It's a compensation model meant to spread the payment for that one time cost among the many people who benefit from it Allowing unrestricted access creates a free rider problem where those one time costs never get paid and the product never comes into existence
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Space__Horse and
Having been on the other side of the debate, in hindsight it's very tiresome pretending not to know how this works for the one thing you care about even though it's applies in many, many situations It's the whole "Why do my taxes pay for a road I don't drive on" thing
1 reply 2 retweets 49 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Space__Horse and
People love to suggest that musicians stop charging money for records and instead make their money from live shows but by this logic they can't charge for live shows either After all, the cost of a show doesn't change based on how many people are physically in the audience
1 reply 4 retweets 49 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Space__Horse and
The cost of having the show is already sunk, right, now that they're already performing why shouldn't I be allowed to just sneak in to watch for free, it doesn't take anything from them materially
1 reply 3 retweets 34 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Space__Horse and
The big difference here is that musicians benefit directly from the show, whereas record companies (and book publishers) gobble up the vast majority of the profits from a record (or book). Shows are also easy to gatekeep. It's easily possible to prevent people from gatecrashing.
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Replying to @WenSchw @arthur_affect and
It's entirely possible to limit the number of people who go to a show, it's not easy to sneak in. It's not possible to prevent people from downloading a PDF of a book or an MP3 of a record. This is why you change your business model instead of futilely trying to stop this.
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Replying to @WenSchw @arthur_affect and
Book publishers generally charge far less for an e-book than the physical copy, record companies put music for "free" on YouTube and Spotify. They found that video game piracy dropped to very low levels when video games started being sold online for cheaper than physical copies.
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Replying to @WenSchw @arthur_affect and
"Piracy" isn't a theft issue, nor is it a moral issue. It's a market issue where it's very easy to distribute free copies of something that used to cost a lot of money, and those who once controlled the market not being able to keep up with the realities of this new system.
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Replying to @WenSchw @arthur_affect and
You want to prevent people from downloading PDFs of your book or MP3s of your record? Male it easy for them to get, at a cheap price. Set up a merch store and build loyalty with potential fans through online interactions. Post music videos or book reading videos on YouTube.
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Replying to @WenSchw @Space__Horse and
I have heard this spiel before, hell I used to deliver this spiel in college The fact of the matter is that these very low prices ARE NOT HIGH ENOUGH TO PAY FOR CREATORS TO MAKE A LIVING The brave new world is a FAILURE
3 replies 3 retweets 38 likes
Lots of people have tried this shit, lots of them have failed, and if you look at industry statistics the percentage of people making a decent living as "content creators" has likely gone down - WAY down - since the 90s and the days of those awful bloated album prices
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Replying to @arthur_affect @WenSchw and
The Brave New World argument for why the Internet would make artists' lives better instead of worse rested on two basic falsehoods: 1) That most of the cost of selling IP on a physical medium was the physical platform itself (this was never true)
1 reply 2 retweets 17 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @WenSchw and
2) That most of the ceiling on sales was the limitations of the physical platform (also blatantly false)
1 reply 1 retweet 16 likes - Show replies
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