Comment by afavour
10 hours ago
I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists.
But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.
> how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists
Spotify was praised as an alternative to piracy that gave some money to artists at a price that consumers wouldn’t complain too much about.
You don’t have to look at Spotify, though. Look at all of the people who won’t even pay Spotify or Netflix rates for content because they know they can pay $0 to pirate it.
Sorry my friend, but Netflix is not a good product. It has a limited selection and, at least for my account, a lot of commercial ads. I am not pirating but I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
bTW - I stopped watching Netflix.
Netflix was just an example.
> I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
I don’t know what plan you were on, but mine doesn’t have ads.
This kind of proves my point, though: People don’t want to pay for things (including the ad-free level) so they use it to justify piracy as being superior for various reasons.
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Kids of varying ages that I've spoken to often talk about the environmental impact (mind you, I live in a fairly liberal/left leaning part of the country), among other things.
At the risk of over generalising, I mostly hear a lot of shit talk from younger generations, distrust from millennials, and more excitement and interest from Gen-x-ish and older.
As with many things, there's a certain level of hypocrisy to the shit talking, because teachers are at the schools are complaining to parents about the kid's use of AI, and pointing out that they will automatically fail any writing that seems to be using AI.
AI has been a culturally radioactive PR disaster of truly epic proportions. Aside from whether or not it works, there are so many established catastrophically negative talking points - steals from creators, destroys the environment, is coming for your job - I'm not sure its reputation can be recovered.
if the internet did AI will as well. after all the internet was (and is) full of scams and p*dos, yet people use it the whole day, for everything.
Does it's reputation even matter? Everyone with money is pushing it, heavily. The government is even stepping in to stop any kind of punishment when it's factually shown that they are stealing water. The people will learn to tolerate it whether they like it or not, eventually.
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spotify still pays artists. it's just a shitty deal.
most big ai will never compensate anyone
Is it really much different to how much artists got from radio?
Most artists never got radio money because it went into a label slush fund and was spent retaining the tent pole artists.
The overall economics are wildly different.
Radio didn't pay much, but it was promotion for the album.
Spotify doesn't pay much, and it _replaces_ the album.
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The big difference was radio wasn't on-demand. You couldn't just listen to a complete album. If you wanted to listen to your favorite artist, you couldn't do that on the radio without listening to a lot of other stuff.
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For a lot of artists they’re paid a rounding error. The core question is whether they’re paid enough to make a living from and the answer is no.