I agree. Also it's not like my favourite artists receive any significant amount of money from Spotify, Youtube or similar services. The vast majority goes to the top 0.5% of the megastars and their record labels. Paying those services shouldn't soothe your conscience one bit when it comes to the poor starving artists and content producers.
Instead, when I buy their albums on Bandcamp.com, that particular artist gets 85% of what I'm paying! Also I get to own an actual copy instead of the ridiculous deal streaming offers. Storage is so cheap these days! But don't tell the consumer or we can't sell them streaming services on one end and data bundles on the other.
Unless you listen almost exclusively to modern commercial "pop" music--though calling it "popular" has been a misleading term ever since people have been able to listen to music via channels that the "pop" industry turns a blind eye to. Still it's a valid choice, of course, if you enjoy that music! And honestly quite a lot of "pop" music is pretty good. And I presume that the people who produce Justin Bieber's songs are reasonably well-compensated for their work, but not fairly if you look at where the money is going. So you're not really paying to support the content producers here either, a lot of your money is also being spent on unnecessary infrastructure designed to keep out the other content producers and to shove the music into the ears of people that don't even really enjoy it.
Someone elsewhere in this thread said to look at the news agencies and journalism doing badly and dropping in quality. The battle here is over advertising versus adblockers. Well here's some news for you: They're supposed to be a mirror of society, a big factor is living in denial of the horror that it can't possibly really be that bad. Another one to think about for a bit: All those poor blocked ad networks, who do you think profits most from those ads? The quality journalists or the listicle clickbait writers filling the web with attention-slurping crap?
And at least for the pop-music industry I can kind of understand why the big labels and rightsholders are very quiet about the unfair distribution and very vocal against anything that challenges it (because they profit very much from the listicle-equivalent of music). But for news agencies I think it's strange or just plain stupid to cry about adblockers. People running adblockers hurt the listicle clickbait writers way more than they hurt quality journalists, like disproportionally so. So it's killing off some dead weight competition. On the income side, news agencies, even smaller ones, have sufficient brand identity that they don't need a 3rd-party ad network, they can 1st-party direct sell their ad-space to an advertiser. Adblockers don't tend to block 1st-party ads (and if they do, THAT is something I'd be willing to add an exception for). Cuts out the middle-men, who also royally screw the incentives of being intrusive or not. Can you imagine a direct sale of ad-space going like: ".. and could you please cut up the article in four pages so that people have to click through, so that they load up my ad more often?" Of course not, it hurts both the advertiser as well as the publisher. But add in a middle-man, with a sufficiently clever cost-per-impression scheme, and suddenly the incentives are against almost everybody else: publisher, advertiser and consumer.
TLDR; The idea of copyright is badly broken, the industry doesn't understand this yet, advertising is not the answer, the current state of affairs is suboptimal for just about everybody.
Instead, when I buy their albums on Bandcamp.com, that particular artist gets 85% of what I'm paying! Also I get to own an actual copy instead of the ridiculous deal streaming offers. Storage is so cheap these days! But don't tell the consumer or we can't sell them streaming services on one end and data bundles on the other.
Unless you listen almost exclusively to modern commercial "pop" music--though calling it "popular" has been a misleading term ever since people have been able to listen to music via channels that the "pop" industry turns a blind eye to. Still it's a valid choice, of course, if you enjoy that music! And honestly quite a lot of "pop" music is pretty good. And I presume that the people who produce Justin Bieber's songs are reasonably well-compensated for their work, but not fairly if you look at where the money is going. So you're not really paying to support the content producers here either, a lot of your money is also being spent on unnecessary infrastructure designed to keep out the other content producers and to shove the music into the ears of people that don't even really enjoy it.
Someone elsewhere in this thread said to look at the news agencies and journalism doing badly and dropping in quality. The battle here is over advertising versus adblockers. Well here's some news for you: They're supposed to be a mirror of society, a big factor is living in denial of the horror that it can't possibly really be that bad. Another one to think about for a bit: All those poor blocked ad networks, who do you think profits most from those ads? The quality journalists or the listicle clickbait writers filling the web with attention-slurping crap?
And at least for the pop-music industry I can kind of understand why the big labels and rightsholders are very quiet about the unfair distribution and very vocal against anything that challenges it (because they profit very much from the listicle-equivalent of music). But for news agencies I think it's strange or just plain stupid to cry about adblockers. People running adblockers hurt the listicle clickbait writers way more than they hurt quality journalists, like disproportionally so. So it's killing off some dead weight competition. On the income side, news agencies, even smaller ones, have sufficient brand identity that they don't need a 3rd-party ad network, they can 1st-party direct sell their ad-space to an advertiser. Adblockers don't tend to block 1st-party ads (and if they do, THAT is something I'd be willing to add an exception for). Cuts out the middle-men, who also royally screw the incentives of being intrusive or not. Can you imagine a direct sale of ad-space going like: ".. and could you please cut up the article in four pages so that people have to click through, so that they load up my ad more often?" Of course not, it hurts both the advertiser as well as the publisher. But add in a middle-man, with a sufficiently clever cost-per-impression scheme, and suddenly the incentives are against almost everybody else: publisher, advertiser and consumer.
TLDR; The idea of copyright is badly broken, the industry doesn't understand this yet, advertising is not the answer, the current state of affairs is suboptimal for just about everybody.