With at least six people to be paid (four musicians and the tour manager plus the artist) and accommodated, fed and moved around, that $10000 really doesn’t go very far.

If it’s a band the economics are no different really - all the band members need to make a living while they are on the road.

And of course if that’s 300 tickets at $20 rather than 1000 at $25 none of these costs scale down, the musicians aren’t going to take less, hotel rooms aren’t going to drop in price.

Pirating the music and going to see the ban play live might actually mean the label says “live brings us no uptick on our recordings, so we are not going to invest in tour support for this artist”.

I think it's worth mentioning that with a patent, nobody else is allowed to use the patented idea. This holds even if they have never heard of you before, and were entirely unaware your patent (or your version of the patented concept) existed. You are granted a monopoly.

With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours. Someone unaware of your work cannot infringe your copyright. You do not have a monopoly on anything, you are just protected against someone deriving their work from yours directly.

This difference probably factors into how easy it is to win a lawsuit: for a copyright infringement, you need to show they made a copy. You wouldn't be bringing suit in the first place if there were substantial doubt in that area. It also factors into how easy it should be to get a patent vs a copyright: a patent closes off much, much, MUCH more idea-space than a copyright.

I’m not being defeatist. I’m literally just pointing out the reality of consumer trends.

There is oodles of research into this topic. It isn’t something I’ve just made up.

It’s why analytics exist to explore website user journeys and then promoting the most important calls to action in prominent places.

It’s why physical store fronts put the doors at the front of the shop rather than on the side (side note: a friend of mine does own a shop and when he had to have the front door closed for repair, he saw a sharp decline in random walk-ins because people didn’t want to use the side door).

It’s why Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn etc remaining dominant platforms in their respective domains despite almost universal dislike for those platforms.

It’s why supermarkets put their product with the highest margin in the centre of the shelves and the lower margin items at the top and bottom.

It’s why being on page 2 of Googles search results are as good as not being in Google at all.

I’d actually love it if your idealistic view were true in practice. I don’t want to depend on GitHub, LinkedIn, YouTube. But that’s where the masses are so I need to use it too.

I already ditched WhatsApp for Signal, but after several years without WhatsApp, I still haven’t converted all my family. So I miss out on sooo much conversations because of my ideals.

What you’re advocating simply doesn’t match the reality of how people shop for content. Be that free stuff on social platforms, nor purchasing physical products in stores. It’s not defeatist to say consumers are lazy. It’s just a sad fact of life. And ignoring that fact doesn’t magically make it untrue.

Oh yeah, it would still be very difficult for him to move his audience off of YouTube. I was trying to pick up on the idea that he would be replaced by someone else. I think it's more likely just a lose/lose scenario for everyone.