[snowwrestler]

Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated. Companies don’t need to control copyright to make money doing it. In fact digital distribution companies make way more money today than copyright holders. Look how much Google, Apple, Amazon, etc are worth, compared to the labels. Spotify alone has more annual revenue than all the big music labels combined. Copyright is the legal lever that allows labels and artists to make a claim on some of that distribution revenue.

This is in fact the origin of the legal concept of copyright: established printers who had more money and equipment than authors would print up copies of popular written works, distribute and sell them, and return nothing to the author.

[bloppe]

> Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated.

Not anymore. Most CDN's will do that for free. Distribution is easy. Spotify makes money because open source pirating networks attract the attention of law enforcement.

[johnnyanmac]

At the scale of Spotify and FAANG, hosting that data gets really expensive, really fast. It's again, why Amazon is a trillionarire from giving "cheap server data" to billionaires.

It's also tech literacy. Artists under may be able to host their own servers, but not well. They'd be the biggest targets of all the big hacks (which still happen to said billion dollar corps in 2023), you would want someone who can secure them for you. And they may not know how to host a server to begin with.

[naasking]

You don't even need to host data and worry about scalability, you can exploit distributed networks like ipfs and BitTorrent.

[naasking]

> Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated.

It is in fact neither expensive, nor complicated, eg. napster.

[johnnyanmac]

I wouldn't call Naptster simple just because it's P2P. And P2P is in fact way more complicated and difficult to do right than a dedicated server. I hope I don't need to describe every disadvantadge and why even Spotify decided to stop using P2P (which isn't purely a control move).

[naasking]

It's simple now because it's effectively a solved problem: your client just uses one of the many robust P2P protocols available.

[saaaaaam]

> Spotify alone has more annual revenue than all the big music labels combined

This is very much not the case. In fact Spotify’s revenue in its last full year was less than half of the combined revenues of the three major record labels for a similar period.

Spotify generated €11.7 billion in revenue in 2022, approx $12.9 billion.

Universal Music Group generated €10.3 billion in revenue in 2022, approx $11.3 billion

Warner Music Group generated $5.9 billion in their fiscal year ending Sep 30 2022

Sony Music generated ¥1.3 trillion (approx $10.1 billion) in their fiscal year ending March 2023.

Total revenues of major labels: $27.3 billion.

Spotify: https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2022/q4...

UMG: https://www.universalmusic.com/universal-music-group-n-v-rep...

WMG: https://investors.wmg.com/static-files/f35e3e8a-8ae2-4960-95...

Sony: https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/er/pdf/22...

[malwrar]

> Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated

Maybe centralized distribution. Bittorrent appears to be a fairly cheap and reliable method for serving content that scales nicely as more people join the swarm.

[johnnyanmac]

cheaper but unreliable.

And at that scale for serving other businesses, people will start being more concious about what and how they seed. People already get into drama over that as is.