Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year
thesmokingman@programming.dev 6 months agoAt least 50% of the bands I’ve seen, toured with, or heard don’t record music to make money. There’s just too much music for it to be dependable income. They do it because they wanna share something neat with their friends. They upload it to sites like Spotify or a decade ago MySpace or a decade before that zines so other people can find cool shit. If they get lucky, that stumble upon nets a shirt sale which actually nets the band some income.
The sweeping generalizations you’re making do not apply. Stop trying to make music about money.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
…what?
Are you angry at me for saying your friends were still getting underpaid for their labor even back then?
thesmokingman@programming.dev 6 months ago
For someone opposed to capitalism, you sure seem to think everything should be a grind mindset.
You’re underpaying all of us for our labor in interacting with you. You’re late on your “pay everyone on the fediverse” invoice. Don’t forget to pay your family for their “putting up with insufferable bullshit” time.
LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
If a friend asks me to help with something, I don’t removed and moan about my unpaid labour. Fuck that, they’re my friends and I wouldn’t take the money even if offered. That’s just what friends do. The same applies to if I wanted to do something nice for them, like sending them a cool mixtape I made. That’s how you build communities! Focusing on payment like you do reduces everything to capitalism but with even less empathy and humanity.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
I don’t understand where you are getting the impression that I think money is the point, I never said that.
What I said is the labor of recording musicians being totally eviscerated by capitalism is a tragedy and that I don’t buy the narrative that this was inevitable for one second.
thesmokingman@programming.dev 6 months ago
I said multiple times “lots of folks do music for fun.” You said “you’re undervaluing their labor.” That’s why everyone thinks you think money is the point.
You also seem to not understand market saturation. If a fair value for a recording is $20 (just pretend for a minute), consumers are happy to pay $20, and artists sell for $20, why aren’t musicians getting rich? It’s because there are more musicians producing an incredible volume of work than the consumers can completely support. Nowhere in that statement is an attack on the value of that labor just an acknowledgment that there’s too much to consume.
In addition, you seem to fail to understand the difference between value to the artist and value to the consumer. Physical and digital radio provide incredible value to the consumer. They don’t really provide value to the artist unless you have an incredible amount of fame. A very good question to ask is “how do we create a solution that’s good for the consumer and the artist?” I have no idea. Making music about money (like you continue to do) instead of about fun (like a good number of artists who aren’t topping charts do) makes it very difficult to balance what an artist should get paid against what consumers can afford to pay (assuming we remove all middle layers).