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Comment by mattowen_uk | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to brace for the Karma hit here, but this is piracy pure and simple.

Spotify is pay-to-play and the royalties model is designed around that. Artists/Labels get a a very small slice of money from every play. As a Spotify consumer you do not pay for the right to play the track offline - if you did, the Artist/Label would get a bigger slice. If you want to play the tracks offline, just buy the non-DRM MP3 from Amazon or some other place.

For people saying the Labels take all the money anyway, there are many independent artists on Spotify who deserve your money if you play their work.

Most of us here are hard working professionals in our fields - how would we feel if someone said at the end of each week, "Thanks for what you did, it's really useful, but I've decided to not pay you, but I'm going to keep your output anyway and use it forever." We wouldn't stand for it, and nor should music artists have to.

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100% yes it is piracy; but to remove the stigma from the word for a moment, I view this issue as an echo of something I've been thinking about recently:

Our society - civilization even - has fallen victim to the belief that there are certain kinds of control over human behavior that are possible and desirable, kinds of control that have never succeeded in human history, and attempting to lock music in a tiny little box to which very few people have the key, is one of those things that has never worked. To expect that to work now is.. so blindingly short sighted that I personally find it fantastically hilarious when it fails.

I don't necessarily think this applies to all professions or all aspects of human behavior but music itself is older than any human civilization and attempting to lock that away is going to be a fight with human nature itself.

And yes, I realize that some people believe that attempting to change that is a good thing. I'm not one of them.

> As a Spotify consumer you do not pay for the right to play the track offline

Yes you do, this is a specifically advertised feature of Spotify Premium.

> Most of us here are hard working professionals in our fields - how would we feel if someone said at the end of each week, "Thanks for what you did, it's really useful, but I've decided to not pay you, but I'm going to keep your output anyway and use it forever." We wouldn't stand for it, and nor should music artists have to.

When was the last time you paid for software? Were you happy about what you got?

Pay-per-use or pay-per-user simply aren't ethical business models for creative works where all significant costs are up front and fixed.

Last two times I paid for software were Deckset and Intellij Goland.

I was very happy about both and recommend both.

I don't think I get your point. There's lots of quality paid software.

> Intellij Goland

Doesn't JetBrains software include a "permanent use" license?

From rough memory, it's not the latest and greatest version... maybe a release or two older than whatever "the latest" release is?

It's based on when you last renewed your subscription, "perpetual fallback license" and a really nice model

> I don't think I get your point. There's lots of quality paid software.

That builds on tons of FLOSS, which I doubt you paid for, so I guess it's not "high quality"?

I don't understand your point either. Nowhere did I say open source software can't be of high quality, nor did I say that these paid products don't build on top of OSS. Hell, I contribute to open source software regularly.

I just answered plain and simple the question the parent stated, that I bought paid software and that I'm very happy with my purchase.

Look, I pay for JetBrains products as well and am happy to do so, but the vast majority of software I use I don't financially contribute to or very little, (a donation here and there), yet I extract great value from the gazillions of lines of code I utilize, some of them without even realizing it.

So for MOST software we use daily we indeed do not pay, bringing up 2, even 10 examples doesn't help with the fact that these are still exceptions.

Now I also happen to be a big supporter of indie artists and my Bandcamp library is in the high thousands of dollars in purchases.

> Thanks for what you did, it's really useful, but I've decided to not pay you, but I'm going to keep your output anyway and use it forever.

Is indeed exactly the stance many, many commercial companies take when utilizing FLOSS in their products.

The Spotify model also mostly benefits your Taylor Swifts, not the indie artists who actually could use it. They don't care about the small guy just as much as many don't care to at least not violate the terms or spirit of the software they use.

It is also worth noting that many of the major artists that benefit the most from Spotify are copyright maximalists, which basically means

"I not only want to profit off the work I did in my 20s and not allow others to reuse it to build new things, I also want my children to be able to do so 70 years after I die, thank you very much."

P.S. Am a free software maintainer myself, but we're talking about monetary contributions here.

Looking at my stats, Spotify earns my bands somewhere between $0.000022999977 and $0.090333931633 per play.

As an indie artist I'd much prefer they let people just download my music as well, enjoy it and support me in other actually meaningful ways.

The recorded music is just a tiny bit of the service that an artist provides. This whole discussion is just diseased from the pop industry that runs on abusing copyright and drills our heads full of constantly repeated songs.

The idea that this is a healthy artistic environment and has anything to do with actual musicians is ridiculous.

>>As an indie artist I'd much prefer they let people just download my music as well, enjoy it and support me in other actually meaningful ways.

If that's the case, you can set up your own website and distribute your music via torrents, youtube (insert youtube-dl joke hereb), or soundcloud.

As an indie artist browsing on HN, I'm sure they're well aware of the existence of soundcloud.

Which is my point actually, there are many platforms and technology already that let artists allow their users to download their art without incurring a huge cost. A relatively good torrent seed box costs around just 5 usd. So thanks to current technology cost of distributing your work for free isn't that hard.

Yes, Bandcamp is great for that.

Sadly they'll never get the amount of attention, funding etc. as Spotify just due to the fact that they won't earn millions on the backs of artists. Exploitation will always win in this kind of market.

Or Bandcamp, which supports Name Your Price and free downloads.

I buy a DRM-free copy on Bandcamp whenever I can to support artists I really like, and keep the lossless version somewhere safe and on my Plex server.

I'm still subscribed to Spotify, and mostly listen my music there.

There’s also the reverse notion of that: “Thank you for buying what I made, I hope it’s really useful, but I am going to keep it away from you unless you pay me forever”.

I think you’ve just described SAAS

That is not accurate

Spotify is a choice on your behalf. You can pay their monthly fee and get access to their entire library for as long as you pay them

Or you can buy the mp3s own them forever from apple/amazon/etc. The artists never continue to ask me to pay them.

Personally, I find it better to buy the mp3s. I'll use spotify or pandora and put up with the ads when I want to discover or whatever

I agree with your points, but I think the topic of music deserves more nuance.

How would you know what you liked if you never heard it?

Would you pay for music you have never heard before?

At some point artists need to distribute their work, and to try and push their music to people that have never heard it before, so there is always a balance of advertising vs. revenue.

I imagine most people my age recorded songs off the radio onto cassettes. I still don't feel bad about it, because I bought the albums I cared about.

I agree that what we are discussing is piracy, but I don't believe music piracy to be a zero sum game.

In and old school record store you could go there and listen before you buy.

Today there are 30sec excerpts on band camp and Spotify for every song, and there is Youtube.

>how would we feel if someone said at the end of each week...

I'd laugh at him because my work cannot be downloaded and copied freely.

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