To most judgmental parasites, who haven’t seen one of your many videos (Ill save you the trouble) by explain to there close minded prehistoric brains.. Ben was once a Golden gloves boxer, and an MMA fighter.. The eyebrow is not fashion, it came from taking a hit, that almost ripped his eye out.. All part of the sport 🫶🏻 So, have fun making fun of him in person.. A true wolf in sheep’s clothing 😉🇮🇪
Makes no sense to me how if something is even slightly unique about someone's appearance, some people just can't deal with it and have to ask the person about it or why it's there, no matter how benign it is.
I came out of the last video in bit of a soul crushing funk. This, like so many other real world problems, just feels so big and complex that I struggle to wrap my head around a solution. I love that you are both a champion for these solutions and a voice of calm reason in a sea of typical binary rage. As someone who has obviously done a lot of work getting informed about the problem and it’s solutions (or potentials) how can I learn more about being part of that solution (in addition to the info from your patreon)?
True, tech in general and the web in particular seems to be moving into ever more exclusive set of companies that get to set the rules. This is in essence a tech problem in addition to IP-law/capitalism problem. With spotify it's very similar to audible, where there's no way to compete with it and anyone who tried would run into the same issues Benn highlighted in his video. I'm not a Spotify hater, I love the convenience and feel absolutely zero guilt from using it. That being said, would I want there to be competition and see creators paid well? Yes, yes I would (also fuck the labels). I've never made enough money to spend on all the music I listen to though, and if there was no Spotify, I would pirate my music like I used to. What I think will happen is that slowly but surely the prices for streaming go up, and piracy goes up as well. I don't see these companies completely failing, just bleeding the industry dry without addressing the underlying problems. I hope someone smarter than me comes up with a way to do all of this open source with a model that pays artists and cuts the middle men while keeping all the functionality and piracy low with low pricing.
There isn't much we can do about anything outside of our local bubble. Change what you can, break what you have to, try to do things that will help you sleep and enjoy your short little amazing blip in time.
Every time i listen to you, I can hear and feel the commonsense oozing from every fiber of your being. Thank you. And I hope without sounding patronizing, keep up the very good work!
As a new artist I'm avoiding streaming and using YT and a web platform called Reward Music which is artist centric. Benn I really appreciate all of your content.
Had Spotify for a while but I just felt so surveilled by the algorithm and stopped using it. I recently uploaded all my music to dropbox (apx 2000 cds) and stream it to myself using the Evermusic app. Works great except that the play / shuffle options are a bit weird. Downside is not getting “new” music, but honestly there’s so much in my own collection I hear something new every time.
That's so awesome. CDs are great, I have a CD player built into my PC and a discman w/ a case for on the go. The fact you can then export it into an mp3 or flac is just so much bang for buck. I'm so glad it's not as price gouged as vinyls ❤️
I find it quite mad that there are lots of (mostly older) people that never listen to new music (Spotify's own research suggests interest in new music tapers off rapidly for most people in their thirties) and yet they keep paying their monthly subs for the convenience of having access to music they already paid for. It would be crazy to keep paying for the vinyl and books on my shelves, so it seems weird to keep paying Spotify for music I can download.
I recently built a home server, for NAS and some other stuff, you really inspired me to start putting my music collection on there and build my personal streaming platform
I'm not sure if you had to think about, whether or not to keep the comments up while you talk about their very topic, but I think it's a great design choice, it kept my ADHD brain concentrated on what you were talking about. The mind is full of mysteries.
Whew, that stock shorting hasn't panned out well in the last 6 months. (FWIW, I had Spotify stock that I sold a few months ago because I didn't expect them to do very well either. Oh well.)
I think its a brilliant idea, that we have to pay some sort of Tax, and get a Free music streaming site, that actually also pays the artists fairly. and i would love to see a video, where you try to calculate how much that tax would be. because i gotta be honest. i pay right now about 30bucks a month for all my streaming and licensing things for all my music, and honestly, i would be happy to pay close to that as tax, when i then dont have to pay some shady company that takes 80% of that money as profit...
Who says the artists aren't being paid fairly? Without streaming, or the internet, guys like Benn wouldn't even be known. Every musician who's ever recorded music is not entitled to a career in music. There are plenty of artists being compensated quite well on spotify. Your local dive bar band is not meant to make a ton of money selling music just because they can upload to spotify
@@Kevinschart you are just factually wrong. Every artist who does any kind of art is entitled of a fair pay per artwork they made. when i make a song, and i need to sell that song, with the exclusive rights and what not that song is easely worth 3k or more. and i am like a not known arist at all. ben still would be a great, and known musician without the internet, because he put the work in, he was on live stage, he brought his music into the open. infact, i as a artist myself can say, spotify is a useless pieces of garbage, when it comes to spreading your music. i gaines more popularity from one festival performance than i ever did with spotify since is started. spotify is a joke
I've long wanted a legal framework for licensing for software and media where, upon purchase, you're granted a license that can be moved without cost between licensing services-such that the shutdown of a service (e.g. Walmart and Microsoft's music service, or a software store like Steam or Origin) guarantees the export of a license, which could be transferred or used to prove purchase. Currently, the stores are each individually responsible for payment, distribution, and license tracking, and they provide no integration between them. I'm pushing for a legally-enforced integration of the license tracking so that users wouldn't be beholden to the various walled gardens for IP access, and content producers wouldn't be beholden to the same walled gardens for everything at the 30-50% costs that are currently charged. Ideally, licensing would be tracked at regional, centralized locations run by non-profits and using modern security with things like 2FA. Services could link to the centralized service with OAuth, check with the service for licensing, and, if they're licensed to distribute, provide it to the consumers. If they're not licensed, a 3rd-party hand-off mechanism could be provided to enable content providers to distribute solely from their own servers. Most would probably opt to either distribute through the app stores or through a hosted service. With this, walled-garden app stores are essentially in charge of purchasing (optional) and distribution, which means they need to focus on improving their experience. It would also mean that 3rd party sales, transfers and lending of content would be more permissable - within reason. Honestly, an entire non-profit industry of collective IP could spring up around libraries. This does mean that, since the app is no longer getting 30% of the pie at purchase, they're no longer incentivized to provide free downloads forever for their users' multi-terabyte content, but actual transfer costs would be in the realm of a few dollars per-year, and download counts could carry over with the licensing to new services. You'd have to mandate that a certain percentage of the purchase be earmarked for transfer costs, and that would incentivize stores to keep customers consuming content from their services, because the transfer expenses would remain with the license. It would also force online gaming account banning to transition from the store's user account to the license, which would carry over. In the end, it's still sort of centralized, but I think it's the kind of compromise that everyone would begrudgingly accept.
I think a publicly funded archive with streaming features would be good. It does make the freedom of speech on the internet deal much more complex because the 1st amendment would be involved for real.
As a UK person and someone who doesn't ever listen to podcasts, i'm seriously considering ditching spotify as my main music streaming platform. The discovery is bad, and I used to solely use youtube which is infinitely better. Only problem with youtube is that the user interface is clunky as a music streaming product. But the biggest upside is that it has literally everything. UA-cam is still best for discovery even though i'd like some control over what kinds of videos get recommended to me. The £120 I spend on spotify a year could much better be spent (or saved) by supporting artists directly on bandcamp. My only wish is that bandcamp gets into streaming, that would be a service i would pay for happily because they seem to support the artists.
The hell with copyright expiring on death of the creator, the whole thing should be completely abolished. The whole point of "IP" (an anachronistic legal fiction) is so corporations can buy them up and sell them back to the culture that created them. "Work once, get paid forever", except without having to do any of the work. 2 scams for the price of one. If they were non-transferable then we'd see these corporations, lobbyists, politicians, lawyers, think-tank-wankers etc - the whole apparatus of manufactured consent do a very quick 180 degree turn and all the lies they've been telling us for the last x-decades would suddenly evaporate and be replaced with other lies.
yes, all media via a central library funded by an internet tax - I suggested this to a research guy at BT many years ago (in those days served via peer-to-peer) but he was not interested. It seems like an obvious idea unless you've been captured by the gatekeepers' dream logic
The thing with Spotify going under is that there is very little chance of anything better replacing it. Streaming is here to stay, no matter how unsustainable it is. We live in times of constantly rising living costs and stagnating wages for the vast majority of people. The times where people had the spending money to sustain the cultural industries is over (not to mention what the internet did for advertising). Maybe Spotify goes bankrupt, but all that will happen is that some other bigger company is going to buy it out and cross-subsidize it from their other ventures. Apple and Amazon are already doing this, with the hope of getting you as invested as possible into their eco-system. Decentralized alternatives aren't actually wanted by most people, as we've seen with Mastodon and Twitter the last few months. The only thing I believe could actually work (within the capitalist framework we are working within here) and that is never going to happen would be to drastically shorten copyright, down from the absolutely ridiculous "lifetime+70 years" to something actually reasonable like 15 years after release, taking away most of the power music labels have over artists, forcing a much higher percentage of music revenue to actually go to artists making music today. Which is of course never going to happen. There is no place for culture under neoliberal capitalism.
12:58 Liked your responses, although I'd like to point out that saying that world hunger is on a "steady decline" based on that data, I'd argue, is an extrapolation at best. It trivializes or ignores many issues with modern agriculture, such as the nutrients in modern crop yield, who's getting that food, the industry's impact on greenhouse gases, etc., and how these and other issues will impact future food supplies. Additionally, it could be argued that the intertwining of advancing technology and capitalism in that industry is to blame for many of these shortcomings. Just stood out to me. Anyways, love your content!
Can you do a video on your non profit work? Having heard that info at the end, that's what I care about more than the rest of this entire conversation.
I've dropped spotify about 3 years ago mostly because it didn't make sense paying for a service that didn't have all the music I listened to. I've been trying to implement a self host alternative since then. Streaming and syncing to mobile is my biggest usecase (since when I'm on my PC I can just stream over the network with foobar or something simmilar), so having no or poor support for it is a dealbreaker. This has been my experience with self-hosted mobile streaming and syncing solutions: The two solutions that worked the best for me were plex and subsonic-based projects. - Plex is proprietary and needs a subscription for plexamp, but other apps like yatse can kinda solve this issue. - Subsonic-based projects have outdated apps which don't function properly on more recent android versions. I've been switching back and forth between those two solutions, not really happy with neither of them. Only recently I've found a solution that I'm mostly happy with, and all because of Symfonium. Symfonium is really the only recent and active android music app that I found which is compatible with the most common media streaming services like plex, subsonic and jellyfin. The player and library manager is good and fits all my needs and, more importantly, streaming and synching works great (with a few minor bugs). Right now, with navidrome and Symfonium, I can happily listen to music at work with the webUI (or sonixd) and on the go with Symfonium. Hope this can help someone that had the same problems as me.
Are you familiar with the economist Henry George? When you talk about these topics (business/econ/politics), your thinking reminds me of him. Your views on "IP tax/internet tax", troubles with pseudo-monopolies(regional telecom/broadband access)/big business(the Dove commercial, iTunes, SOPA, DRM/software access), etc all line up nicely with Henry George's reasoning.
The only good thing about Audios and their crypto was being there when they did their early users drop of their coin and having cashed that out ASAP before it tanked.
One thing I never see people talk about in the cryptocurrency world is... If the encryption algorithm gets broken, the entire blockchain and all wallets become broken overnight. The entire thing can fall apart if and when someone or the government cracks the encryption algorithm, which they already have really.
I've been thinking a fair bit about the last video. One of my biggest concerns is that I'm finding more and more of the music I like only released on streaming services. So, I've been moving towards a setup where streaming is where I actually listen to the music, but I buy outright anything I can that gets added to my liked category. I find this a good balance for me. While streaming is still good, I get the convenience and easy discoverability of new stuff. But as it gets worse, I will always have a mostly intact archive of all that I like, so I do not feel chained to my streaming and can drop it whenever I need to.
As far as I can tell, selling music as a non-pop musician has been, well, not a business for almost 2 decades or so. I don't know why people keep insisting on trying to do it. You don't need to sell your music directly to make a living, and spend 90-100% your time creating. But you also can't sit around writing sheet music (even if it's the best damn sheet music ever) and expect to just magically make money. Big labels and capitalism won that war a long time ago, let it go. Music files are business cards for you as an artist, and whatever way you choose to make money from being an artist has to be in tune with what people want to pay for. It's like watching people argue about what to charge as a horse carriage driver to stay profitable after the car was invented, it's too god damn late. All the while we are watching AI get better and better and you're still arguing about how to make money from downloads, something Napster made obsolete years ago (while AI is about to make a bunch of types of composing contracts obsolete). Love your videos Ben, I was looking forward to chatting at Astronox but you were a bit too busy, hopefully catch you around.
Blockchain solves one problem: black markets on the internet. It doesn't handle file distribution. But if you were to do a massive piracy streaming service, well blockchain currencies like monero might be the only way to pay creators. Mine it on users devices, give it to creators. Good luck implementing that, but it's probably the only way blockchain could help in this space.
I'm curious about how much you believe it should cost a consumer to listen to music. The spotify model is pretty simple. They take 30% of the income as a platform fee, everything else goes to the rights holders (I believe the exact numbers can differ slightly from country to country, but in general that is true). That means that even if Spotify were to take a smaller cut, the difference would be negligible - thus to make more money, consumers would need to spend more money. Is there a number that you believe to be reasonable for a streaming service like spotify? Or do you believe that the all-you-can-eat model for paying for music is inherently unsustainable, and that only selling music in a traditional way is a functional system?
Problem with constantly "gowing the pie" is we live on a finite planet. Future generations will look back at us as the generations that destroyed our habitat, and forced our descendants to live underground during the day. The slave traders had no idea how we would view them... I bet they thought they were angels. We're the same, but our damage is actually much worse, thanks to our relatively advanced technology.
Thanks for the videos, BTW. Sometimes when I leave a comment with pushback... I don't even disagree with "growing the pie", or the rest of the video, but the comment could make it seem like it. I don't know how to move forward, with a huge human population, and not kill the host organism... It feels like 10 billion ticks on a moose, wondering how to move forward without killing the moose, sometimes.
I watch these videos with a bit of bemusement as someone with no interest with Spotify. Well, I should say I have thought about getting a subscription from time to time, but then I just don't. I prefer Bandcamp and if there's something specific that I want I'll just find it on UA-cam. I pay for music over Bandcamp usually. I tend to torrent a lot and I've been thinking about how I can start using Flacs, so I'll look into something like plex since iTunes or Apple Music won't let me use anything but mp3. As an ancom and musician, I dig the decentralisation and democratisation you suggest and are working on. Why can't there be "top track on (decentralised, not for profit or nonprofit, media streaming service)"? Post scarcity is THE jam.
As a leftist i agree with your take on copyright expiration in general, but I’d like to point out that particularly for black and Hispanic artists, especially in genres like rap, dying at a young age before you can realistically set aside any wealth (considering prior poverty). So even tho in principle I share your views, in practice I’ve heard no recourse for the colored artists who will suffer disproportionately short of dismantling capitalism period (Im a Marxist, go figure)
Not listening to crypto evangelism is a good thing (note: I'm a long term crypto dude). What this space is often missing is the ability to differentiate. Not always, but very often, solutions are created for nonexistent problems, or a problem is being made up to offer a solution. Good example, at least in my opinion, were NFTs as ingame items: nobody asked for that, there was no need for that and the gamers' reaction was as you'd expect in such a case. Blockchain tech is interesting and it does have the potential to offer value (other than financial one). But wrapping a blockchain around literally anything that's still lacking one is a bad idea, and just because it's "efficient" for the creators (e.g. no need for lots of infrastructure) does not mean it makes sense. I like your stance toward all this, not generally against something, but always assessing if something makes actual sense. It's good to also have artists talk about this, because who else should those who develop "solutions" to "problems" ask or listen to to build something with an actual use case?
Pitching the dream idea once my brain got ticking from watching this COMPRESSOR A non-profit music streaming service owned by artists. A platform for all artists who care about small artists. (Oo it rhymes) Customers pay a minimum of $8 a month with a voluntary sliding scale above that and donations also encouraged wiki style. The "compressor" function is there to redistribute a fair proportion from comfortable artists to struggling artists. Artists are invited to voluntarily declare "offsets" if they have significant outside income sources or are wealthy. The pay structure algorithm: - server and moderation costs are paid first - remaining money is divided by listens (measured in time listened, not tracks) - the compressor function works like an audio compressor but for money output per artist, so below a certain income you get your slice of the overall income of the streaming service unaltered, if you earn more than enough to survive throughthe service, anything above that is compressed at different ratios at different levels, so say the first compressor is 1.25:1 at $25000, 1/1.25 = 0.8 so if you earn $30,000, you get $25,000 + (0.8 x $5000) = $24,000. The remaining $1000 goes back into the overall pot inflating everyones income. Then maybe there's a second compressor of 1.5:1 at $35,000, so if you get $40,000, that's $25k + (0.8 x $10k) + (0.67 x $5k) = $36,333.33. Let's say 1.75:1 at $50,000, 2:1 at $75,000, 2.5:1 at $100,000, 3:1 at $200,000, 4:1 at $300,000, etc. So someone on a raw division of $250,000 is getting $25k + (0.8 x $10k) + (0.67 x $15k) + (0.57 x $25k) + (0.5 x $25k) + (0.4 x $100k) + (0.33 x $50k) = $1k x (25 + 8 + 10.05 + 14.25 + 12.5 + 40 + 16.67) = $126,470, the remaining $123,530 goes back into the pot inflating everyone's income a lot. - Artists can also voluntarily declare an "offset" for their external wealth/income. And so if they are a like the guy I'm working for now a tech CEO with a techno side project, they can declare an offset, say $100k, which means that their calculation will have compressors that start $100k lower, theoretically their first $100k worth of listens would be compressed at 2.5:1. (Obvs would need really good moderation)
"Solve a problem and you won't have to evangelize blockchain" This, sir, would be the most concise way to sum up my feelings about crypto in general. Thankyou for this!
super appreciate learning about Exportify. Losing my playlists has been one of my biggest obstacles to leaving the platform. Also, I fully support copyright ending at death, but unfortunately most artists don't own their work and major labels rarely "die".
A somehow better alternative IMHO would be for the copyright to end after a far more logical time limit than it is today. 10, maybe 20 years. I don't see why a copyrighted work should provide it's creator income "for life".
@@lindenbasket I just put the songs on a cloud service (some are free if you don't have many songs/use up lots of data space, or you can use multiple email accounts for example for completely free cloud services) and stream from there or I just download the songs to a file and listen from that.
@@djgeorgetsagkadopoulosNo way, that's too short. We musicians want to have kids man! We want to leave assets. Yes, investments, property, etc but ownership of our recorded creative works is also an asset and one very close to our heart.
🙌Thanks for your thoughtful response here. I appreciate what you do! Also the caveats you have to pile on re: shorting, etc. 100% respect your skin in the game here. And admittedly part of my response was based on the me being in the minority of people who Spotify boosts algorithmically, where they're effectively paying me to put my music in front of new listeners. Especially appreciate your take on physical media as not as virtuous as people make out. I've pointed many people to your vinyl video. As an ex-Earth scientist, it hurts to have so many people point at vinyl and shipping things around (and blockchain! and don't @ me proof-of-stake fans). Also appreciate the callout of Audius's scammy, pump-and-dump shaped strategy. Mentioned this elsewhere on the other video -- open source software saw one of the most enormous wealth transfers, from developers to tech giants, in that Amazon, Google, and others built their cloud empires on free and open source software without paying the people who made it (except occasional voluntary contributions back). Those of us who make things that fall under the IP bucket have to be very careful, it's one of the few paths to owning something of value without having to buy it. But it's also the most imaginary form of property, requiring social contracts and behavioral norms for people to get paid. And there are vultures ready to descend if we're not vigilant about protecting it. The most important thing to do right now is exactly what you're doing: starting the conversation then keeping it going. So thank you! We all need to keep this discussion going until we can figure out some place that's better than where we are now and realistic steps we can take to get there.
I think 5 years is also enough for the family to manage their new financial situation. (Move to a more affordable house, adjust the overall lifestyle...)
The internet might have been more tasteful if Tim Berners-Lee had said "I've created the world wide web, but no one is allowed to freely access it until 75 years after I've died".
You should absolutely do financial pundit work for different platforms about this. It’s really interesting and will help the music industry as a whole. You’ve already elevated the conversation at multiple music companies I know of
Hey. UK here. Our economy is fuc*ed. If any of these subscription services start to jack their prices, which they inevitably will, I’m done. Most people in the UK are going to have to start making hard choices about what they can and can’t afford and I’m pretty sure Spotify will be getting the chop in a time where a lot of people in the UK are struggling to feed their children or heat their homes. These streaming services have started to reach their natural, capitalist conclusion. Walled Gardens. Jacked prices. Format Fog. Artists with no leverage or ownership of their work. At this point piracy seems more moral than paying these streaming companies.
to be honest, glad to hear your economy is f'ed... makes great musicians! and you where already my top ranked country for music. greetings and al jokes aside best of luck, your equally efffd dutch neighbor
Non-competitive, monopoly-market, cronyism capitalism isn't the 'natural conclusion' of whatever you think capitalism is. What exists now is corruption, and just as I wouldn't measure the merits of communism against Stalin's or Mao's corrupt and fascist implementations, I wouldn't do the same to this abomination of the free* market we have currently.
What’s the reality of Spotify putting in a “tip” system. Seems simple to implement. Tip icon lives next to the Heart icon. Set a flat tip amount. $0.10 or $0.25? Your subscription includes $1.00 into your tip account every month. Also unlike the Heart icon it resets every 30 days so you may re-tip a given song again and again. I know this is only a couple million a month spread out but it is moving towards a balance point between the service and the artist. Again, this seems soooooo easy to implement.
The alternative to streaming is piracy. The problem is not capitalism and greed, the problem is technology. We can share music with almost zero cost. Spotify only sells convenience and that is the reason, why it is such a hard business and not yet (if ever?) profitable. Consumers now would never pay significant money for listening to music, because they would always have the alternative to pay nothing. As in many industries before, people just have to learn to live with the new reality and technology. Otherwise you are just a luddite.
Surprised to see my comment make it into this video ha ha. But yeah, it is quite sad that capitalism can spread like a bad infection to anywhere.. even the final frontier.
Thank you for taking the time to dig into this and taking the time to address the peanut gallery. It matters and it's good content and it's gratefully received.
Not a complete equivalent to Funkwhale (As it's not free or open source) would be something like Roon. For those of you who want a more smooth transition from streaming to files Roon is great as you can connect it to streaming services temporarily as you try and build up your collection of music that you can listen to for the long term. They also have EQ and other features built in that somewhat justify the price tag. Not trying to sell for them just a big fan of their service.
same here in italy. originally it was a standalone tax that was tied to the tv you had in the house, but over the past 10-15 years with the decline in popularity of the tv medium more and more people stopped owning a tv altogether, so that tax is now part of the energy bill so that nobody can escape it. gotta love this country
in France govt just cancelled it, it finances public TV and radio networks which are very popular hère (1st morning show is public, one of the tv stations financed prominent french youtubers...)
Same in Austria. The 'tax' part always leads to a bit bloated and entitled orgs (less incentives to be efficient), and politicians always try to influence them, but having said that I still think it's a good approach and I was sad to hear that France ended it. You have to pick your poison somewhere, and the tradeoffs of these public broadcasters work for me at least.
I only play devil's advocate with people who i'm really comfortable with, and even then i seem to piss them off about half of the time. Kudos for having the balls to do this on a public platform! In all seriousness, i've been crypto-curious since 2012, and i lost most faith in it's original anarchistic goals by the 2017 bubble when it became just another asset for daytraders to get stressed over. Nevertheless i was somewhat enthusiastic about the idea of nft's and it's possible use for authorship and copyright. But the thing i never saw addressed in the whole hype is the fact that you need enforcement. From the get-go every nft holder has this idea that "i own the nft minted for , so i own the rights", but as far as i know not a single legislative institute has accepted nft's as a proof of copyright. I often hear the comparison that buying an nft is like buying the receipt to something, i would argue it's more akin to a receipt of a sale scribbled on a napkin, hoping napkins will one day be the receipt standards legally. And given the amount of useless tokens out there you can mint nft's on, i would argue the napkin is written on in pencil.
A great solution for the $ per stream problem would be a setup like this: After Spotify/Apple Music/etc take their 30% cut of the subscription fee the rest gets distributed between the songs a subscriber actually listen to. So if I listen to a indie artist a lot they would get a lot of the subscription fee I’m paying. That way small artist could earn a great living with a relative small fan base. No other solution would be needed.
I was talking same thing some time ago. Spotify (and others) are actually ripping off millions of small artists and their algorithm works in favour of big names. There should be no algorithms but only music library browser by various categories so everyone has a chance of being discovered Btw, I recently quit making music… Costs a lot in time and money for virtually no return…
@@FlatTire Almost 80% of the customer base love those playlist(even though its bad for smaller artists). You can't take away what people love, because the act of promoting only few artists in itself doesn't cause any harm to anyone. So, a proper solution would look like a open sourced algorithm with no bias to anyone or something similar. For the record, I do not believe this would work in any meaningful way too.
I have to say I am so fucking tickled that one of my favourite electronic artists in some of the most formative years of my life puts out content like this.
I have a huge streak of natural grey hairs in my hair and i'm a dude with long dark brown hair in my early 20s but we look fucking cool bro, ignore the bad comments Also I love your view on art and especially on the question about ethics on streaming dead musicians music. True artist right here
Not in agreement with your assessment of Spotify and streaming, but your breakdown on how much it would cost to return to physical formats was brilliant. Great work there. Thank you.
The only time I ever made a CD on my own (in 2010), I did all the artwork including a 16 page colour booklet - and a small company produced 100 of them for me, for £3 each - that includes a printed disc, and bear in mind this was a very small batch indeed. Are they really so much more expensive to produce these days? I find it sad. It's such a perfect medium... as a listener, I want music to be something I can buy and then listen to in perpetuity, with no danger of being stopped from doing so. Streaming is abhorrent to me (and I know I'm in a minority). If the death of CDs means Bandcamp downloads etc., then I guess that's fine - but I happen to love CDs and I'll really miss them. Oh... and don't get me started on inter-track dropouts. Grrrrrr!
11:05 I'd actually love to see maybe an in-depth explanation or tutorial on something like this. That and if alternatives are better than Plex, because when I went to look it up, there was much discourse over it - I was hearing about stuff like Emby, Kodi, Jellyfin, and I don't even know where to start or what's better for simply organizing and playing my music conveniently on my devices. Would love to hear more about it. EDIT: Actually, that decentralized music streaming thing you mention at the end of the video sounds like one of the things I should learn about first. Either way, thanks for another video with further discussion!
At 13:14 the sentence you say here doesn’t make sense to me. I really want to understand what you are saying. “Future generations will look at our last century of lobbying the government to make sharing freely available information a criminal offense”. I would very much appreciate clarification. Thank you!
Your eyebrow is frickin’ awesome! Those haters are just jealous.
pfft lol
honestly i thought it was a shaved in fashion choice lol.
To most judgmental parasites, who haven’t seen one of your many videos (Ill save you the trouble) by explain to there close minded prehistoric brains.. Ben was once a Golden gloves boxer, and an MMA fighter.. The eyebrow is not fashion, it came from taking a hit, that almost ripped his eye out.. All part of the sport 🫶🏻 So, have fun making fun of him in person.. A true wolf in sheep’s clothing 😉🇮🇪
He is a good looking guy despite the eye brow 😉👌
Makes no sense to me how if something is even slightly unique about someone's appearance, some people just can't deal with it and have to ask the person about it or why it's there, no matter how benign it is.
I came out of the last video in bit of a soul crushing funk. This, like so many other real world problems, just feels so big and complex that I struggle to wrap my head around a solution.
I love that you are both a champion for these solutions and a voice of calm reason in a sea of typical binary rage. As someone who has obviously done a lot of work getting informed about the problem and it’s solutions (or potentials) how can I learn more about being part of that solution (in addition to the info from your patreon)?
True, tech in general and the web in particular seems to be moving into ever more exclusive set of companies that get to set the rules. This is in essence a tech problem in addition to IP-law/capitalism problem. With spotify it's very similar to audible, where there's no way to compete with it and anyone who tried would run into the same issues Benn highlighted in his video.
I'm not a Spotify hater, I love the convenience and feel absolutely zero guilt from using it. That being said, would I want there to be competition and see creators paid well? Yes, yes I would (also fuck the labels). I've never made enough money to spend on all the music I listen to though, and if there was no Spotify, I would pirate my music like I used to.
What I think will happen is that slowly but surely the prices for streaming go up, and piracy goes up as well. I don't see these companies completely failing, just bleeding the industry dry without addressing the underlying problems. I hope someone smarter than me comes up with a way to do all of this open source with a model that pays artists and cuts the middle men while keeping all the functionality and piracy low with low pricing.
There isn't much we can do about anything outside of our local bubble. Change what you can, break what you have to, try to do things that will help you sleep and enjoy your short little amazing blip in time.
"solve a problem and your project will succeed - it's as simple as that" - PERFECTION BEN!
Every time i listen to you, I can hear and feel the commonsense oozing from every fiber of your being. Thank you. And I hope without sounding patronizing, keep up the very good work!
Ben for president?
The “IP Tax” sounds like a public library to me, just based on data in the Internet. I think that’s a great idea
Just wanted to say that I'm interested in a deep dive into this concept from Ben.
Yeah maybe have it as an opt in or out program so anyone wanting old music can stream from the government in original quality
One Love!
Always forward, never ever backward!!
☀☀☀
💚💛❤
🙏🏿🙏🙏🏼
Always enjoy hearing your takes (and responses to responses on those takes), keep up the great work Benn!
Old fan from Chicago. Appreciate the videos. ✌️
As a new artist I'm avoiding streaming and using YT and a web platform called Reward Music which is artist centric. Benn I really appreciate all of your content.
I'm in love with the way you interpret and are amused by negative comments. Sincerely, it's inspiring to me.
I’m just commenting so the algo will maybe serve this to more people.
Had Spotify for a while but I just felt so surveilled by the algorithm and stopped using it. I recently uploaded all my music to dropbox (apx 2000 cds) and stream it to myself using the Evermusic app. Works great except that the play / shuffle options are a bit weird. Downside is not getting “new” music, but honestly there’s so much in my own collection I hear something new every time.
That's so awesome. CDs are great, I have a CD player built into my PC and a discman w/ a case for on the go. The fact you can then export it into an mp3 or flac is just so much bang for buck. I'm so glad it's not as price gouged as vinyls ❤️
I find it quite mad that there are lots of (mostly older) people that never listen to new music (Spotify's own research suggests interest in new music tapers off rapidly for most people in their thirties) and yet they keep paying their monthly subs for the convenience of having access to music they already paid for. It would be crazy to keep paying for the vinyl and books on my shelves, so it seems weird to keep paying Spotify for music I can download.
I recently built a home server, for NAS and some other stuff, you really inspired me to start putting my music collection on there and build my personal streaming platform
one of the smartest, most thoughful, well evidenced and articulate voices on the internet.
I am 100% with you on when copyright should expire!
I'm not sure if you had to think about, whether or not to keep the comments up while you talk about their very topic, but I think it's a great design choice, it kept my ADHD brain concentrated on what you were talking about.
The mind is full of mysteries.
Great video as always, Benn. Always enjoy hearing your insights
I actually _really_ like your eyebrow thing. It's stylish
Whew, that stock shorting hasn't panned out well in the last 6 months. (FWIW, I had Spotify stock that I sold a few months ago because I didn't expect them to do very well either. Oh well.)
Thank you for calling out Audius. Based response.
Criminalizing sharing will indeed be seen as a weird anomaly for a social animal to do...
I think its a brilliant idea, that we have to pay some sort of Tax, and get a Free music streaming site, that actually also pays the artists fairly. and i would love to see a video, where you try to calculate how much that tax would be.
because i gotta be honest.
i pay right now about 30bucks a month for all my streaming and licensing things for all my music, and honestly, i would be happy to pay close to that as tax, when i then dont have to pay some shady company that takes 80% of that money as profit...
Who says the artists aren't being paid fairly? Without streaming, or the internet, guys like Benn wouldn't even be known. Every musician who's ever recorded music is not entitled to a career in music. There are plenty of artists being compensated quite well on spotify. Your local dive bar band is not meant to make a ton of money selling music just because they can upload to spotify
@@Kevinschart you are just factually wrong.
Every artist who does any kind of art is entitled of a fair pay per artwork they made.
when i make a song, and i need to sell that song, with the exclusive rights and what not that song is easely worth 3k or more. and i am like a not known arist at all.
ben still would be a great, and known musician without the internet, because he put the work in, he was on live stage, he brought his music into the open.
infact, i as a artist myself can say, spotify is a useless pieces of garbage, when it comes to spreading your music.
i gaines more popularity from one festival performance than i ever did with spotify since is started. spotify is a joke
I've long wanted a legal framework for licensing for software and media where, upon purchase, you're granted a license that can be moved without cost between licensing services-such that the shutdown of a service (e.g. Walmart and Microsoft's music service, or a software store like Steam or Origin) guarantees the export of a license, which could be transferred or used to prove purchase.
Currently, the stores are each individually responsible for payment, distribution, and license tracking, and they provide no integration between them. I'm pushing for a legally-enforced integration of the license tracking so that users wouldn't be beholden to the various walled gardens for IP access, and content producers wouldn't be beholden to the same walled gardens for everything at the 30-50% costs that are currently charged. Ideally, licensing would be tracked at regional, centralized locations run by non-profits and using modern security with things like 2FA. Services could link to the centralized service with OAuth, check with the service for licensing, and, if they're licensed to distribute, provide it to the consumers. If they're not licensed, a 3rd-party hand-off mechanism could be provided to enable content providers to distribute solely from their own servers. Most would probably opt to either distribute through the app stores or through a hosted service.
With this, walled-garden app stores are essentially in charge of purchasing (optional) and distribution, which means they need to focus on improving their experience. It would also mean that 3rd party sales, transfers and lending of content would be more permissable - within reason. Honestly, an entire non-profit industry of collective IP could spring up around libraries.
This does mean that, since the app is no longer getting 30% of the pie at purchase, they're no longer incentivized to provide free downloads forever for their users' multi-terabyte content, but actual transfer costs would be in the realm of a few dollars per-year, and download counts could carry over with the licensing to new services. You'd have to mandate that a certain percentage of the purchase be earmarked for transfer costs, and that would incentivize stores to keep customers consuming content from their services, because the transfer expenses would remain with the license. It would also force online gaming account banning to transition from the store's user account to the license, which would carry over.
In the end, it's still sort of centralized, but I think it's the kind of compromise that everyone would begrudgingly accept.
I think a publicly funded archive with streaming features would be good. It does make the freedom of speech on the internet deal much more complex because the 1st amendment would be involved for real.
FYI to Tobias and co. Rolex is a non-profit. That status of company means little in practice.
Ben you're a wit and funny human being, thank You👍❤️🙏🏻
There was no single Clap SFX W/ verb at the end of the video! Aaaahhhhh
As a UK person and someone who doesn't ever listen to podcasts, i'm seriously considering ditching spotify as my main music streaming platform. The discovery is bad, and I used to solely use youtube which is infinitely better. Only problem with youtube is that the user interface is clunky as a music streaming product. But the biggest upside is that it has literally everything. UA-cam is still best for discovery even though i'd like some control over what kinds of videos get recommended to me.
The £120 I spend on spotify a year could much better be spent (or saved) by supporting artists directly on bandcamp. My only wish is that bandcamp gets into streaming, that would be a service i would pay for happily because they seem to support the artists.
The hell with copyright expiring on death of the creator, the whole thing should be completely abolished.
The whole point of "IP" (an anachronistic legal fiction) is so corporations can buy them up and sell them back to the culture that created them. "Work once, get paid forever", except without having to do any of the work. 2 scams for the price of one.
If they were non-transferable then we'd see these corporations, lobbyists, politicians, lawyers, think-tank-wankers etc - the whole apparatus of manufactured consent do a very quick 180 degree turn and all the lies they've been telling us for the last x-decades would suddenly evaporate and be replaced with other lies.
love you Benn
I've watched a lot of your videos and this is the first time I noticed the eyebrow lol
Yurel, love the RA2 reference
Have you done a vid about Garage Band (the daw)? Love your absolutely top notch work!
yes, all media via a central library funded by an internet tax - I suggested this to a research guy at BT many years ago (in those days served via peer-to-peer) but he was not interested. It seems like an obvious idea unless you've been captured by the gatekeepers' dream logic
an interesting counter-point is whether/how such a setup would work to generate funds (and allocate them) for making new content
your eyebrow is really cool
But Benn. Keep it up. Really appreciating your voice.
I love that you want to control your own narrative.
These videos are fantastic. Eloquent and well thought out. Thank you and I hope many more people get to see this!
The thing with Spotify going under is that there is very little chance of anything better replacing it. Streaming is here to stay, no matter how unsustainable it is. We live in times of constantly rising living costs and stagnating wages for the vast majority of people. The times where people had the spending money to sustain the cultural industries is over (not to mention what the internet did for advertising). Maybe Spotify goes bankrupt, but all that will happen is that some other bigger company is going to buy it out and cross-subsidize it from their other ventures. Apple and Amazon are already doing this, with the hope of getting you as invested as possible into their eco-system. Decentralized alternatives aren't actually wanted by most people, as we've seen with Mastodon and Twitter the last few months.
The only thing I believe could actually work (within the capitalist framework we are working within here) and that is never going to happen would be to drastically shorten copyright, down from the absolutely ridiculous "lifetime+70 years" to something actually reasonable like 15 years after release, taking away most of the power music labels have over artists, forcing a much higher percentage of music revenue to actually go to artists making music today. Which is of course never going to happen.
There is no place for culture under neoliberal capitalism.
Thank you sir👍
How to internet comment:
1. Accuse someone of a mere superficial understanding of technology X
2. Make fun of any superficial feature of that someone
"Whatever you do, don't say nothing about his birthmark there, man, because he flips out", Cheech and Chong
12:58 Liked your responses, although I'd like to point out that saying that world hunger is on a "steady decline" based on that data, I'd argue, is an extrapolation at best. It trivializes or ignores many issues with modern agriculture, such as the nutrients in modern crop yield, who's getting that food, the industry's impact on greenhouse gases, etc., and how these and other issues will impact future food supplies. Additionally, it could be argued that the intertwining of advancing technology and capitalism in that industry is to blame for many of these shortcomings. Just stood out to me. Anyways, love your content!
transferring all my music out of Spotify to a flash drive just in case, everything completely legal :)
Can you do a video on your non profit work?
Having heard that info at the end, that's what I care about more than the rest of this entire conversation.
It would also be interesting to know why they're former ones, especially if they were all self-sustaining..
I've dropped spotify about 3 years ago mostly because it didn't make sense paying for a service that didn't have all the music I listened to.
I've been trying to implement a self host alternative since then.
Streaming and syncing to mobile is my biggest usecase (since when I'm on my PC I can just stream over the network with foobar or something simmilar), so having no or poor support for it is a dealbreaker. This has been my experience with self-hosted mobile streaming and syncing solutions:
The two solutions that worked the best for me were plex and subsonic-based projects.
- Plex is proprietary and needs a subscription for plexamp, but other apps like yatse can kinda solve this issue.
- Subsonic-based projects have outdated apps which don't function properly on more recent android versions.
I've been switching back and forth between those two solutions, not really happy with neither of them. Only recently I've found a solution that I'm mostly happy with, and all because of Symfonium.
Symfonium is really the only recent and active android music app that I found which is compatible with the most common media streaming services like plex, subsonic and jellyfin.
The player and library manager is good and fits all my needs and, more importantly, streaming and synching works great (with a few minor bugs).
Right now, with navidrome and Symfonium, I can happily listen to music at work with the webUI (or sonixd) and on the go with Symfonium.
Hope this can help someone that had the same problems as me.
Publishing. You need to let you peeps know you still get publishing on plays.
I've never listened to more than ten minutes of a podcast at any one time in my entire life.
I m gladly following and watching you making music.
Actually 4 eyebrows is in this year.
this video made me look up to you as a role model
I am fine with paying $40-$90 for new vinyl.
I loved you in Flash Flash Revolution hehe keys go SMASHSMASHSMASH
Are you familiar with the economist Henry George? When you talk about these topics (business/econ/politics), your thinking reminds me of him. Your views on "IP tax/internet tax", troubles with pseudo-monopolies(regional telecom/broadband access)/big business(the Dove commercial, iTunes, SOPA, DRM/software access), etc all line up nicely with Henry George's reasoning.
Uber now is good, for both drivers and consumers. A lot of people do it as a side hustle, women with kids for example.
Spotify is manipulating the sound also and not in a good way
Great music, hot eyebrow, hot man. I love the points you bring up too.
Your eyebrows make you look super cool and unique tbh I can't even understand why someone would insult you about them hahahhahaa
The only good thing about Audios and their crypto was being there when they did their early users drop of their coin and having cashed that out ASAP before it tanked.
One thing I never see people talk about in the cryptocurrency world is... If the encryption algorithm gets broken, the entire blockchain and all wallets become broken overnight. The entire thing can fall apart if and when someone or the government cracks the encryption algorithm, which they already have really.
Exportify 👍
I've been thinking a fair bit about the last video. One of my biggest concerns is that I'm finding more and more of the music I like only released on streaming services. So, I've been moving towards a setup where streaming is where I actually listen to the music, but I buy outright anything I can that gets added to my liked category.
I find this a good balance for me. While streaming is still good, I get the convenience and easy discoverability of new stuff. But as it gets worse, I will always have a mostly intact archive of all that I like, so I do not feel chained to my streaming and can drop it whenever I need to.
Put Leaps
As far as I can tell, selling music as a non-pop musician has been, well, not a business for almost 2 decades or so. I don't know why people keep insisting on trying to do it. You don't need to sell your music directly to make a living, and spend 90-100% your time creating. But you also can't sit around writing sheet music (even if it's the best damn sheet music ever) and expect to just magically make money. Big labels and capitalism won that war a long time ago, let it go. Music files are business cards for you as an artist, and whatever way you choose to make money from being an artist has to be in tune with what people want to pay for. It's like watching people argue about what to charge as a horse carriage driver to stay profitable after the car was invented, it's too god damn late. All the while we are watching AI get better and better and you're still arguing about how to make money from downloads, something Napster made obsolete years ago (while AI is about to make a bunch of types of composing contracts obsolete). Love your videos Ben, I was looking forward to chatting at Astronox but you were a bit too busy, hopefully catch you around.
Blockchain solves one problem: black markets on the internet. It doesn't handle file distribution. But if you were to do a massive piracy streaming service, well blockchain currencies like monero might be the only way to pay creators. Mine it on users devices, give it to creators. Good luck implementing that, but it's probably the only way blockchain could help in this space.
I'm curious about how much you believe it should cost a consumer to listen to music.
The spotify model is pretty simple. They take 30% of the income as a platform fee, everything else goes to the rights holders (I believe the exact numbers can differ slightly from country to country, but in general that is true). That means that even if Spotify were to take a smaller cut, the difference would be negligible - thus to make more money, consumers would need to spend more money.
Is there a number that you believe to be reasonable for a streaming service like spotify? Or do you believe that the all-you-can-eat model for paying for music is inherently unsustainable, and that only selling music in a traditional way is a functional system?
Spotify is Enron
Problem with constantly "gowing the pie" is we live on a finite planet. Future generations will look back at us as the generations that destroyed our habitat, and forced our descendants to live underground during the day. The slave traders had no idea how we would view them... I bet they thought they were angels. We're the same, but our damage is actually much worse, thanks to our relatively advanced technology.
Thanks for the videos, BTW. Sometimes when I leave a comment with pushback... I don't even disagree with "growing the pie", or the rest of the video, but the comment could make it seem like it. I don't know how to move forward, with a huge human population, and not kill the host organism... It feels like 10 billion ticks on a moose, wondering how to move forward without killing the moose, sometimes.
I watch these videos with a bit of bemusement as someone with no interest with Spotify. Well, I should say I have thought about getting a subscription from time to time, but then I just don't. I prefer Bandcamp and if there's something specific that I want I'll just find it on UA-cam. I pay for music over Bandcamp usually. I tend to torrent a lot and I've been thinking about how I can start using Flacs, so I'll look into something like plex since iTunes or Apple Music won't let me use anything but mp3. As an ancom and musician, I dig the decentralisation and democratisation you suggest and are working on. Why can't there be "top track on (decentralised, not for profit or nonprofit, media streaming service)"? Post scarcity is THE jam.
There could be, it just relies one someone being willing to put up the capital for it. Which for something that size is a pretty tough ask.
I like your eyebrow.
As a leftist i agree with your take on copyright expiration in general, but I’d like to point out that particularly for black and Hispanic artists, especially in genres like rap, dying at a young age before you can realistically set aside any wealth (considering prior poverty). So even tho in principle I share your views, in practice I’ve heard no recourse for the colored artists who will suffer disproportionately short of dismantling capitalism period (Im a Marxist, go figure)
Classic musician conversation topic: How do I invest all my money?
Butt Ben lmao
Not listening to crypto evangelism is a good thing (note: I'm a long term crypto dude). What this space is often missing is the ability to differentiate. Not always, but very often, solutions are created for nonexistent problems, or a problem is being made up to offer a solution. Good example, at least in my opinion, were NFTs as ingame items: nobody asked for that, there was no need for that and the gamers' reaction was as you'd expect in such a case.
Blockchain tech is interesting and it does have the potential to offer value (other than financial one). But wrapping a blockchain around literally anything that's still lacking one is a bad idea, and just because it's "efficient" for the creators (e.g. no need for lots of infrastructure) does not mean it makes sense.
I like your stance toward all this, not generally against something, but always assessing if something makes actual sense. It's good to also have artists talk about this, because who else should those who develop "solutions" to "problems" ask or listen to to build something with an actual use case?
Pitching the dream idea once my brain got ticking from watching this
COMPRESSOR
A non-profit music streaming service owned by artists.
A platform for all artists who care about small artists. (Oo it rhymes)
Customers pay a minimum of $8 a month with a voluntary sliding scale above that and donations also encouraged wiki style.
The "compressor" function is there to redistribute a fair proportion from comfortable artists to struggling artists.
Artists are invited to voluntarily declare "offsets" if they have significant outside income sources or are wealthy.
The pay structure algorithm:
- server and moderation costs are paid first
- remaining money is divided by listens (measured in time listened, not tracks)
- the compressor function works like an audio compressor but for money output per artist, so below a certain income you get your slice of the overall income of the streaming service unaltered, if you earn more than enough to survive throughthe service, anything above that is compressed at different ratios at different levels, so say the first compressor is 1.25:1 at $25000, 1/1.25 = 0.8 so if you earn $30,000, you get $25,000 + (0.8 x $5000) = $24,000. The remaining $1000 goes back into the overall pot inflating everyones income. Then maybe there's a second compressor of 1.5:1 at $35,000, so if you get $40,000, that's $25k + (0.8 x $10k) + (0.67 x $5k) = $36,333.33. Let's say 1.75:1 at $50,000, 2:1 at $75,000, 2.5:1 at $100,000, 3:1 at $200,000, 4:1 at $300,000, etc. So someone on a raw division of $250,000 is getting $25k + (0.8 x $10k) + (0.67 x $15k) + (0.57 x $25k) + (0.5 x $25k) + (0.4 x $100k) + (0.33 x $50k) = $1k x (25 + 8 + 10.05 + 14.25 + 12.5 + 40 + 16.67) = $126,470, the remaining $123,530 goes back into the pot inflating everyone's income a lot.
- Artists can also voluntarily declare an "offset" for their external wealth/income. And so if they are a like the guy I'm working for now a tech CEO with a techno side project, they can declare an offset, say $100k, which means that their calculation will have compressors that start $100k lower, theoretically their first $100k worth of listens would be compressed at 2.5:1.
(Obvs would need really good moderation)
"Solve a problem and you won't have to evangelize blockchain" This, sir, would be the most concise way to sum up my feelings about crypto in general. Thankyou for this!
Right, crypto is for contrarians.
Sounds great but most people don't realize there is a problem with the financial sector, that is at the core of the illusion.
To the guy that commented the capitalism Space bit, I commend you. It’s a game reference, and a quite good one at that!
Tim Curry is a legend.
SPACE!!
Haha, I got the reference as well and was laughing at how straight-faced Benn took it. :D
Even though I already knew the quite sad answer that space is already corrupted, glad some people found a laugh.
best part of the whole video. 😂👍🏻
By far the most positive outlook on someone questioning your looks. Positive Benn is best Benn.
He is handsome enough to laugh off mean comments from insecure basement-dwellers.
@@justinwatson1510 why judge people living in a basement? Isn't that kind of like making fun of someone's eyebrow? Just a thought
super appreciate learning about Exportify. Losing my playlists has been one of my biggest obstacles to leaving the platform. Also, I fully support copyright ending at death, but unfortunately most artists don't own their work and major labels rarely "die".
A somehow better alternative IMHO would be for the copyright to end after a far more logical time limit than it is today. 10, maybe 20 years.
I don't see why a copyrighted work should provide it's creator income "for life".
What's it been like leaving Spotify? I use it daily but also think about dropping it fairly often so curious to hear how you went about it.
@@lindenbasket I just put the songs on a cloud service (some are free if you don't have many songs/use up lots of data space, or you can use multiple email accounts for example for completely free cloud services) and stream from there or I just download the songs to a file and listen from that.
@@CM_CM_ nice, which cloud service?
@@djgeorgetsagkadopoulosNo way, that's too short. We musicians want to have kids man! We want to leave assets. Yes, investments, property, etc but ownership of our recorded creative works is also an asset and one very close to our heart.
🙌Thanks for your thoughtful response here. I appreciate what you do! Also the caveats you have to pile on re: shorting, etc. 100% respect your skin in the game here. And admittedly part of my response was based on the me being in the minority of people who Spotify boosts algorithmically, where they're effectively paying me to put my music in front of new listeners. Especially appreciate your take on physical media as not as virtuous as people make out. I've pointed many people to your vinyl video. As an ex-Earth scientist, it hurts to have so many people point at vinyl and shipping things around (and blockchain! and don't @ me proof-of-stake fans). Also appreciate the callout of Audius's scammy, pump-and-dump shaped strategy.
Mentioned this elsewhere on the other video -- open source software saw one of the most enormous wealth transfers, from developers to tech giants, in that Amazon, Google, and others built their cloud empires on free and open source software without paying the people who made it (except occasional voluntary contributions back). Those of us who make things that fall under the IP bucket have to be very careful, it's one of the few paths to owning something of value without having to buy it. But it's also the most imaginary form of property, requiring social contracts and behavioral norms for people to get paid. And there are vultures ready to descend if we're not vigilant about protecting it.
The most important thing to do right now is exactly what you're doing: starting the conversation then keeping it going. So thank you! We all need to keep this discussion going until we can figure out some place that's better than where we are now and realistic steps we can take to get there.
I think copyright should last like 5 years after death, mainly because I'm scared of untasteful uses of the music just after an artist death.
Eh .... wikipedia: List of countries' copyright lengths
You want to shorten it ??????
I think 5 years is also enough for the family to manage their new financial situation. (Move to a more affordable house, adjust the overall lifestyle...)
The internet might have been more tasteful if Tim Berners-Lee had said "I've created the world wide web, but no one is allowed to freely access it until 75 years after I've died".
You should absolutely do financial pundit work for different platforms about this. It’s really interesting and will help the music industry as a whole. You’ve already elevated the conversation at multiple music companies I know of
Hey. UK here. Our economy is fuc*ed. If any of these subscription services start to jack their prices, which they inevitably will, I’m done. Most people in the UK are going to have to start making hard choices about what they can and can’t afford and I’m pretty sure Spotify will be getting the chop in a time where a lot of people in the UK are struggling to feed their children or heat their homes.
These streaming services have started to reach their natural, capitalist conclusion. Walled Gardens. Jacked prices. Format Fog. Artists with no leverage or ownership of their work. At this point piracy seems more moral than paying these streaming companies.
I've already given Spotify the chop.
to be honest, glad to hear your economy is f'ed... makes great musicians!
and you where already my top ranked country for music.
greetings and al jokes aside best of luck,
your equally efffd dutch neighbor
@@michel5148 wut...
Non-competitive, monopoly-market, cronyism capitalism isn't the 'natural conclusion' of whatever you think capitalism is. What exists now is corruption, and just as I wouldn't measure the merits of communism against Stalin's or Mao's corrupt and fascist implementations, I wouldn't do the same to this abomination of the free* market we have currently.
What’s the reality of Spotify putting in a “tip” system. Seems simple to implement.
Tip icon lives next to the Heart icon. Set a flat tip amount. $0.10 or $0.25?
Your subscription includes $1.00 into your tip account every month.
Also unlike the Heart icon it resets every 30 days so you may re-tip a given song again and again.
I know this is only a couple million a month spread out but it is moving towards a balance point between the service and the artist.
Again, this seems soooooo easy to implement.
The alternative to streaming is piracy. The problem is not capitalism and greed, the problem is technology.
We can share music with almost zero cost. Spotify only sells convenience and that is the reason, why it is such a hard business and not yet (if ever?) profitable.
Consumers now would never pay significant money for listening to music, because they would always have the alternative to pay nothing.
As in many industries before, people just have to learn to live with the new reality and technology. Otherwise you are just a luddite.
Surprised to see my comment make it into this video ha ha. But yeah, it is quite sad that capitalism can spread like a bad infection to anywhere.. even the final frontier.
Thank you for taking the time to dig into this and taking the time to address the peanut gallery. It matters and it's good content and it's gratefully received.
Not a complete equivalent to Funkwhale (As it's not free or open source) would be something like Roon. For those of you who want a more smooth transition from streaming to files Roon is great as you can connect it to streaming services temporarily as you try and build up your collection of music that you can listen to for the long term. They also have EQ and other features built in that somewhat justify the price tag.
Not trying to sell for them just a big fan of their service.
Sweden also have this TV tax. Roughly 100 USD per citizen per year is deducted towards it.
same here in italy. originally it was a standalone tax that was tied to the tv you had in the house, but over the past 10-15 years with the decline in popularity of the tv medium more and more people stopped owning a tv altogether, so that tax is now part of the energy bill so that nobody can escape it. gotta love this country
@@crifox16 They did the exact same thing here haha
in France govt just cancelled it, it finances public TV and radio networks which are very popular hère (1st morning show is public, one of the tv stations financed prominent french youtubers...)
Same in Austria. The 'tax' part always leads to a bit bloated and entitled orgs (less incentives to be efficient), and politicians always try to influence them, but having said that I still think it's a good approach and I was sad to hear that France ended it. You have to pick your poison somewhere, and the tradeoffs of these public broadcasters work for me at least.
I only play devil's advocate with people who i'm really comfortable with, and even then i seem to piss them off about half of the time. Kudos for having the balls to do this on a public platform!
In all seriousness, i've been crypto-curious since 2012, and i lost most faith in it's original anarchistic goals by the 2017 bubble when it became just another asset for daytraders to get stressed over. Nevertheless i was somewhat enthusiastic about the idea of nft's and it's possible use for authorship and copyright. But the thing i never saw addressed in the whole hype is the fact that you need enforcement. From the get-go every nft holder has this idea that "i own the nft minted for , so i own the rights", but as far as i know not a single legislative institute has accepted nft's as a proof of copyright. I often hear the comparison that buying an nft is like buying the receipt to something, i would argue it's more akin to a receipt of a sale scribbled on a napkin, hoping napkins will one day be the receipt standards legally. And given the amount of useless tokens out there you can mint nft's on, i would argue the napkin is written on in pencil.
if you were crypto curious since 2012, by 2017 you should have learned it was all horseshit for dumb gambling addicts
What do you believe by anachronistic goals?
Also if you want more info, Folding Ideas did a deep dive on NFT's.
I come here for the great synth socio-techno-enviro deep dives, and I stay for the Tim Curry Red Alert 3 references
A great solution for the $ per stream problem would be a setup like this: After Spotify/Apple Music/etc take their 30% cut of the subscription fee the rest gets distributed between the songs a subscriber actually listen to. So if I listen to a indie artist a lot they would get a lot of the subscription fee I’m paying. That way small artist could earn a great living with a relative small fan base.
No other solution would be needed.
I was talking same thing some time ago.
Spotify (and others) are actually ripping off millions of small artists and their algorithm works in favour of big names.
There should be no algorithms but only music library browser by various categories so everyone has a chance of being discovered
Btw, I recently quit making music… Costs a lot in time and money for virtually no return…
@@FlatTire Almost 80% of the customer base love those playlist(even though its bad for smaller artists). You can't take away what people love, because the act of promoting only few artists in itself doesn't cause any harm to anyone. So, a proper solution would look like a open sourced algorithm with no bias to anyone or something similar. For the record, I do not believe this would work in any meaningful way too.
I have to say I am so fucking tickled that one of my favourite electronic artists in some of the most formative years of my life puts out content like this.
Lol, he wasn't a formative artist for me but yeah that must be crazy. Mine aren't exactly what I would call "wise and measured thinkers" lol
I have a huge streak of natural grey hairs in my hair and i'm a dude with long dark brown hair in my early 20s but we look fucking cool bro, ignore the bad comments
Also I love your view on art and especially on the question about ethics on streaming dead musicians music. True artist right here
You're the man Benn. Your Spotify fail video changed my whole thinking. Especially as I get ready to put out another release.
Not in agreement with your assessment of Spotify and streaming, but your breakdown on how much it would cost to return to physical formats was brilliant. Great work there. Thank you.
The only time I ever made a CD on my own (in 2010), I did all the artwork including a 16 page colour booklet - and a small company produced 100 of them for me, for £3 each - that includes a printed disc, and bear in mind this was a very small batch indeed. Are they really so much more expensive to produce these days? I find it sad. It's such a perfect medium... as a listener, I want music to be something I can buy and then listen to in perpetuity, with no danger of being stopped from doing so. Streaming is abhorrent to me (and I know I'm in a minority). If the death of CDs means Bandcamp downloads etc., then I guess that's fine - but I happen to love CDs and I'll really miss them.
Oh... and don't get me started on inter-track dropouts. Grrrrrr!
11:05 I'd actually love to see maybe an in-depth explanation or tutorial on something like this. That and if alternatives are better than Plex, because when I went to look it up, there was much discourse over it - I was hearing about stuff like Emby, Kodi, Jellyfin, and I don't even know where to start or what's better for simply organizing and playing my music conveniently on my devices. Would love to hear more about it.
EDIT: Actually, that decentralized music streaming thing you mention at the end of the video sounds like one of the things I should learn about first. Either way, thanks for another video with further discussion!
At 13:14 the sentence you say here doesn’t make sense to me. I really want to understand what you are saying. “Future generations will look at our last century of lobbying the government to make sharing freely available information a criminal offense”. I would very much appreciate clarification. Thank you!
Capitalism is the reason why artists can't afford living