I’m an artist with music on Spotify. I honestly don’t know how I feel about this.
I know Metallica got a lot of shit about Napster back in the day, but I can’t help but feel like they were right. They were (by my recollection) trying to ensure artists still have a claim to their body of work. I know the industry has come so far since then, but it feels like the moment everything started to slowly become “content” and not art.
I just want real people to actually enjoy my music. I don’t expect to make a living or even real money off my music, but I also don’t like someone else making money off my art and using it to train AI models.
I made something meaningful, no one else gets to decide that they wanna commodify it or use it to make slop.
As a former professional, now semi professional musician: we make our money playing gigs and selling merchandise, not by getting paid by Spotify. Go ahead, pirate all you want. But also go to shows, buy merch, if the bands are on bandcamp, buy their shit.
From a musician to another, as someone else replied, if you’re making your work available digitally then you immediately lose control over if people pay for it or not. The good thing is, the ones who want to support you will if you give them a way. But you just can’t coerce them anymore. Spotify and other similar platforms are getting the whole cake because of the convenience that they offer, that’s it. And I’m sure you know how little of that cake trickles down to you.
I get why this feels personal, but I think there’s a deeper problem with the framing. The internet was never meant to be anyone’s marketplace. It was meant to be a place for people to share ideas and work freely, not a storefront.
The moment we decided the internet should function like a sales platform, artificial scarcity became inevitable. That’s when art turned into “content,” and creativity got optimized for algorithms instead of people. Freedom and monetization can’t really coexist online the business model always wins.
This was done by an archival group, primarily for the purposes of preservation. Don’t know if it helps make you feel better, but at least personally I think complete archives of human cultural output, if possible, are important. So much has already been lost over the course of history
Anything you post online should be considered permanently online. It’s really outdated to think exclusive ownership is possible online. The way I think about it is that anything I put online is for everyone, good or bad, and not for profit.
I’m an artist with music on Spotify. I honestly don’t know how I feel about this.
I know Metallica got a lot of shit about Napster back in the day, but I can’t help but feel like they were right. They were (by my recollection) trying to ensure artists still have a claim to their body of work. I know the industry has come so far since then, but it feels like the moment everything started to slowly become “content” and not art.
I just want real people to actually enjoy my music. I don’t expect to make a living or even real money off my music, but I also don’t like someone else making money off my art and using it to train AI models.
I made something meaningful, no one else gets to decide that they wanna commodify it or use it to make slop.
People are able to download your music illegally if they aware you exists and ai companies was also able to train models before the scrape
As a former professional, now semi professional musician: we make our money playing gigs and selling merchandise, not by getting paid by Spotify. Go ahead, pirate all you want. But also go to shows, buy merch, if the bands are on bandcamp, buy their shit.
deleted by creator
From a musician to another, as someone else replied, if you’re making your work available digitally then you immediately lose control over if people pay for it or not. The good thing is, the ones who want to support you will if you give them a way. But you just can’t coerce them anymore. Spotify and other similar platforms are getting the whole cake because of the convenience that they offer, that’s it. And I’m sure you know how little of that cake trickles down to you.
I get why this feels personal, but I think there’s a deeper problem with the framing. The internet was never meant to be anyone’s marketplace. It was meant to be a place for people to share ideas and work freely, not a storefront.
The moment we decided the internet should function like a sales platform, artificial scarcity became inevitable. That’s when art turned into “content,” and creativity got optimized for algorithms instead of people. Freedom and monetization can’t really coexist online the business model always wins.
This was done by an archival group, primarily for the purposes of preservation. Don’t know if it helps make you feel better, but at least personally I think complete archives of human cultural output, if possible, are important. So much has already been lost over the course of history
Anything you post online should be considered permanently online. It’s really outdated to think exclusive ownership is possible online. The way I think about it is that anything I put online is for everyone, good or bad, and not for profit.