(smallish) artists complain about it because they also run a loss when they try and tour. It’s quite difficult to make any money in this industry, and that’s fundamentally the source of discontent. It feels absurd to make a product then get paid nothing for making that product when lots of people use it.
>It feels absurd to make a product then get paid nothing for making that product when lots of people use it.
It really shouldn't be considered absurd, especially to people on hacker news. Many software projects are used by billions of devices (eg. linux, curl, openssl), but nobody is creating websites protesting how little github pays them. Just because people use your product, doesn't mean they're willing to pay money for it. If you can't make the economics work because nobody is willing to pay for your product, or there are tons of people lining up waiting to undercut you, blaming the platform is barking up the wrong tree.
But those are the rockstars of the FOSS world, the equivalent of Taylor Swift or whatever. I doubt she or artists like her would be complaining about how she doesn't make enough money from music.
The typical way to make a living from open source is to use your work as a portfolio to get a job doing closed-source development. Then if you keep working on your open source stuff it’s either for fun or to keep your portfolio up to date for when you want to switch jobs.
I don’t think there’s a musical equivalent to that strategy.
Thing is, one of the reasons why so many people use the product is because it's so cheap for them. Given the sheer amount of content being produced today, I don't think it's reasonable to expect most of it to command the price that it needs to be for the makers to make money off it. This is separate from the issue of parasites like Spotify, which can still profit in this arrangement by skimming a little bit from everyone.
>I don’t think its reasonable to expect most of it to command the price that it needs to be for the makers to make money off it.
Would it be that much though? Consider an artist with 20k unique regular listeners, which is successful territory but nowhere near big. If albums cost 3-5 bucks, an artist could make a good individual living releasing albums every 8 months or so, which is plenty of time to make em. Songs could then be maybe 30-50 cents. We’re never going back to such a model, but it wouldn’t be that expensive to fund artists.
also, of course it's a very frequently voiced "observation" that some percentage of a big amount of money... is a big amount itself, yet the marginal cost is - and you might not believe it, but - almost zero!
that's why people complain about taxes, bonuses, etc.
the usual complaints from small artists are usually about how the network effects are "biasing" the payout distribution toward big names. (ie. the fixed monthly subscription revenue split amongst all the artists weighted by plays.)
