
Grappling with the ‘Culture of Free’ in Napster’s Aftermath - dnetesn
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/technology/grappling-with-the-culture-of-free-in-napsters-aftermath.html?ref=technology&_r=0
======
fooey
> Over a six-month period, Ms. Keating’s songs had been played on Pandora more
> than 1.5 million times; that earned her all of $1,652.74. She had 131,000
> plays on Spotify in 2012. She took home $547.71, or less than half a penny
> per play.

People are making money, it's just not the artists

This has less to do with a "Culture of Free" and more to do with predatory
business practices

~~~
gear54rus
Interestingly enough, these 'predatory' practices is pretty much what 'culture
of free' is about.

Big corps who rant about pirates are nothing more than just hypocrites (as in
the worst offenders).

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TD-Linux
I have never liked the streaming services like Spotify for this reason - the
royalties seem incredibly small (the DRM is also not great).

I feel like Bandcamp (and iTunes) have a much better profit model. Offer full
length samples so you know exactly what you are getting, and then charge 25-50
cents per track with 90% of it going to the creator. Despite the higher prices
to the consumer, the cost feels a lot more justifiable in my mind. I've spent
over $50 a month on Bandcamp before, whereas I can't see myself purchasing a
music streaming service for anywhere near that cost.

~~~
ryan-allen
If Spotify were $50 a month it'd still be worth it. I don't know how they
divvy up profits but lets look at this example:

I pay $12 a month and only listen to one record three times through on that
month. You'd expect the artist(s) of the record to get my $12 minus a service
fee, but what I'm sure happens is the artist(s) only get the price per play x
3 and Spotify pocket the rest.

Subscription models are a huge boon for this reason, but the inequitable split
might change artists' minds about these sub services.

I tend to listen to a small subset of music over and over, the artists should
be getting close to that $12/month cost in my opinion.

~~~
krilnon
> You'd expect the artist(s) of the record to get my $12 minus a service fee,
> but what I'm sure happens is the artist(s) only get the price per play x 3
> and Spotify pocket the rest.

I think companies like Spotify end up spending 60-70% of that $12 on paying
license fees, which include per-play amounts that eventually end up with the
artists. And the structure of those deals is such that the groups with the
biggest licensing deals get most of your $12, even if you didn't listen to
music from that particular artist.

I agree that it's not what you (or I) want, but it does make sense from the
perspective of the largest parties involved in these negotiations.

~~~
kzrdude
The royalty systems are created for paying the pop industry. The niches and
the long tail gets nothing, because it's divided according to stakeholder size
and by playlists from major radio & broadcasters, not a fair cross section.

------
Malic
I've long had the belief that the very act of audio-recording, all the way
back to Edison's wax-cylinders, would eventually be the end of making
significant money for music makers. That and the fact that there is only
24-hours in a day.

My point being that it is a matter of scarcity - or the lack thereof. Music,
to some degree, doesn't age. Regardless of what new pop album is due out in
the near future, we will still listen to Louis Armstrong sing "What a
Wonderful World" as it nears it's 50th anniversary.

Any newly produced music is competition with the back-catalog of _all music
ever recorded_. And there is only so much time during the day one can spend
listening to music, so individual "consumption" isn't going to change much as
time goes one.

The only real future for professional musicians is ticket sales for live
performances and licensing their songs for uses in other media (movies,
commercials, "hasn't been thought of yet")

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Disruptive_Dave
As a co-founder of a marketing platform for independent artists, and not
exactly a music industry veteran, I've spent the past 8 months getting very
educated on the situation. It's basically a clusterf... Streaming isn't
"figured out" yet, and everybody knows it.

My two cents: indie artists should take a page from startup founders and get
scrappy with easy access to affordable software and marketing/engagement
tools. It's certainly doable, but requires a bit of a behavioral change.
Musicians want to write/record/play music, not run a business. But they have
to start embracing it or they'll continue to be dependent on major label-like
overlords.

PS - go watch "Artifact" on Netflix as soon as possible. It's a riveting
documentary on a signed band fighting a major label who, in turn, sued them
for $30mm.

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_nullandnull_
I have always wondered why musicians don't have donate links on their site?

~~~
rectang
Probably for the same reason I don't as an open source developer: the donation
model doesn't yield a lot of income. It's more worthwhile to put your
resources towards developing other revenue streams.

Maybe donation links work for some, and of course creators should have the
freedom to pursue that avenue, _along with the freedom to pursue others_.

~~~
pmoriarty
Kickstarter seems to work pretty well. Why can't there be such a model for
non-technological creations?

~~~
rectang
Lots of non-technological projects are funded on Kickstarter.

Before Kickstarter existed, I once donated a substantial sum (for me) to a
local musician who I was a big fan of and whose albums I had listened to
countless times. Fast-forward several years, and now one of the ways this
creator funds her work is through Kickstarter.

------
rectang
In US radio, unlike radio elsewhere in the world, performers don't receive
royalties -- only composers do. This was set early on in the history of radio
and became very hard to change.

I'm glad that we seem to have made it through an analogous phase in the
history of internet distribution without artists being frozen out.

------
untilHellbanned
Despite the downvotes I might get, there is nothing new to see here. This is
the 1 millionth article of the same ilk. We need some fresh points of view.

What I've been surprised by on previous HN commenting threads on this topic is
how harsh people tend to be on the content creators' side of the balance
sheet. People really despise pay walls and other existing attempts for
creators to make money (you want all the songs in the _world_ for $5 and not
$10, REALLY??). As a creator myself, a scientist who publishes in academic
journals, I desperately want to find new ways to help me and my colleagues
monetize our works ( _Edit_ : by "monetize" I mean fundraise, NOT profit).

I'm pretty sure direct consumer-to-creator payments are part of the solution,
but that solution isn't exactly lighting the world on fire like Napster did.

~~~
rayiner
> As a creator myself, a scientist who publishes in academic journals, I
> desperately want to find new ways to help me and my colleagues monetize our
> works (Edit: by "monetize" I mean fundraise, NOT profit).

What's wrong with profiting from science?

I think a lot of people have this, to me incomprehensible, state of mind where
they feel like things that don't matter much in the grand scheme of things
(InstaSnapWhatsYo) are entitled to make lots of money, but it's morally
objectionable to make money on things that matter (science, journalism, etc).
That creates perverse social incentives: people who are brilliant but not
particularly selfless have every incentive to spend their talents on things
that don't matter, instead of things that do.

~~~
jholman
Well, there may be people that actually think that way (that it's okay to
profit from useless things, but not okay to profit from useful things), but I
think there's a less-incomprehensible version, that has to do with
entitlement, perceived entitlement, perceived social virtue, that sort of
thing.

I see two major halves to this.

First: No one cares if InstaSnapWhatsYo goes bankrupt, and if they do, Jan
Systrom (founder of ISWY) doesn't make a heartstrings appeal that he's
entitled to make money. Live by the market, die by the market, all in the
game, y'all, etc. But Lars Ulrich thinks he's _entitled_ to sell 50 million
records (emphasis on "sell", as opposed to "give away"), and EMI thinks
they're entitled to their cut of the same. So the claims of Ulrich and EMI
earn a degree of legitimate skepticism: this thing you're saying is "fair" and
"just" in return for your social contribution, we can't help but notice that
it's making you very very rich. My point here is that if you're nothing but a
mercenary, it's hard to knock you for being a mercenary; if you're claiming
social value and also have a vested interest, then this tension gets you some
sharp looks. Some of that is legitimate, some of it is just sloppy thinking.

(Aside: imo, this is the same type of sloppy thinking that claims that
hypocrisy is a the one true sin; if Dahmer calls Manson a bad person, Dahmer
is right, hypocrite or not.)

Second: Science in particular has another problem, and that is the
questionable social value of each individual scientist. Read 40 randomly
selected peer-reviewed journal publications, and you're going to read a lot of
useless garbage. And yet the authors of the garbage are still getting paid,
and they might be making above-median wages for an American (not above-median
wages for an American with 10 years of education who works 60-hour weeks, but
still). I'm a pretty big fan of the net output of science, and academia
generally, and think that we should _increase_ our social expenditure on
science, but I can see a rational reason for people to be suspicious of
requests from scientists to increase science funding.

Sort of accidentally, I note that the entire preceding paragraph also applies
to your other example of things that matter, journalism. Every sentence,
except the "10 years of education".

~~~
rayiner
When exactly did the record labels ask for a bail out? They complain about
people taking their products for free, which is a totally legitimate thing to
complain about. If people were getting into ISWY's systems and putting their
databases on the Internet for free access, bypassing the revenue-generating ad
mechanisms, those companies would be complaining too about it too.

~~~
zipfle
while I think you probably have a point when you describe unauthorized copying
of music as "taking [music businesses'] products for free," I also think it's
hard to describe the mechanism of copyright (a government-granted monopoly on
your goods) as something completely unlike a bailout. At least it seems a lot
like a subsidy.

~~~
rayiner
A copyright is a property right on an original creation. It's a government
granted monopoly, but so is any other kind of property right. If you're a golf
course, you rely on a government granted monopoly on land, which isn't even
your original creation. If you're ISWY, you rely on a government-granted
monopoly that keeps a competitor from simply breaking into your servers and
copying your content.

There's nothing entitled about expecting the government to keep people from
taking things from you. There is nothing obsolete about business models that
rely on the government protecting you from that kind of violation.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Property "rights" only make sense if you believe might makes right. The golf
course person has the papers that entitle them to the land only because of a
series of violent military actions that simply claimed it, and then sold it to
the highest bidder. At best it is stolen property on which some sort of
statute of limitations has expired.

I mean, the freaking word "title" is right in the middle of "entitlement" for
crying out loud. You can argue property law is the best of a set of bad
options, but it is far from just, and it is absolutely, _literally_ , about
entitlement.

------
paulhauggis
I just don't understand the culture of free. On one hand, everything digital
is expected for free (or close to it). Even app prices have gone so low, that
the majority of app developers would never be able to earn a living.

On the other, lots of hate for big corporations and further complaining when
jobs go away (one of the direct results of the free culture). The ability to
make a living online makes it so you don't ever have to work for a large
corporation. The ultimate freedom.

I know plenty of independent artists that can't really make a living with
music anymore because albums are now essentially worthless. Many of these
people are now forced to sell out to big corporate record labels (and then,
the same people that created this environment call them "sellouts").

~~~
IndianAstronaut
It enriches our lives though. While free goods cannot be measured in terms of
GDP, it makes us all better off. It also brings that enrichment to a much
wider audience than would be if it had a pay barrier.

~~~
drcube
Yeah. _The_ main benefit of digital technology is the ability to copy and
transmit data freely. Nobody complains when the email I sent is still sitting
in a folder in my mailbox. I don't have to hand write a second copy for my own
records. This is progress. It's the same as buggy whip makers complaining that
automobiles put them out of a job. Only in this century, the buggy whip
manufacturers have a much larger and louder lobby.

~~~
rayiner
If commercial content had been made obsolete by people using cheap production
technology to put their own original content on Youtube, etc, then you might
have a point. That'd be the internet's automobile to the big labels' buggy
whip. But people don't want indie content, they still want the buggy whips.
Technology just enables them to get the buggy whips for free instead of paying
for them.

~~~
selmnoo
> That'd be the internet's automobile to the big labels' buggy whip. But
> people don't want indie content, they still want the buggy whips.

I generally want indie content to get a large user audience, I _don 't_ want
the "buggy whips" people ostensibly are interested in to gain as much of a
user audience, that is, things like, Anaconda, Wrecking Ball, Blurred Lines
are supposedly what people want, I'd rather they not.

A friend of mine who had been playing the viola since age 6, took his craft
extremely seriously, and played for about 10 years with an orchestra, recently
decided he was done with it, he's not able to pay his bills. He's one of the
nicest guys I know, it was depressing to see him finally resign. While our
industry is rebuked for sexism, we see Eminem succeed again and again by
repeatedly talking about raping, assaulting women in his songs, it's kind of
disgusting really that this has sort of become his trademark marketing and
branding strategy[1]. It bugs me that beautiful art perfected over generations
is lost and left aside to shit made by producers with commercialization more
on top of their mind.

I want to see the music industry to really just come to its knees (when I mean
music industry, I actually really mean just the big record labels). I want it
to become an unprofitable business, where it doesn't have much of a value,
because that might be the last thing that deters record companies to stop
making stuff that's formulaic and trite, using cheap misogynistic tricks and
so on. Maybe then we can get back to having a piano or a guitar in the house,
and making music ourselves, with friends and families.

[1]: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2014/11/12...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2014/11/12/how-eminem-peddles-misogyny-as-a-tool-to-sell-records/)

