Musician posts call transcript after Google says her claims are 'patently false'

[Drabula]

All this simply makes me very glad that after 35 years of doing art and music my personal philosophy has led me to care not about popularity or revenue streams. Pay the bills via other means do art in between. Do not come under the thumb of something named “google” for christ’s sake. When the system goes rotten throw it out.

[Ambiguity]

@Nonhuman_Hominid

I’ll just have to hope the Reg covers it, it usually explains stuff in a non-brain-hurty way.

Google BOFFINS tell independent MUSICIANS to F@@K OFF.

[WearySky]

@SpaceGhost

This combined with the fact your ENTIRE catalog (every song and variation that you wish to sell or even give away) must be available to the service. You cannot use YouTube as a hook in hopes of selling other material on the side since all of it is now available and nobody will buy it except out of pity basically.

You’d be surprised how many music fans discover new artists through free methods such as Spotify or Pandora (or ad-supported Youtube), and then go and buy that artist’s music because they want to support them (or, “out of pity”, as you put it). See also: writers like BB’s own @doctorow giving away drm-free eBook copies of books, yet still managing to make sales. I’m not saying that this Youtube model is good for artists (in fact, I think it’s quite shitty), but the premise of “giving stuff away means nobody will ever pay you for it” seems to be demonstrably false, at least in some cases.

[anon50609448]

@WearySky

You’d be surprised how many music fans discover new artists through free methods such as Spotify or Pandora (or ad-supported Youtube), and then go and buy that artist’s music because they want to support them (or, “out of pity”, as you put it).

I’ve certainly bought things off pandora, and back in the early Napster days I used to buy a ton of music (it may have just been the age I was, but I would buy things I got off there all the time). I certainly recall reading research that showed that “pirates” spend more on music and movies than anyone else.

I think the trouble is that if you are paying for a subscription service that gives you access to all the work on demand, then you have actually already paid for it. I think that’s a very different dynamic.

[WearySky]

@anon50609448

I think the trouble is that if you are paying for a subscription service that gives you access to all the work on demand, then you have actually already paid for it. I think that’s a very different dynamic.

This is true, it certainly changes the dynamic. I wonder if any studies have been done on the habits of music purchasing from people who use other paid streaming services (Spotify, Google Play, etc).

[Thorzdad]

…the technology lawyers had engineers build…

Nice phrasing. The poor innocent engineers, forced to kowtow to the evil lawyers’ demands. Guns to their heads, no doubt. Please. It’s highly naive to think that, in a technology-oriented company like Google, engineers aren’t involved from the beginning of any plan like this. I’ll wager that many, if not most, of them had no moral qualms at all about working on this. It’s a technical challenge, pure and simple.

It’s a shitty move by an increasingly shitty company, to be sure. But, don’t for a minute believe that the engineers had their arms tied against their wills in this matter.

[ghostly1]

@baronmog

So, they’re forcing publishers to sign the new contract, by disabling their content if they don’t sign the new contract.

Didn’t Google learn from Plus that forcing people into something they have no interest in is a bad move?

[anon50609448]

@ghostly1

Didn’t Google learn from Plus that forcing people into something they have no interest in is a bad move?

I thought the lesson from Google Plus was that if you are going to force people into something they have no interest in you need to force them really hard, like with lawyers and financial penalties.