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Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

reuters.com

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Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#331

Post by EADGBE »

whiddershins wrote: post #324
whiddershins wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW selling 100 albums/month, if you’re touring, was far far incredibly far more feasible than getting 180,000 streams is now. Also it seems a bit unclear whether Spotify’s payouts are as egalitarian as they claim. It may be the case that a bunch of cash went towards getting existing catalogues signed up. I’m all for Spotify btw, I just think it may not be as idealized as we like, and has some structural problems th…

Edit: I’m not advocating for touring being better. I hate touring. But the streaming amounts we’re discussing are really tiny in the end. The guitar player you linked to is making less than a tenth of what someone should hope to make to even think about calling their music income a success.

> The guitar player you linked to is making less than a tenth of what someone should hope to make to even think about calling their music income a success.

I'd surely hope $7000/month is considered a success. A passive $700/month from streams would be considered a success around here.

This is the assumption the stream counts continue, of course.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#332

Post by QAPereo »

sideshowb wrote: post #268
QAPereo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the vast majority of history, musicians were not some of the wealthiest members of society, far from it. Music has traditionally been “near free” and only ceased to be during a brief period necessitated by tech. That period has long since ended. I don’t see that an artificial value placed on music, rather than the previous real value set on its distribution, is necessarily a good thing.

Can we ignore any question about whether 21st century tech/economic changes are helpful to us by saying "for the vast majority of history, we lived in caves and many died in childbirth?"

That’s an excellent point, but I’d say that death during childbirth has always been recognized as a bad outcome. I’m not so convinced that the same can be said for the history of music before the modern mass market. I don’t think that the history of music is akin to the history of premedical chikdbirth; the history of music is in fact replete with positive outcomes we enjoy to this day.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#333

Post by zaphar »

mortenjorck wrote: post #174
zaphar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also an actual use of you know... A database.

Well sure, but who owns the database? Where is it hosted and who vouches for its accuracy? What happens if it goes down or its maintainer goes out of business? Of course, all these questions can be addressed in one way or another with conventional database tech. But blockchain has some undeniable appeal in an application like this.

If by blockchain you mean a merkle tree then sure I might agree with you. If by blockchain you mean one of the various crypto currencies with a consensus protocol then I don't really see the appeal.

A merkle tree has some useful properties for verifying the integrity of your data cryptographically. As such it is a useful way to distribute a ledger. But in this particular domain there is no double spend problem to worry about so proof of work and most other consensus protocols are... wasteful at best.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#334

Post by Terr_ »

RobertoG wrote: post #281
Terr_ wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the Just World Hypothesis. "Something bad happens, you must've screwed up somehow. Just look at me, I'm doing fine and I instinctively know that random good-luck had nothing to do with it."

I think that effect it's called by psychologists "fundamental attribution error". It has been studied for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

They are certainly related, but not quite the same.

JWT is based on whether positive or negative outcomes were "deserved" and the extent to which randomness exists.

In contrast, FAE touches on what you believe motivated an individual to act, and whether it was innate or circumstantial.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#335

Post by thirdsun »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #326
thirdsun wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't seem to follow your argument. If you want DRM-free, lossless, digital music to download and own you can buy it from countless shops - from iTunes (well, not lossless) to platforms like Bandcamp to niche stores like Boomkat. I think the music industry, in contrast to its Hollywood sibling, has very much succeeded in offering DRM-free content from a wide range of stores, shops and platforms. Physical media like…

I want the liberty to compete with Spotify, Pandora, Google Music, iTunes, etc. without fear of debilitating litigation. I want to enjoy music without ever sacrificing my security or privacy to DRM. Just because the music industry is in a significantly better position than others does not make it good enough.

> I want the liberty to compete with Spotify, Pandora, Google Music, iTunes, etc. without fear of debilitating litigation.

Feel free to do so. Of course it will be an uphill battle and a very complicated process, but I guess that applies to competing with any kind of major service, regardless of its category.

> I want to enjoy music without ever sacrificing my security or privacy to DRM.

Again, you can. Buy music from the shop of your choice - it's yours. No DRM, no strings attached.

> Just because the music industry is in a significantly better position than others does not make it good enough.

I still don't understand what you're missing.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#336

Post by touristtam »

Can_Not wrote: post #285
rebuilder wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functionally, for the consumer, streaming is mostly identical to a recording. Want to listen to a song? Press play. The storage just happens to be on some server somewhere.

Except a recording is mine permanently and physically

You hold a physical artifact on which some data can be extracted and interpreted by a device build for that purpose, but the legality of you playing the data isn't implicitly tied up to the ownership of the artifact holding the data. That is what the licensing scheme is. The common assumption is to think that because you hold the storage, you are therefore entitled to decode the data held on it, but the laws about IP are there to limit this and allow to extract value from you using the device.

Otherwise, you could just legally extract the bits downloaded onto your computer and keep the music files you have just streamed from Spotify or any equivalent service.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#337

Post by emodendroket »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #327
emodendroket wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the DRM on games takes a few weeks to get cracked it's done its job. Sales are really front-loaded for most games.

Do you really believe the same customers who buy a game the week it comes out would not pay for that game if they could pirate it soon enough? That's absurd.

What's so absurd about it?

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#339

Post by sideshowb »

QAPereo wrote: post #332
sideshowb wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we ignore any question about whether 21st century tech/economic changes are helpful to us by saying "for the vast majority of history, we lived in caves and many died in childbirth?"

That’s an excellent point, but I’d say that death during childbirth has always been recognized as a bad outcome. I’m not so convinced that the same can be said for the history of music before the modern mass market. I don’t think that the history of music is akin to the history of premedical chikdbirth; the history of music is in fact replete with positive outcomes we enjoy to this day.

Sure, but the question of whether or not streaming has helped music or musicians overall has nothing to do with the economic model of the 19th century and prior. It's about the change from 20th to 21st century.

I hope in future we come up with something better than any of the three.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#340

Post by ergl »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #271
swiley wrote: post #190

I hope there's a way to export Spotify playlists.

Not as far as I can tell. My backout plan is to manually copy over all the artists I'm following. It'll take an hour or two, and I'd have to remember which of their albums I liked the most. For custom playlists? Currently you're shit out of luck, you'll have to do it manually.

You can export the list of albums you saved through the api. A while ago I wrote this using jq: https://gist.github.com/ergl/ae7c56d2a754558bb7b2cf9e98979fa...

Just grab an auth token from https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-current-us... and call the above script with it. Very hacky, but it works.

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