| ▲ | slg 6 days ago |
| >As a musician, fuck everything about this Pretty wild to include a comment like this in the testimonials. Sure, you can disagree with the musician on philosophical terms over IP laws and many consumers will always prefer "free", but to put this in your testimonials shows that the developers take pride in the act of pissing off musicians. That just rubs me the wrong way. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 6 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Musicians are not the consumers, users are the consumers. Some musicians will always be unhappy, this is unavoidable due to complex issues around IP rights, compensation for art, and the length of time it takes to make changes to these systems (not to mention simply how much existing content is out there new and current artists are competing against, attention economy and all that). n=1, I am optimizing for access to as much content as possible while providing as little economic benefit to corporations as possible (ie Spotify) while still supporting the artists I enjoy (whether that's via venmo, paypal, buying their vinyl, buying their digital versions from bandcamp, etc). I also enjoy cheeky devs/builders, can't take any of this too seriously, we're all dead eventually. |
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| ▲ | slg 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Musicians are not the consumers, but it's their work being consumed and this software would have no purpose without them. And to be clear, my problem isn't that this software upset some musicians. It's that the developers highlighting that fact as part of their marketing suggests they take pride in angering musicians. That is a level of disrespect that goes way beyond the sort of passive consumer level disrespect of wanting something for free. It's active hostility compared to mild selfishness. | | |
| ▲ | lukan 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It is one musician whose negative comment is displayed along with people complaining that the whole thing is slow garbage. You might be reading too much into it. | | |
| ▲ | partomniscient 4 days ago | parent [-] | | One musician can be ripped off and not compensated and have to take the 'big guys' to court on the off-chance they find out about their work being used despite the (fucked up) copyright laws [0]. It is a massive problem. It's the rich poor divide with propoganda fucking over the genuine little people in favour of the richer/established/more connected people. Human life is like this. Call it out if you see it if you value truth over greed. The future is built on the past. Claimed "Ownership" of the past fucks up the present for the established powers over creativity (e.g. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act). AI just takes it to a whole 'nother level. [0] https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/unauthorized-rap-samples/ |
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| ▲ | ada1981 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think it’s just funny to post bad reviews. | |
| ▲ | protocolture 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I am kind of sick of Musicians complaining that culture is so accessible. Its truly the case that if it wasnt for radio and the legal frameworks developed to deliver radio we would probably be looking at incredibly heavy gatekeeping for music. Humans in general are better off with tools like this. And I for one am glad that these developers are showing off who is angry. Heck things could be a lot better right now if it wasnt for Metallica. | | |
| ▲ | fiddlerwoaroof 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I like Pete Seeger’s paraphrase of his father: “Plagiarism is basic to all culture”. I think we underestimate the damage to society at large when “remixing” the work of others is legally fraught. The mere reproduction of a previous performance is not additional work for the artist and so does not require compensation: to demand royalties undermines the fundamental structure of art for most of history. | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | As a musician: that's totally fine, we can argue the philosophy of it all day and what the law should or shouldn't be. But right now it is what it is and people are basing their careers off that status quo. There should be some respect for that, no? | | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > There should be some respect for that, no? Not really. Like when my friend scolded me the other day for not finishing the dessert I ordered - "trash is burned here, you're contributing to excess methane production." May I be flogged for my excess methane production. I will present myself with no resistance, so long as the floggings are delivered in a linear scale mapping to amount of methane produced. As soon as all the time in the universe is spent flogging the decision makers at all the oil and gas companies, I'm right there. People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked. | | |
| ▲ | mitchitized 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked. Astonishingly ignorant hot take. Music is what MUSICIANS DO. Some of them are also performers, many are not. What they create is the same as what a painter does, or even a chef or architect. However it is not a physical good so people with tiny brains think that means "iT's FreEEe!!1!" when each musical instrument used costs money, the recording cost money, the distribution cost money, the filing/registration costs money, and then there's all the years of time and effort spent learning how to do all of this. The fact of the matter is that right now music is treated very similarly to software. There is ownership and copyright, and being able to make a digital copy for minimal cost/effort does not magically remove that ownership. If you don't like it then you should change the laws. It's like being mad at cops because of the speed limit, when the likely culprits are your local city council. | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I think you're misunderstanding the point GP was trying to make. Artists and musicians in particular seem to think that copyright is their friend. Because, in theory, it's a mechanism by which a revenue stream could appear when you produce artwork. But copyright is not the musician's friend at all. It's a mechanism by which record labels consolidate power as the middlemen and route revenue to their executives with very little money ever going to artists. and with every technological shift, the labels find a way to give less and less to the consumer and give less and less to the artists. So now it's extremely unusual for somebody that's a fan of some music to actually purchase that music, and artists are getting paid less and less when people do listen to their music. My personal belief is that systems that allow people to get paid when they're not working are not sustainable, and therefore intellectual property has a fundamental flaw. The end game for musicians is to perform live and use their recordings as advertisements for that. That makes them very similar to jobs I've held my whole life where the second I stop showing up for work is the second I stop getting paid. | | |
| ▲ | secstate 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's a pretty nice fundamental law. Explains the rot that occurs with land ownership as well. Really, stopping wealth accretion via non-action would probably help with some of the nastier outcomes of a regulated market economy. I suppose it's probably too late for us, however. Revolution, ahoy! | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 5 days ago | parent [-] | | It's literally the whole thing about labor vs. capital. | | |
| ▲ | secstate 5 days ago | parent [-] | | haha, I swear I read Marx and Engels, but it was 25 years ago. So I suppose the problem we find ourselves in now is the feedback loop of capital sources being so well endowed there's no risk of investment to create more capital. |
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| ▲ | protocolture 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >My personal belief is that systems that allow people to get paid when they're not working are not sustainable, and therefore intellectual property has a fundamental flaw. The end game for musicians is to perform live and use their recordings as advertisements for that. That makes them very similar to jobs I've held my whole life where the second I stop showing up for work is the second I stop getting paid. Could not agree more. |
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| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't know how you can square that with the fact that when people bought records musicians made more money. Your metaphor is also incredibly impersonal. What about stealing a sandwich from a homeless person and saying "well society already fucked them over big time." It's a drop in the ocean compared to all the meals he's already missed for other reasons. | | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > I don't know how you can square that with the fact that when people bought records musicians made more money. Everyone used to make more money, and anyway this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior, which is my argument. I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to me why this basic fact of piracy needs to be restated so often but I guess I'll do it again: Stealing a sandwich from a homeless person deprives a homeless person of a sandwich. Downloading a song deprives nobody of nothing - they can still sell the song. You can't reasonably compare these two completely different actions. You can make other arguments against piracy if you want but it simply isn't theft. Also my original was talking about orders of magnitudes difference. Burning my leftover pastry being the equivalent of like, a millisecond of the methane output of Chevron. Stealing a sandwich from a homeless person is 1 / 336580 vs, what, do I gotta do the math here to show how astronomically small my output is compared to chevron? | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to me why this basic fact of piracy needs to be restated so often Woah, woah, let's back up here. You made a metaphor about orders of magnitude. I asserted that orders of magnitude on the level of the global environment and the individual human are very different and provided you with a metaphor to illustrate that. I made no suggestion that piracy was theft so you had no need to correct me on this "basic fact." > Everyone used to make more money It's not clear what you're saying with this. Maybe we should just continue the trend and say no one should earn any money anymore? Honestly confused by this one. > this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior How did we come to the current model? Everyone was happily getting recording contacts with advances for instruments, studio time and touring logistics until one day MegaCorps said "let's instead move to a model where everyone pays the absolute minimum, if anything at all, and then try to split the much lower profits between the same number of actors?" Come on, I'm happy to criticise companies like Spotify all day but they weren't the driving force in creating the current model and having some of the richest people in our society sit around in forums like this saying maybe musicians shouldn't be paid at all really isn't helping | | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > Everyone was happily getting recording contacts with advances for instruments, studio time and touring logistics until one day MegaCorps said "let's instead move to a model where everyone pays the absolute minimum, if anything at all, and then try to split the much lower profits between the same number of actors?" Basically yes. Except for the "happily" bit before. Even the biggest artists were always getting shafted by the labels, is it surprising that the labels would fuck their artists over even more given the chance? Taylor Swift's fight with the label may legendary but there's thousands of working musicians out there scraping by getting credits on movies and bigger band releases (jazz and whatnot) and they remain as poor as they ever have, from vinyl through to streaming. So I just don't think it's ever been something that random consumers really influence, it's always been the labels fucking over the artists, and that's where my scale argument comes from. Me downloading a song has nothing to do with record labels spending the last six decades writing progressively more predatory contracts, fighting every new technology until they can find a way to capture value from it at the expense of their artists, and working with streaming companies to extract every slice of margin they can until the artist gets their $.20 paycheck on ten thousand listens. This argument I don't like: a company found a way to exploit someone so as to sell people something cheaper and then people bought the cheaper thing. It's thus the consumer's fault that the other people got exploited. I see it all the time and that falls under the same umbrella of what I'm arguing against, the idea that corporations are immune to criticism because they're just profit generating algorithms and actually it's on us to make the world better by not buying what they're selling. Why not just cut out the middle man literally and stop the exploitative behavior? So far as I know nobody here is arguing musicians shouldn't get paid. I'm arguing the opposite. |
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| ▲ | account42 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, with that logic we should have outlawed the internet. It's up to you to find a working business model, not up to society to enable the one that you want. | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Maybe you could explain that logical continuation because I don't follow you. Society has so far agreed to legislate in favour of people monetising their intellectual property. By all means people should be free to disagree with that for whatever reason but I feel it's a bad look to make fun of the musicians trying to follow the rules and make a living within the bounds of both law and social contract. |
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| ▲ | cess11 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Some people think that music should mainly be a task for artists, and not for careerists in the entertainment industrial complex. | | | |
| ▲ | welferkj 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure, and "piracy" is part of the status quo. Show some respect for my total disrespect of IP laws and your livelihood. | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Do you feel that putting the quote from the musician in the testimonials was respectful? | | |
| ▲ | protocolture 5 days ago | parent [-] | | If its legit feedback, the musician wanted it to be seen, why would it not be? |
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| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > It's active hostility Not really? If the testimonials are true, then simply making the app itself is an act of hostility. The parent comment is putting it as nicely as it can be put. If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work. There is no honor system in music or data and there never will be. | | |
| ▲ | toast0 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work. People have been recording concerts for decades. Often with a bit of help from the sound crew, which can probably be discouraged by musicians with enough influence, but if the only allowed way to hear a song is to attend a concert, lots of people would rather have a recording that a fan made and distributed. | |
| ▲ | slg 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >The parent comment is putting it as nicely as it can be put. If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work. There is no honor system in music or data and there never will be. I'm just tired of this technolibertarian mindset of "it's not wrong because no one is stopping me from doing it". There is no "honor system" in life either and if you see that as permission to be an asshole, that just makes you an asshole. And if your best defense against being accused of being an asshole is some form of "they couldn't stop me", then you're tacitly admitting to being an asshole. | | |
| ▲ | voidfunc 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Unfortunately the winds are not blowing in your preferred direction. We are being shown time and time again and in increasing frequency that being an asshole is the best way to succeed. | | |
| ▲ | anon_e-moose 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That short-term individual success is at the expense of the wider long-term success. If 10 people live in a lake and I fish more than everyone I will be better off that others. But then everyone else will seek the same individual short-term success because my first step in being an asshole was not punished. We will all end up starving in this scenario. A central authority agreed by all to manage this situation fairly is the way out. Rules agreed to in common beforehand and enforced by a neutral party. | | |
| ▲ | voidfunc 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You're missing the key next step where after you get yours you start figuring out ways to deny others from getting theirs either through bullying, state-supported violence or legal means :) | |
| ▲ | thwarted 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It's only a tragedy if everyone acts the same way. If a few act against the grain then it's no longer a tragedy. The common thief is an example. Also pirating games and movies is another example. | |
| ▲ | ToucanLoucan 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tragedy of the Commons is bullshit. Just one pessimistic, selfish asshole penning out a manifesto on how everyone is just as miserable and awful as he is. It assumes that individuals, left to their own devices, will inevitably over-consume shared resources out of selfishness. But this narrative ignores centuries of evidence to the contrary: communities around the world have sustainably managed commons through norms, trust, and mutual accountability. And he wasn't just wrong for the hell of it. He used it to argue against immigration and for coercive population control, not to promote environmental stewardship. His model erases the role of governance, culture, and cooperation, reducing human behavior to a simplistic race to depletion. In reality, the commons don’t fail because they’re shared. They fail when they’re mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them. I would go so far to say that the only way this concept has ever come close to being "correct" is the culturally inert modern Western world which has replaced everyone's souls with aimless desires for products and cheap dopamine hits, far from anything approaching our natural state. | | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | History bears out the truth of what you say. Native Americans managed the commons in communal ownership so well that some of their permaculture existed through to today, untended. | |
| ▲ | llbbdd 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | They have demonstrably not - they have generally failed until introducing capitalism-eseque cooperation. "They fail when they're mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them" - yes, these are obvious natural consequences of scale. | | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Not really. It didn't happen in syndicalized Spain. It didn't happen for millennia in ancient cities. Scale being necessary seems to be unique to capitalism and state capitalism (Marxist industrialization requirements). Maybe it was necessary before, I don't know but it's moot. We certainly have achieved post scarcity now and there should be no issues leveraging the tools our ancestors have given us to ensure it's distributed well. | | |
| ▲ | ToucanLoucan 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah but that would make all the people who are rich because they own things very sad, so instead we're just gonna starve shitloads of people to death next to piles of food daily and call it rational. |
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| ▲ | glitchc 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Dawkins in The Selfish Gene demonstrated through experiments that society collapses when everyone is an asshole. It also collapses when everyone is nice. There's an optimum ratio (~23% assholes to the rest) that leads to long-term sustainability. | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This in opposition to millennia of human history, which should teach us that the surest path to human success is cooperation. Why else would we have invented language? | |
| ▲ | reaperducer 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | being an asshole is the best way to succeed. Being an asshole is the opposite of success. Unless you think life is a video game and the score is tallied in dollar signs. In which case, you've already lost. | | |
| ▲ | afarcryfromhome 6 days ago | parent [-] | | this is very naively reductive. it's been shown time and time again throughout human history that being an asshole/ruthless/competitive leads to better outcomes for you and the people around you that you care about. humans are not bonobos. sitting around being nice to each other is not what got us to be the apex species on the planet. people break rules (social norms or legal laws) to get ahead, it is happening continually around you and can't just wish it out of existence. | | |
| ▲ | llbbdd 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Some people seem to think that because they don't want to be assholes that assholes have no reproductive usefulness, and I'm not sure that's valuable. |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then maybe we'll never see eye-to-eye. I grew up with an iTunes account, but I never spent my money on music. Some weeks my family lived paycheck-to-paycheck, some nights skipping dinner. I downloaded my music off YouTube to my 2005 HP Compaq, put it on my iTunes library and synced it to my iPod Shuffle. Didn't weigh on my conscience when I pirated video games or FL Studio either, not then and not now. If that made me an asshole, then 11-year-old me was a supervillain bumping Aphex Twin. Oftentimes I think HN forgets to consider the 99% when contemplating ethics over sous-vide. | | |
| ▲ | 9dev 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Our legal and economic systems just don’t work that way, being poor is no excuse for doing something illegal. Add to that that not all musicians are Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but might just as well have to fight to survive, living from Spotify payout to gig revenue as well. I sympathise with people trying to get access to culture by all means, but we cannot wholesale morally legitimise freeloading because of that. We all get to enjoy a broad cultural landscape, but that can only exist if most people pay for content. | | | |
| ▲ | slg 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | bigyabai 6 days ago | parent [-] | | You actually don't understand the consumer desire for free, if you necessarily conflate it with class warfare and moral grandstanding. It seems to be a karma sink insisting upon this, but this is the hacker ethos. Nobody lords information over anyone, any paywall you erect will eventually fall. For fuck's sake, children are being firebombed in Gaza right now, and this is the imperative ethical hill you choose to die on? Draw out this line of reasoning long enough, and one could argue that Richard Stallman is the worst human alive for "moral grandstanding" the software industry and taking glee in destroying software jobs with copyleft licensing. But more accurately, he ushered in the information age for everyone and prevented it from being cordoned-off behind a proprietary paywall. Yes, he predicated Napster and ThePirateBay and 4chan and all the horrible examples you're apt to draw upon. But he also invariably pushed technology forward - we're better people, that we aren't slaving away remaking the Cairo library for the 30,000th time. Common access to at least some information enables a great deal of art and provides countless value to would-be artists. I'd like to think that the entire human race is bettered with access to information. It would certainly be idyllic if we could compensate artists, authors and scientists along the way, but humanity would be ruined if all information came at-cost. I am willing to fight for a world where individuals have free access to information, and I reckon my tools are more powerful than the publishers who seek to thwart me. I won't stop when the musicians scream out bloody murder, and if you think that's the most immoral thing imaginable then don't ask how 15-year-old me found the money to afford Jimmy John's. | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Argue one way or the other but it's extremely distasteful to use the suffering of children in Gaza in that way. | |
| ▲ | slg 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >For fuck's sake, children are being firebombed in Gaza right now, and this is the imperative ethical hill you choose to die on? Nonsense like this is where I leave the conversation. You can't deny the accusations of moral grandstanding in the same breath you say this. I commented directly on the topic being discussed in a specific HN thread. That does not mean I think this is the most important issue on the planet and the non-sequitur of contrasting a discussion of IP law with children in Gaza being firebombed is just straight up offensive. The "karma sink" here isn't voicing your "ethos", it is you. | |
| ▲ | jazzyjackson 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I love seeing your perspective here among all the hand wringing, thanks for not letting downvotes scare you off. IMO it’s regressive to think just because someone has no money they should have no music, and it’s rich seeing calls for free information get downvoted on the same site singing praises of LLMs, as tho those companies paid a dime for their source material | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > IMO it’s regressive to think just because someone has no money they should have no music The person they're responding to has repeatedly said this is not their position. |
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| ▲ | cindyllm 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Musicians are not the consumers, users are the consumers Yeah but if you want to sell cheese it's probably a good idea to maintain a good relationship with farmers. | | |
| ▲ | prmoustache 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Searching for and playing music from YouTube (including integration with playlists and SponsorBlock), Jamendo, Audius and SoundCloud From what I understand the _farmers_ themselves are distributing their _cheese_ freely on various website and this tool is just a glorified search engine to find them more easily. Not sure why the _farmers_ would complain? | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Some of them are but not all of them are, some of them are having their cheese redistributed without their involvement. The ones who are complaining are the ones who aren't happy, such as the musician quoted in the testimonials saying "fuck everything about this.' | | |
| ▲ | dpoloncsak 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Isn't that literally 'shooting the messenger'? You can Google search for pirated music too. It's not 'Fuck Google' for indexing these, its 'Fuck those sites' for hosting it, right? |
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| ▲ | account42 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not if the cheese can be copied at no cost and there are already more cheese varieties around than anyone could eat in a lifetime. In that word, farmers should have no say in who does and doesn't get to eat cheese or extract a tax from cheese consumption. | | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > there are already more cheese varieties around than anyone could eat in a lifetime. If that's what you think then why don't we just close down all the studios and instrument shops. We've got enough, no need to keep producing it? You can copy and distributed the cheese freely but the farmer still has to spend money taking care of and housing the cows, milking the cows, going through the whole processes of churning and pasteurising and everything else, then packaging it and disturbing it to where you can initially find it. Now after all that you come along and make your perfect atomic copy and walk away saying "Well screw you, you should have no say in any of this..." Then what? What's the incentive to produce and distribute new cheese? You really think it doesn't matter because you already have cheese from the past? Because there's a lot to be said about cheese that captures the spirit of the zeitgeist...(Ok that last bit didn't work in the metaphor) | | |
| ▲ | account42 4 days ago | parent [-] | | There is nothing wrong with people creating new music, either out of passion or because they have some way to get paid for it (patronage, crowdfunding, live performances). But as abundance of available creative works increases we need to re-evaluate what cost we should pay as a society in order to incentivize it. IMO we are at a point where no incentive via copyright is needed and the cost copyright imposes on everyone is way too high. The world only works as well as it does because most people routinely ignore copyright already. And no, in this analogy the farmer doesn't have to keep working for us to have enough cheese - only if someone specifically wants a new kind of cheese. We don't need to bend reality in order to make information scarce for that. |
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| ▲ | atoav 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Your app is living off the work of artists and making it in a way that gives them a way to profit from it costs you nothing, so it is the right thing to do. Show some merch buying options or display a button that allows you to pay for the music as a thank you to the artists or something. Makes you appear better in front of the crowd that would use bandcamp/soundcloud in the first place (so your core demographic) and supports the artists. I am listening to music on bandcamp/soundcloud because I love music and this is a place where you can find new interesting music — not because it is free there. And in my experience as someone who sells on bandcamp many listeners share that spirit. | | |
| ▲ | prmoustache 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > Your app is living off the work of artists and making it in a way that gives them a way to profit from it costs you nothing, so it is the right thing to do. The app just find the music on free sources, probably published by the artists themselves or their agents. How is that living off their work and where do the nuclear developer receive money from the nuclear app users in the process? | | |
| ▲ | atoav 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You read "living of" as a monetary value, that isn't what I meant. That particular app is useless without musicians that upload stuff for free, meaning the fact that musicians do that is of existential importance for it. And that means such an app enters a certain relationship with these musicians. This relationship can be symbiotic (good) or parasitic (bad). |
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| ▲ | elliotec 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is a really shitty take. „Can’t please everyone, might as well piss off the creators and show it as a badge of pride!“ Personally I will never use this software and would actively advocate against it if only to counter the attitude you’re presenting. But mainly because artists should be able to make a living and it’s already hard enough with the meager pennies or less they get from current PAID streaming services. | | |
| ▲ | 1gn15 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Do you, or anyone supporting this comment, have adblock installed? The same argument applies. Don't be a hypocrite. | | |
| ▲ | elliotec 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You do have a point. Feels different but can’t put a finger on it right now. | | |
| ▲ | atoav 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Artists, especially on bandcamp, are often the underdog. Being proud of not paying them is like being proud to watch a street artist "for free", because fuck them for doing it in public. My ethics say: "If you don't like it, ignore it and walk on, if you liked it enough to stop and watch you give them something." Meanwhile most online ads are supporting multinational corporations that already may earn money with your browsing data and try to manipulate your choices every step. All while delivering their ads in a way that makes it a threat to not block them. That isn't remotely the same. If you need my money to survive, give me the choice to pay instead at least. The exact same software could have been marketed as something to discover new music, for free and the musicians would be mostly okay with it. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Artists making a living will in no way be impacted by the use of this software. The only way for artists to make a living through their art would be changes through IP/copyright reform (politics and policy, which will take years if not decades) and the operation of platforms where they can get a more fair share of compensation [1] [2]. One can think a musician's response to this software is absurd and still believe they should be able to live comfortably and with dignity while creating art. Pay these folks UBI if we have to, but the problem is not this software is my point. [1] Spotify Alternatives That Pay Artists... - https://cutoffthespigot.substack.com/p/spotify-alternatives-... [2] How To Support Artists As They Withdraw From Spotify - https://www.nylon.com/entertainment/delete-spotify-alternati... | | |
| ▲ | atoav 5 days ago | parent [-] | | One can be angry for symbolic reasons as well. If your CEO told you to "Get your code on github, it is free", you would probably rightfully question whether they understood the reasons why people develope and maintain open source software in the first place. Similarly here. It is not about the act of people listening to the music for free. If this was a problem, a musician would just restrict access to those tracks. It is about a spirit of taking without giving back, which could be understood as: "Haha you idiots, thanks for providing it for free, I am not paying then". A bit like stopping to watch a street performer, and instead of clapping and (eventually) tossing a coin going like: "We are in a public space, I don't need to pay, idiot. Your own fault!". Technically correct, but ethically wrong and shows they don't value the work of artists. This is just about words and showing some respect, not about money. And since words and showing respect literally cost nothing this makes the insult even greater. | | |
| ▲ | technothrasher 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > Technically correct, but ethically wrong Ethically wrong to watch a street performer but not toss a coin? I do agree that it is ethically virtuous to toss the coin, but ethically wrong not to? I'm not seeing it. | | |
| ▲ | atoav 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Everything exists in thousand shades and ethics is one of those fields where in the finer shades people can and will differ in their assessment. That is in the nature of the thing. I am not saying anyone who listens voluntarily for 30 seconds and doesn't pay a handsome amount is a monster. What I said is that listening, enjoying it and then telling them: "Stupid musician, their fault for giving me the choice to pay, so I don't" makes you a bad person. There are a thousand ethically sound reasons why you wouldn't toss a coin, you could not have one, you could be broke, you could misunderstand the situation, you could have a cultural background where this is uncommon and street performers are getting their share in a different way etc. But enjoying the fruit of their work and then maligning them for giving it to you for free is not only rude, but yes: ethically wrong. |
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| ▲ | 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | sweeter 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | deejaaymac 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Comparing copying data to battery/assault is wild | | |
| ▲ | GlacierFox 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I've copied your sensitive product source code before leaving for lunch then released it to the public for free. Why are you mad? We all die eventually... | | |
| ▲ | Uehreka 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Idk if I’ve ever seen an HN thread dunk on nihilists this hard. It warms my heart. | | |
| ▲ | bigyabai 5 days ago | parent [-] | | It's an AGPL project that seems to be doing fine for itself. The dogpile dunking reflects HN's own purity spiral, if anything. |
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| ▲ | 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | jazzyjackson 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Release your source code under GPL and stop taking life so seriously | |
| ▲ | 1gn15 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, we can share, thank you | |
| ▲ | 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | dingnuts 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | feel free to copy your bank account and routing number into the comment section | | | |
| ▲ | SalmoShalazar 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Your misunderstanding of the point is wild. It’s not a comparison to battery/assault. It’s a reframing of the interaction to help understand the relationship at play here. |
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| ▲ | pxoe 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's completely understandable not just for the usual streaming services (like youtube, etc.) and the grievances there (payouts per play, whichever way it goes, be it that artists getting stiffed or people refusing to come up with even a fraction of a cent), but for something like bandcamp as well, which is kind of 'almost but not quite a streaming service' and more accurately described in a literal way like 'it lets you play music and buy it', from which apps like this just remove the 'buying music' portion completely. For something like youtube, there's hardly any qualms whether it's ethical or exploitative to sidestep that whole thing and whatever else artists may put out around their music (even something like links in video descriptions), because it is just a mess and people just roll with it anyway. But for bandcamp it leans a bit more towards 'taking it for a ride', when an app like this completely removes the aspect of buying music. Perhaps some people might not even get a slightest clue that's even possible cause there is just no such suggestion in the app at all. And if you wanted to get there, it kind of makes it harder to do so, because there's no prominent links to the original pages of songs and albums in the app. Finding or copying a link is a bit non-trivial because there's no such option in album view or track items, there is in playing queue but it's also kinda buried there. It's just the way that something like this completely obscures the fact that you could buy music from bandcamp, or sometimes even download it for free (depending on what artists have set up). It's one of the better platforms for artists, so it's kind of odd to see this 'fuck you got mine' approach to it. It's also kind of just crummy and shoddily made, so even bandcamp webpages seem like a better browsing and listening experience. Bandcamp website isn't the worst for finding and playing music (it may be plain but it's snappy, and their discovery tools are pretty nice), but it's remarkable to make something that works even worse, perhaps just because bandcamp doesn't even have that much going on. |
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| ▲ | charcircuit 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This bypasses the ads of YouTube Music which means that artists are not being compensated for their work. | | |
| ▲ | lelandbatey 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That is a detail which is the responsibility of the artist as a businessperson. If you give away pizza with a big stack of ad flyers, no one would complain when that business doesn't make that much money because no one reads the ad flyers all they do is eat the pizza and toss the ads. We live in a world where said pizza shops want to force you to look at each flyer in the ad stack, but for years they didn't sit you down and make you look with your eyes, instead they just let you take the ads and the pizza and leave. They're trying to crank up the pressure to watch saying "the cooks deserve to be paid" and "you have to let us watch you look at the flyers to eat the pizza, or else you can't leave with the pizza." Don't be fooled, if the musicians didn't want folks to listen on YouTube then they wouldn't put their music there. If you can find a way to look away from the flyers while still eating the pizza, you are not the bad person. Eat and weep for a world where we can't just exchange money for food. | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >Eat and weep for a world where we can't just exchange money for food. Youtube sells subscriptions for YouTube Music if you want to be able to listen to the music in the background or without ads. Violating YouTube's terms of service is unethical. | | |
| ▲ | lelandbatey 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If I open a new YouTube page incognito, I am not asked to agree to any kind of TOS. I agree to nothing, I merely start watching videos. Where is there a requirement that I must watch the ads if I have never agreed to such? Even then, I bring this all up as a YouTube Premium membership holder, someone who has been paying for YouTube Premium since the very day it was announced as YouTube Red! I am also a sponsor block addon user, so I skip the "this video is sponsored by Stupid shoes" or whatever, read by the creators. According to you, am I stealing money from them as well, somehow? | |
| ▲ | ada1981 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Can you explain why TOS violations in general are unethical? | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If you enter into an agreement with someone you should follow the agreement to the best of your ability. Purposefully agreeing to agreements when you know you will violate them is exploitative behavior as you are taking advantage of someone because you are purposefully not holding up your end of the deal when you know that they will continue to hold up their end. | | |
| ▲ | dns_snek 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > If you enter into an agreement with someone Upon review, it looks like you don't have to enter into an agreement with anyone in order to use this software, except its authors under the terms of the AGPL. > exploitative behavior Even if you want to frame it like that, it doesn't look good for you unless you assume we're imbeciles who don't keep score. You do not have any right to complain about exploitative behavior when you willfully exploit hundreds of millions of people by 1000 units and they "exploit" you by 1 unit in return. You're still a net exploiter in the relationship. > when you know that they will continue to hold up their end That's a lie, corporations unilaterally alter the terms of service without offering compensation all time. | |
| ▲ | rpdillon 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You'd be correct if all of these contracts weren't essentially contracts of adhesion. The fact that the user has no agency to change the terms of the contract or really any say at all in what the terms of the agreement are waters down your argument significantly. In fact, the contracts are so asymmetrical that only one party has control over them and can change them at any time. The other party has no agency whatsoever. | |
| ▲ | ada1981 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think in modern commerce TOS are things written in small print most reasonable people read of purposely agree too. I saw some BS in an owners manual for a washing machine that was attempting to imply that by using this machine I agreed to the TOS.. I mean, I guess. It doesn't seem like ethics has much to do with it. |
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| ▲ | edoceo 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Typically they start with something like: by using this $SERVICE you AGREE to blah-blah-blah ($X) If you agree to $X but then don't do it: you're a liar. The terms might be shit. But if you agree to shit terms you should be bound by shit terms. In the olden days: "I gave my word as a gentleman and a scholar" or "a deals a deal, even with a dirty dealer"[0]. Going back on a deal is not ethical; end of. [0] I think it from Futurama. | | |
| ▲ | lelandbatey 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Nah: going back on a somewhat ethical and REMOTELY fair deal made by folks who are even close to equal in power, that's not OK. Also, most of these sites make no requirement that you read and agree to anything; I can open YouTube and watch videos in an incognito tab right now, no EULA/TOS necessary, so how are you to say I am breaking any agreement at all? Furthermore, these "use the service or not" agreements is like saying "accept a government or leave the country". Being handed an ultimatum saying "agree or you can't participate with your peers culturally, and potentially can't even access other local services such as government announcements", that's basically not a deal as there is no negotiation, that's being informed by greater powers of the pound of flesh they expect to extract. Yes, yes I know the law says if you don't agree then you should simply not use the Internet, simple as that. That's clearly not even a possibility to be a functioning member of society at this point, but I guess it'll take some time for the law to catch up. | |
| ▲ | prmoustache 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Typically they start with something like: by using this $SERVICE you AGREE to blah-blah-blah ($X) > > If you agree to $X but then don't do it: you're a liar. You have never been presented any TOS nor agreed to anything if you don't have an account. If artists and youtube don't want us to use their 1 and 0 the way we want, they can pretty easily lock them under registration and payment. The thing is they don't care to do that, so they cannot complain. | |
| ▲ | flkenosad 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If you agree to $X but then don't do it: you're a liar. No, you're unreliable. |
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| ▲ | baq 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Violating YouTube's terms of service is unethical. It’s a breach of contract, but whether this contract is ethical is a different question altogether, as is the question of ethics of breaching of unethical contracts. | | |
| ▲ | prmoustache 5 days ago | parent [-] | | It is not a breach of contract if you never signed a contract in the first place. |
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| ▲ | nadermx 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/15/disney-... Might have a word with you | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 6 days ago | parent [-] | | If you mutually agree to use arbitration then you should use arbitration. | | |
| ▲ | nadermx 6 days ago | parent [-] | | First, I don't see how someone viewing a publicly available stream is an agreement to terms of service. Court cases to back this up ie Netscape. Second, just because you agree to a contract doesn't mean that contract is consionable, not something that shocks the court. And it would have to be up to a court to decided just that. Hence you know disney ended up backing out before the court decided. As arbitration can be considered unconscionable. https://www.newsweek.com/disney-wrongful-death-lawsuit-waive... |
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| ▲ | anjel 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Violating YouTube's terms of service is unethical. I gotta ask, more or less than enshittification? | |
| ▲ | MiiMe19 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Violating YouTube's terms of service is unethical. lol |
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| ▲ | munificent 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > if the musicians didn't want folks to listen on YouTube then they wouldn't put their music there. You are giving musicians way too much agency here. For most musicians on YouTube, they're there because their label and/or their manager wants them there. A big part of why musicians sign with labels and have managers is specifically because they don't have the inclination or expertise to micromanage this stuff. I'm sure in many cases, musicians would rather not be on YouTube at all, but their already-signed nebulously-worded contract with the label doesn't give them any control over that. In a world where everyone is a perfectly spherical rational actor in a libertarian vacuum, your argument would make more sense. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world filled with primates doing the best they can with the weird cognitive capabilities nature gave them and trying to get through each day with a little joy and dignity still intact. |
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| ▲ | guappa 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You think youtube music compensates artists? | | |
| ▲ | GuB-42 5 days ago | parent [-] | | They do. At least for those who are eligible to become YouTube partners, which starts at 1000 subscribers I think. How fair it is depends on what you think is fair, but it is not zero. | | |
| ▲ | guappa 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The amount is important, since it's like trace amounts of money. |
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| ▲ | pxoe 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, which is what I also mention (as more usual streaming services, what someone would immediately think of and which is more geared towards that conventional kind of streaming - which bandcamp is kind of just not), it's just that culturally one is further down the line of being shitty to artists, and something like bandcamp has much lower fees on payments. However yeah, this thing is shitty to artists in about the same way, just relatively even shittier to artists on platforms that are better. |
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| ▲ | Severian 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I 100% agree with this take: adding Bandcamp to this "media" app is a really shitty thing to do. I personally know a few musicians who use Bandcamp to either exclusively make a living (along with touring), or to supplement their income. Some are overjoyed when they get a few sales a week on a release. This POS software denies that opportunity. Either way, 99% of the artists are small independent musicians, and this just skips the Purchase album or track and just freeloads off the small MP3 player on each album page. Its disgusting. | | |
| ▲ | bigyabai 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Artists can disable full-length previews if this is a concern. Otherwise, I don't think Bandcamp's 320kbps MP3s are any more attractive than a YouTube rip. | | |
| ▲ | pxoe 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Previews/free streaming on bandcamp is 128 kbps mp3 only. If you buy music there, you get the whole spread, lossy and lossless, mp3 320/v0, aac, ogg, flac, even wav. (Only thing notably missing at this point is opus, which would be fantastic to have, like for example, opus at 64k (space saving/space efficient) and 256k (quality), although vorbis or aac at whatever quality they have it set to is pretty good as a space efficient option) |
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| ▲ | juanani 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | fsniper 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| When I read the testimonials, my take was the developers are not taking themselves too seriously. It felt well for me. They are not trying to sell one perspective, and not hiding what haters tell too. I suppose I find this refreshing. |
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| ▲ | indigodaddy 6 days ago | parent [-] | | That's my impression as well. It doesn't exactly seem like bragging nor "oh look what we are doing and we don't give af" |
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| ▲ | 30minAdayHN 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Probably they are employing rage marketing? I used to follow this hotel in Ireland, I think, that used to post very aggressive comments against the reviews. It became a thing and people used to stay there just for it. I think there is a TV series recently in the same vein. |
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| ▲ | baq 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Take a look at Ryanair’s X profile. There’s gold over there. | | |
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| ▲ | atoav 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You can limit the number of possible listens without buying on Bandcamp if you prefer people who actually consider paying for artists. But yeah marketing an app as "this is free, we are great, while some musician didn't like it, but fuck them" may not be the cool humorous power move they thought it might be. As a musician and open source programmer myself I don't feel I am automatically entitled to people's money for stuff I put out there. But while my Open source software is about giving back, I actually want people to value my music and pay for it (if they can and like it enough). So the tiniest bit of sensibility towards people who produce those things, often in their spare time, would help and costs exactly nothing. If this was framed more like:
"Discover music that is actually new for free and get in contact with the artists directly" that would be a different story. This may turn out to be a good way to discover new music. And the bandcamp/soundcloud crowd tends to be after new unknown and good music anyways, so that should align with their ways of discovering music and make for a much better elevator pitch than the current one. |
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| ▲ | raffraffraff 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They aren't testimonials. Couldn't be. Nobody would put mostly negative comments on their page like that. Some aren't remotely positive in any way (not even in a "hahaha, fuck the artists, get music for free" way). Maybe they're coming from a comment feed somewhere? |
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| ▲ | graynk 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I am very certain this is intentional. Sorta "look how much we don't care" bravado. | | |
| ▲ | raffraffraff 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Why would they not care if people were saying that the product itself was complete trash | | |
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| ▲ | smcleod 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fairly sure it's just a joke. Who takes testimonials on a products website seriously anyway? |
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| ▲ | fredsmith219 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If a musician doesn’t want them to do this, why do they upload their music to the free site? |
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| ▲ | bfg_9k 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Funny because it made me feel the opposite way! I'll be giving this a spin. |
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| ▲ | lukan 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Have you checked the other comments? |
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| ▲ | 3RTB297 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Most of the "testimonials" I'm seeing are actually negative. >I used nuclear and had a horrible experience with it. It looks bad, you wait for 1 minute to play a 3 minute song, it's slow as fuck. Probably it's because of Electron, but it is used by so many people that I started cringing. Uh.....what? I get trying to lean into being edgy, but a bad user experience? No thanks. |
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| ▲ | guappa 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I mean, if people like these hate it, it must be really good. |
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