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How are musicians supposed to survive on $0.00173 per stream? (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] -5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (14 children)

Having a musical idea, and recording it, expressing it the way that you thought it... That required a lot of effort, from a lot of engineers, at a studio, with a lot of expensive equipment... As recently as the mid 90s.

Now we've got Jacob Collier, winning Grammys from his bedroom.

To assume you can live off streams today would be like a journalist thinking they could survive off of tweets 3 years ago. Getting well edited thoughts out to the masses via the press required a lot of effort from a lot of engineers, at a studio using lots of expensive equipment.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (6 children)

sure, but why platforms get to be rich and the actual artists dont?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Because they have all the customers.

If you don't like the rate the current major platforms give, you could choose to use one of the many alternatives that (presumably) exist.

And if they really don't, I could build you one in a couple of weekends with all the open source resources and federation protocols available today.

But none of that matters because all the paying customers are on those major platforms. And until you convince users to move off those platforms, you're basically their bitch. They'll pay you whatever they happen to feel like paying you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Actually while typing that out I thought more about the technical architecture of such distributed alternative streaming service that pays artists fairly, and it does sound like it could be fun to build.

But everyone in the fediverse already knows how difficult/impossible it is to get the average person to switch to open source software. It would most likely be a waste of time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Here's a person who knows way more about the music industry than all of us in this thread out together. And he's thought a lot about this, too

Not so much the fediverse side of it, but the legal, and financial/jobs side of things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Here's

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I don't think you can get people to agree on what's "fair" but it's always fun to think about. What would your fair payment scheme look like?

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