Any sauce on the KGLW story? Had not heard of this.

If you use Spotify to listen to artists, you certainly don't actually respect them. Fuck you people who give money to Spotify.

It have never been a fight against privacy, it's a fight against freedom

We should stop pretending piracy is some fringe problem instead of a pressure valve. When artists and creators use the internet primarily to sell and self-promote, they’re still participating in the same system even if they’re not Facebook or Spotify. Scale doesn’t change the outcome.

We can’t have the internet we claim to want and treat it like a digital busking space. Those two ideas don’t coexist. Once monetization enters, everything starts bending toward the same endgame, tracking, ads, artificial walls, data collection, subscriptions. It always converges there.

Content creators are part of the enshittification problem. Piracy is a stopgap response to it. A way people push back against a system that turns sharing into commerce. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the result of trying to force a market model onto a space that was built for sharing ideas and collaboration, not sales.

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 It’s really outdated to think exclusive ownership is possible online.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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

How dare they, someone should call, PETM. People for the ethical treatment of music. Those poor songs locked up all day.

The major labels are still the biggest evil

Spotify & Co. make advance payments to the labels to be allowed to use their music catalogues. These advance payments are then recouped with the streaming revenues. However, if the revenue is less than the advance, the difference remains with the labels as “breakage”. If a streaming service pays a label US $1 million as an advance for the contract period, but the label’s catalogue is only streamed to the value of US $750,000, then the label has US $250,000 in additional revenue that does not have to be distributed to the artists.

https://musicbusinessresearch.wordpress.com/2024/10/14/the-music-streaming-economy-part-18-breakage-in-the-digital-age/?hl=en-US#%3A%7E%3Atext=It+is+revenue+that+cannot%2C5%5D

gonna have to wait an extra 2 months to get that gold plated shark tank.

Anna’s

No, they just released metadata as the first batch. The rest will follow.