I mean sure this is a subset of what's happening to the whole economy -- the middle class is vanishing, corporations are posting record stock prices while everyone struggles to get paid I posit that's because it's one general phenomenon -- the price of labor diving toward zero
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
The role of Big Tech in "disintermediating" against "rent-seekers", the ethos of "I can always find someone to do what you do for slightly cheaper, until the price reaches the lowest level it possibly can", the whole Uber/Fiverr/AirBNB phenomenon
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
And I don't get how people don't see the conversation about IP and piracy as the *same conversation* "Well, the price point you have to compete with is $0 All you're actually charging for is the convenience of not having to look for a torrent"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @lawnerdbarak and
People want to pay for art they like. That remains true. And it's how people with Patreon and large, niche, fanbases work. Sci Show is free to watch on YouTube, and yet it has Patreons.
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Replying to @phyphor @lawnerdbarak and
People *want* to pay for art they *like*, but in the old days they *had* to pay for art they were merely curious enough to take a look at (And then the ones who actually were fans and really liked it paid more)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
The latter model is objectively "worse for fans" because you have to pay more money, but that also makes it better for creators Once you hit a certain ceiling it is, I hate to say, a zero sum game
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
Like shit "selling merch" or whatever isn't new In the old days, if you liked the band you had to buy the album first just to hear the music, then you ALSO bought the merch Removing the first step is objectively taking money away from the band
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Replying to @arthur_affect @lawnerdbarak and
In the old days music was played *on the radio*. You could hear music there before buying it. Or you could listen to music in a shop before buying it. I do remember this from not that long ago.
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Replying to @phyphor @lawnerdbarak and
Radio stations were controversial when they first appeared, and the mechanical license negotiated for their existence was a hard-fought legal battle And listening to music in the record store was fairly inconvenient and annoying and *also* a hard-fought legal battle
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
And yeah it's easy to dunk on the rightsholders in these disputes -- "If they had their way *libraries* wouldn't exist, *VCRs* would be illegal" -- but it's silly to pretend the financial tradeoff was just made up and doesn't exist
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They did not, in fact, just decide radio stations don't need to pay anything and can just broadcast whatever they want if they bought a copy of the record Just like they didn't decide VCRs meant everyone should be able to tape movies off TV and sell them for a buck
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Replying to @arthur_affect @lawnerdbarak and
No, but also, the fact that CDNs need to spend a ridiculous amount of money to ensure that *they have a distinct copy per user* is also bullshit but it's where we are.
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Replying to @phyphor @arthur_affect and
As one who worked in radio, pre-Internet, I can tell you, there's a reason radio stations didn't tend to play just any old song off the albums we got (college stations could do that, but commercial stations tended not to)
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