It was employees' personal MP3 collections that seeded their library, so while that statement is true it is a little disingenuous without further context
There are lots of other examples of this happening too... I believe some of the early nintendo retro releases were emulators running pirated roms
> It was employees' personal MP3 collections that seeded their library, so while that statement is true it is a little disingenuous without further context
If anything, that feels even worse.
> I believe some of the early nintendo retro releases were emulators running pirated roms
If Nintendo has a licence for the game that the ROM was an unlicensed pirate of, while that's weird, it doesn't seem fishy in the same way.
I don't understand how employees contributing their personal collections is somehow worse than company agents trolling torrent sites specifically to stream.
Like, every nerd from the era has an mp3 collection. Mine is literally the only data that I have that's been around since I was 15 and survived multiple HD crashes.
How are you going to get the streaming business up and running without some seed data?
The music industry wasn't just handing out blanket streaming rights until Spotify showed up. All the other services of the era sucked -- their libraries were patchy and music streaming looked very much like TV streaming is today where every show lives under a different provider. It took freaking Apple to convince the music industry to allow single track sales and thats why we were in that state until the mid 2010's when Spotify came in and started to clean house.
The music industry was not looking to break the stranglehold they had on CD sales. Someone had to come in with a 'shoot first ask questions later' attitude to get to where we are today.
Uber and Lyft did what they did for the same reason -- the (oftentimes mafia-backed) taxi cartels had a monopoly on pricing and taxi medallions and the only realistic way to break that was to operate illegally.
I think you will find that the law (and copyright) to be extremely overrated. Copyright, in particular, should not exist in its current form, especially with digital data that is not bound by the laws of physics or physicality, to say nothing of the various entities which have carved out most of the royalties that an artist can make for themselves.
This was not Spotify vs CD sales. By 2005 everybody (even the labels) knew the writing was on the wall and physical media was going to be legacy niche. Digital retail grew fast from there (faster than CDs replacing tapes for a few years) and by 2011 (still limping through the trench of the 2008 crash) the yearly revenue was not only growing it was outdoing physical media and rising. Not just Apple. Amazon, Google, Bandcamp, Bleep, half a dozen others plus artists and indie networks experimenting with direct marketing and retailing. The physical vs digital fight was over at all levels of industry strategy when Spotify was founded and smartphones were a rumor, and music was well on track to a complete digital transition by the time the monster escaped scandinavia.
What Spotify actually did was cannibalize digital retail. Because of course it did: it used massive capitalization AND ignoring pesky laws/policies about actually compensating people creating the work Spotify's service depends on to give that work away to consumers for essentially free, until they'd created that expectation in the market and had enough pull as a channel to buddy up with labels (and the ironic thing is it's not even clear how profitable they can be, maybe leading the charge to the bottom has downsides).
> Copyright, in particular, should not exist in its current form, especially with digital data that is not bound by the laws of physics or physicality
Copyright conventions become more important in the face of falling barriers to reproduction and transmission, not less. That's how they got created in the first place: physical copying got industrialized and could take place with scale and ease that was unheard of before then. And the rationales behind them are still solid today, because they're about the economics of creation, not distribution.
The economics of creation are meaningless if distribution lacks physical scarcity. That is the entire problem with copyright in the digital age -- it is physically impossible to control (i.e. prevent) consumption once the consumer has the data, and for IP like music this is impossible to control. Sure, we can attach DRM and technological controls to our work, we can form massive databases of royalties distribution, we can falsely moralize until our faces turn blue, we can even try to craft laws and legislation to get what we ant. But all these things are meaningless in the digital land of infinite plenty to a determined enough adversary, and some music fans are adamant (yet also kind enough to share with others)
If copyright (and DRM) was enforced the way some wanted, we wouldn't have a rich history of remixes, recontextualizations, or bootlegs that allow a work to live on far past its shelf-life. Memes would be a shallow husk of what they are today. We wouldn't have many, many genres of music, and things like the Amen break wouldn't exist and we'd all be worse off for it.
For that reason copyright needs to be abolished. There are other ways of monetizing intellectual property. Once a given work is released to the public, its creators have literally zero control over it, despite the technological artifices we construct otherwise.
> The economics of creation are meaningless if distribution lacks physical scarcity.
As if nobody has to actually create the first instance of a given work, it's just copies all the way down.
That's why the economics of distribution/reproduction are distinct from the economics of creation. Maybe it's clearer if we use the term invention. The major input is time, time to develop the faculties needed to invent/create -- often years if not decades -- and then the time needed to put into a specific work.
The legal claims/controls on distribution give inventors leverage they can use to get better returns on that time, which provide better incentives.
> Copyright (and DRM) was enforced the way some wanted, we wouldn't have a rich history of [blah blah blah]
Copyright was enforced for literally centuries and for much of that period we got a rich history of works which borrowed in a dozen ways from other works, because actual copyright law has both boundaries and blessed borrowing.
I swear, so many tech folks got half a narrative in their heads about draconian DRM as digital gulags and lost their minds to a manichaean all-or-nothing view on the topic.
Yes yes the evil suits from 1999 probably wanted to super-glue your 1/8" output and lock you out of control of your machine. Again, almost 20 years ago the basic truce on that battle was defined. There's always going to be some activity that can't be controlled, but that doesn't mean you can't define and encourage legitimate activity, so we keep the basic bargain because giving inventors/creators a say in how/where/pricing for their work is both helpful and decent, but we don't try suing individuals over their uh "freely-sourced" media collection or install policing malware.
This isn't digital hitler on every last device vs total free-for-all. It's saying Amazon can't sell your ebook or music without compensating you. And maybe even that Spotify doesn't have the right to give away tracks for free or a pittance, that buffet streaming is close enough to ownership that it calls for artist payouts that are closer to the scale of retail than broadcast. You don't need total control to get there, and we have the levels of control to make this happen.
> Memes would be a shallow husk of what they are today.
Oh no not the memes, known for their fullness and depth.
But also no, not the memes, since it'd be vanishingly unusual that any of them would end up in court let alone to be found to violate copyright law.
> There are other ways of monetizing
It's a well-known fact about creative paths that they're not littered with the luxury of money-making opportunities. There are a few ways of doing it, but they're legs of a stool, and the number of inventors/creators who have the stool up to even 3 legs is not large. Suggesting they give just one little leg knocks over a lot of stools, and for what?
> Suggesting they give just one little leg knocks over a lot of stools, and for what?
A great filter, for one, that eliminates those that do art for money in favor of those that do art for the sake of doing art. Personally I don't want output from the money-motivated. I want art for art's sake. The made-for-money stuff is bland and lowest-common-denominator. It is essentially trash.
First, the idea that art is inundated with people who are just in it for the money isn't just wrong it's funny. Who is this crowd of cold dollar-driven people who pass over high-value careers like business, finance, medicine, tech, etc and say "yeah, being a musician is my gravy train, even though I don't give a damn about it?" Like, insert Drake-in-Orange-Coat meme here, right? Even with the rare outlier successes (like Drake), everybody knows the arts are a lottery ticket. Nobody is doing it just for the money. Especially music.
Second, it's pretty iffy that only low-quality succeeds economically. Sure, everyone can think of examples that somehow succeed with limited merit, but you can't sustain the thesis that well-rewarded work is mediocre without ignoring a lot of strong yet widely appreciated and profitable material.
But even those two big points are minor compared to the most important one:
Everyone needs money. Even artists who do what they do for love. It's the legs of their stools you're suggesting "filtering"/kicking out too.
When someone can't earn money doing what they love, they have to spend time doing other things in order to get the money. And that's time they're not creating art and time they are not refining their craft.
What you're "filtering" out is the peak of the skill they could have developed with more time as well as the art they could have created with it. Maybe even the attention and focus they have to doing it at all, hijacked by all the ways necessity can preclude even love.
I'm probably more on your side that you think WRT the law and copyright law but let's not pretend Spotify, Uber, and Lyft are doing some social good. They're greed-driven corporations (a bit redundant, but it's especially true for them). They may have partially broken up the walls around their particular industries, but not to democratize them, just to take ownership of whatever they can grab.
And in doing so, each has failed to realize better solutions for people. Uber & Lyft have increased our dependence on wasteful, dangerous, expensive personal vehicles. Spotify is a worse model than Bandcamp for indie artists. It's also a worse model than pretty much every other streaming service in that it pays so little to artists. So, yeah I don't like it when rich people break the law to get more rich at society's expense. We should be breaking the law to make society better.
Ergo, piracy and buying music on bandcamp. Still very viable options. I am close to publishing an EP on bandcamp myself. But I cannot deny how handy Spotify has been with musical pursuits. Spotify may rule the roost but we still have Bandcamp, Beatport, JunoDownload, Amazon Music, iTunes, Discogs marketplace, and others.
And I would say Spotify is doing a social good. As a nobody artist, being able to point people to stuff on Spotify is really compelling. Any other way I'd have to force people into either buying or using an app they are unfamiliar with just to listen to it. That said I am not trying to make money from music, that is just foolish.
> And I would say Spotify is doing a social good. As a nobody artist, being able to point people to stuff on Spotify is really compelling. Any other way I'd have to force people into either buying or using an app they are unfamiliar with just to listen to it.
Well, I understand where you're coming from here, but that's not really Spotify doing a social good, it's just the inevitable effect of their cultural dominance. Everybody[1] has Spotify. But they've taken that position due to their unethical growth plan.
Anyway, I've realized that we're discussing multiple things, not one thing. Spotify can be bad for artists who want to make money off their art, while being good for those who don't want/need to make money from music.
There are lots of other examples of this happening too... I believe some of the early nintendo retro releases were emulators running pirated roms