Comment by pbasista
13 hours ago
If I was a musician and produced music nowadays, I would not induce regular copyright rights on it. Because, in my opinion, it makes no practical sense. It mostly alienates the users.
I would put the uncompressed flac files of my music directly on my website for everyone to download.
That does not mean that I would not be interested in getting paid. But I would approach it differently. I would charge for broadcasting it on YouTube or Spotify. Or for playing it in venues.
But I would not charge a regular Joe for it. They would be free to download it, play it and redistribute it in any noncommercial way they see fit.
The most important part is this. I would encourage the "buy after you like" model. Everyone is free to listen. And who likes what they hear, is welcome to buy it.
In my opinion, many small bands and solo musicians would benefit from that model. And I think it would also create some goodwill among their fans.
It also would not shut down the mainstream delivery channels. So if someone still wanted to listen to it over Spotify and pay for it that way, they would still be able to do so.
So long as you don't try to go without any kind of copyright. I've heard stories of people releasing their music for free with no copyright only for somebody to download it, register it as THEIR copyright, and then sell it on all the platforms and even send a copyright takedown notice to the original creator.
Better to protect yourself by registering it under creative commons or a similar licence.
Of course, the music should still be protected against the commercial use or reselling.
Well. This is what Soundcloud or Bandcamp do. The problem is that: if it's for free, 99% of people won't pay.
The users usually not paying is a problem introduced by those platforms, in my opinion. They make the entire experience too generic for the regular users to care.
It seems to me that the bands or musicians should distribute their music via their own websites. I think that then the users would care much more.
You're absolutely right
Add a download gate to the mix, remove the optional payment (I promise you nobody's gonna do that) and you're basically describing https://hypeddit.com/.
Instead of paying to download music, the users "pays" by following you across social media / streaming services. Granted it's mostly used for copyright-violating edits, but some musicians use it for original tracks too.
It's how basically any electronic music producer makes a name for himself before they ever sign a contract with a label.
No. No restrictions should be put on downloads. The main point is that the distribution channels should always be free.
What should be gated and limited is the commercial use: reselling, relicensing, using for business, etc.
> the optional payment (I promise you nobody's gonna do that)
Such "promises" seem to be based on no facts. Moreover, they contradict my personal experience.
I would be very interested in using that business model. In fact, I have already used it with other types of services. I have paid for software that is open source, free to download and free to use. Multiple times. Simply because I like the software and I wanted to thank the authors for it in some tangible way.