Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by amenhotep 833 days ago
You keep returning to bricklayers and that's a really odd way to analogise it. The bricklayer is tangibly giving away the results of his labour - once he's finished building a house, he doesn't have it any more. Musicians are not giving Spotify their music! They're not sitting there slaving away at an album, handing it over to Spotify, and being left with nothing. It's still their album.

If musicians were actually left without their music, like the bricklayer, I'd agree with you and I think so would most people. But conversely, if a bricklayer really loved building houses, spent a great deal of time building houses, owned all of them himself and they were empty and he was doing nothing with them, and a company came up to him and said "hey, we like your houses, we have a business letting people go on tours through houses and we make money off it, would you let us run tours through your houses in exchange for a cut of the profits, which will probably be very small but could be large?" then I don't think you can be too scandalised by him taking the deal and making at least some money off these houses that he'd already built and was doing nothing with! Even if you think selling photos of the houses directly to customers is a better model! Especially since he can still do that!