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.
Random idea: do you think a platform for crowd sourcing / funding ideas could go well for musicians? Like a feature request in software, where users can like a post about a feature to show interest, except it would use dollars instead of likes. Fans could publish an idea for a song they like and donate $5 or whatever. If it’s a popular idea, more people donate to it and the artist takes notice (having now been somewhat paid to produce it).
And it’s probably training gen AI models as we speak to put music artists out of what little profitable work there is left. Very few people value music as much as they do visual art.
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.
Random idea: do you think a platform for crowd sourcing / funding ideas could go well for musicians? Like a feature request in software, where users can like a post about a feature to show interest, except it would use dollars instead of likes. Fans could publish an idea for a song they like and donate $5 or whatever. If it’s a popular idea, more people donate to it and the artist takes notice (having now been somewhat paid to produce it).
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
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And it’s probably training gen AI models as we speak to put music artists out of what little profitable work there is left. Very few people value music as much as they do visual art.