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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

This is the problem right here:

>The musician who was owed $40,000 missed out because a glitch between two databases removed many of his credits. It wasn’t the musician’s fault, but too much time had gone by before anyone noticed. The companies involved declined to pay him.

If the people who owe the money overtly don’t care about doing the right thing, which seems to have been the typical attitude since the recorded-entertainment business was invented, who’s going to be able to fix it? Seems like this is working exactly as designed.

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Getting a major record company to just follow through on the payment of a clearly contracted project is a hassle on its own. It's like they just want to weed out paying any musicians who can't afford to have a lawyer follow up.

Music executives are some of the biggest scumbags around. I’m sorry for my harshness, but I’m trying to be polite. They’re very predatory.

Absolutely. Surprised the music industry hasn't had its own 'Harvey Weinstein' moment because the same stuff happens there.

That's when that artist should tweet the story, along with an admonishment to definitely NOT steal their music

"Definitely do NOT pirate this material just because I won't be paid either way, it's still illegal! I cannot be more clear on this to you, my fans who normally pay for my music"

One has to wonder if it would hurt their credit ratings to not pay their bills to musicians.

Companies always pay when it hurts them not to.

When running a service business the best decision I made was using a factoring service from Welles Fargo.

Big company might specify NET180 on a big contract and still not have remitted payment 200 days in. If you are a small company your recourse is to sue.

If you have a big bank handling accounts receivable they call on day 181 and tell the company that their credit rating is taking a hit for not making payment on time.

Payment gets made. Big companies like good credit ratings, they don’t like paying more to borrow money.

Seems like there is a market opportunity for artists to have a financial partner handle collections on their behalf.

Even if they cared, it might be very hard. The people in that industry are surprisingly not tech savvy, moreover, often, there's very little they can do about it, or worse, very little access to detailed information themselves.

>The people in that industry are surprisingly not tech savvy

As the quote goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" - I'm confident that things would be entirely if the industry suddenly found it in its best interest to become tech savvy.

That's like saying it's OK for me to pirate music because I can't tell the difference between Spotify and PirateBay.

But as long as lobbying is a thing and those companies have a deep pocket I have no expectations that a solution (which I'm sure already exists) will be implemented.

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