Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

"Let's give money to the content creators" is exactly what big incumbents want. They want to farm you, the viewer, for big profits, and give the content creators a few pennies in return. Meanwhile they hoover up the lion's share of the profit. We've seen this over and over again. It's rent-seeking.

"Content creators" are part of the problem. Generating endless "content", which isn't very useful or valuable, and creates too much "content supply", which devalues it. This then creates a giant "soup" of content that viewers drown in, trying to find some content that isn't as identically useless as all the rest. But the big incumbents love it, because they use this content soup to collect money from - you guessed it - ad companies. (Those same companies they don't want to make ad-blockers against...)

So now that search is dead, they need to find a new way to drink from the ad-dollar faucet. At first it'll be "pay content creators from AI subscription money", but then AI will be offered "free with ads", and then later "paid with ads". And nobody's going to stop it, because everyone is "happy": the viewer gets their free crap (with ads), the content creators get a few pennies, the big companies rake in billions, and ad companies continue their "industrial welfare" by pouring their excess profits into this whole system as ad-dollars. The great commoditization of eyeballs continues.

Had a similar thought, yeah, Spotify is like this. I don't know what the numbers are, but a very, very large majority of musicians make very little money off of Spotify (Weird Al Yankovic said he made enough in a year to buy dinner for himself).

On the other hand, Youtube is pretty good. You can make some money off of youtube viewings, but what it's really great for is building an audience. Musicians know that Youtube is a good tool for building a successful music career.

As for devaluing content with oversaturation, yeah, agree with this. Ironically, media is both the bread and butter of the internet, but it has also become devalued with the shear amount of it. Still, this isn't a problem of the media companies. Content creators can either chose to engage and or not, and hope they breakthrough.

And you kind of said it, "The great commoditization of eyeballs continues." Money makes the world go round, and nothing is free. If we want a vibrant internet, companies have got to find a way to make money (although, monopolies aren't a good thing, but paying for good content and services seems like a good idea).

A question: Why do musicians put their music on Spotify if they make so little of it.

If the answer is that it's the labels who owns the rights and puts the music there, then the next question is why do the labels do it if Spotify pays so little.

If the answer is that Spotify pays decently to the labels, then isn't all of this just the labels exploiting the artists as usual?

Am not an expert at Spotify, but for at least the musicians i know, they self-publish these days, so it's really not about the labels. For us, Spotify is just another way of getting our music out there. Yeah, we can build a very small audience who'll follow our music, but more over, it's just a way to point interested producers, venues, musicians or listeners to our music.

And actually Spotify hasn't been profitable until 2024. It seems like the problem is streaming music is not a great business model. They pay a tons to labels and (big name) artists, but only get a set subscription fee from its listeners.

It's a the lesser of two evils, because without it, people would go back to bittorrenting music or using things like the Apple Store, where you don't have to buy an entire album, you can just buy only the songs you like for a couple bucks.

Btw, to all that are reading this, actually, found out the that Weird Al's music makes a lot more from Spotify than buying himself a sandwich - His rights holders get paid by spotify. These middlemen then take a cut and pay Weird Al. But on top of this, since Weird Al does parodies, the musicians he parodies also take a share (Michael Jackson, Nirvana...).

He got 80 million streams of his music in 2023, which paid out $386k to his rights holders according to a Spotify payout calculator. Not great, but not bad. https://musically.com/2023/12/01/weird-al-yankovics-spotify-...

While I'm partial to your cynic interpretation — after all Cloudlfare is a for-profit US business —, the model isn't that far from what Jaron Lanier had proposed in ’Who Owns The Future?‘ (2010).

In the book he explains how these micropayments would be sent out to all the websites you visit, etc. And you can have a built-in mechanism to combat the "star system" that tech automatically enables, where a few people get the most money.

Lanier's proposal was that ISPs take charge of this issue, but perhaps Cloudflare can make it work. The less cynical interpretation would be that later they federate the system or even turn into a non-profit.

I don't think every website you visit should be paid. Who says this random website even deserves payment? This would incentivize people to use tricks to redirect traffic to their websites (which already happens..). Imagine a world where, in order to step into a retail store and browse the merchandise, you had to pay $0.25. Payment systems are already a nightmare, this would add headaches. And just because it's a non-profit or federated doesn't mean anything; show me a non-profit and I'll show you a hierarchical organization with a rich board, poor workers, and problematic outcomes.

People need to think long and hard about why they think there should be unlimited stuff on the internet. Have you looked around? It's mostly crap. Random scribblings by opinionated amateurs, exhibitionists shilling snake-oil, "products" like online games or unlimited videos designed to sell your personal information for a profit, "news" that is 100% gossip, and an unlimited number of echo chambers. We need less incentive for all this crap, not more. But ads are never going away, so it's moot.

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