[AlienRobot]

I don't understand this opinion.

The only leverage you have to stop Spotify from taking your music and publishing it without your permission is your copyright of the music.

In fact, every time I see a complaint about copyright it's always "we tried to do something at small scale for some noble purpose and couldn't because of pesky copyright laws," and it completely ignores the massive scale of abuse for profit purpose that would occur if copyright didn't exist.

Think of how AI scraped everyone's books without permission using the flimsy excuse that it's transformative work, except they wouldn't even need that excuse or the transformation. Amazon could just take everyone's books and sell it on Kindle, then kick out all authors because they only need to buy 1 book to resell it as if they were the owner of the book.

[jMyles]

> The only leverage you have to stop Spotify from taking your music and publishing it without your permission is your copyright of the music.

There are a lot of challenges facing a band, including the frustrations of CDBaby and Distrokid. If you told me my music would just magically appear on Spotify without my having to lift a finger (and without having to implicitly endorse them by putting it there), that'd be a huge relief.

> it completely ignores the massive scale of abuse for profit purpose that would occur if copyright didn't exist.

"abuse"? If you can somehow make money by playing music that I've made, nothing will make me prouder. And whatever you're doing that's generating that profit, it will almost certainly increase the likelihood that I can plan a series of shows around it, which will in turn generate income for me. Who exactly is losing here? Where is the "abuse"?

> Think of how AI scraped everyone's books without permission using the flimsy excuse that it's transformative work, except they wouldn't even need that excuse or the transformation.

I'm already sold, you don't have to keep making it sound sweeter and sweeter.

[port11]

I find your arguments hard to relate to, given that I buy CDs/on Bandcamp because I want to pay musicians. I usually can't afford concerts, so I won't be there as a channel for merch. If you release all your work under permissive licenses, how do you expect to be supported?

[jMyles]

Yeah, awesome! I love bandcamp.

You can buy our stuff on bandcamp if you want:

https://justinholmes.bandcamp.com/

In my mental model, participating in bandcamp (and getting your supporter badge) is a sort of "merch". You aren't really buying the music - the music is something you hear as the result of a FLAC file being decoded, and that FLAC file can be endlessly and freely copied.

Even better than the bandcamp model, in my thinking, is for you to get the music via pirate channels like bit torrent or IPFS, listen to it, and if you want to, you can buy album-related merch on the ethereum blockchain. That's the long-term vision.

As far as affording concerts: on sufficiently long time scales, I'm wanting to make our shows free-to-enter, buy-a-ticket-stub-if-you-want. Sadly, a lot of great rooms around the country are locked behind contracts with Ticketmaster/AEG and are prohibited from hosting such a show.

> If you release all your work under permissive licenses, how do you expect to be supported?

I believe that a huge majority of our fans are like you: they _want_ to support us, and the spotify model doesn't really give them a channel for that. Permissive licenses don't prevent people from supporting us on bandcamp and similar models.

[AlienRobot]

I assume that this means you simply make all your work public domain, as you don't believe in copyright?

I don't believe that most creators would willingly let go of their right as you would.

[jMyles]

Indeed I do.

And it's far from a foregone conclusion that what you call "their right" is real - I don't believe I have a right to stop you from copying bytes on your device. That's insane.

And yes, I'm sure that the top .01% of pop musicians for whom the system is working well will hang on, and many more hoping to hit whatever lottery they've hit.

But as I pointed out above, some genres which are experiencing thunderous revivals right now are embracing DRM-free very hard, and even CC as well.

As John Perry Barlow said about his band, The Grateful Dead, when he found himself facing down record labels and movie studios as the only person on the stage who was actually in a band:

"We gave away our so-called intellectual property and became the most popular band performing band in the United States. and we're making one hell of a lot of money giving it away. It was not required that we be absolutely firm in our hold on this material because we recognize something important which is that in an information economy the normal sense of an economy based on scarcity is turned on its head. Value in an information economy is based on familiarity and attention. These are very different principles and and trying to optimize towards scarcity as you are by all of your methods is not going to be in the benefit of creation."