What if someone started a real underground music label on the dark web. Bitcoin only, no banks, no streaming and no middlemen. Artists could drop music, earn for say 5 or 10 years, then the rights go to the public domain. No corporate ownership, no lifetime contracts.
Could a label like that actually work?
Could it? Technically maybe. Would it? No.
None of the distribution to spread the artist’s work to a wider audience, reduced duration of profit per work, and weaker copyright protections even before going public domain. You could probably find ways to cut a music label’s revenue even more steeply if your really tried, but you’d have to really try. This is barely a step up from an artist trying to self publish, except the artist still has to give the label a cut AND they can only make money on the work for 5-10 years. Nobody would sign with this label in the first place, and the label itself would implode in short order.
Why would an artist sign with a label that has none of the marketing, distribution, or legal capabilities of a major label and serves an extremely limited/niche audience (bitcoin users)? Why would they give up their IP for free when it’s how they pay rent?
I think the system you’ve envisioned is unnecessarily limited and lacks the main reasons to sign with a label in the first place. I recognize labels are largely shitty and mistreat their artists, but they still serve a purpose.
most musicians don’t pay rent with IP actually. they do it by going on tours and selling merch at said events. they could keep selling their merch even if they made the designs public domain
I recognize that IP alone doesn’t make money, and that the vast majority of income for artists is via touring and merch sales. Controlling that IP, however, is what allows a band to protect its income streams- if I started selling merch with their brand on my website, none of that money would go to the band or pay their bills.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the copyright system we’ve come up with in the US is beyond fucked and generally favors large corporations over actual creators. However, as long as we continue to love in a world where basic necessities and dignity are not guaranteed, there needs to be something that allows those creators to protect their income from leaving, and publishing to the public domain does not accomplish this.
if I started selling merch with their brand on my website, none of that money would go to the band or pay their bills.
how does IP law stop that though? most art theft is done by large media conglomerates. it’s similar to worrying about petty theft when most theft is caused by employers stealing wages. the only way to enforce your property is to have a better lawyer than the media conglomerates violating your copyright, or to get lucky with a judge that can sympathize with your plight.
However, as long as we continue to love in a world where basic necessities and dignity are not guaranteed, there needs to be something that allows those creators to protect their income from leaving, and publishing to the public domain does not accomplish this.
you’re right, and I didn’t mean to imply that making your work public would solve the issue of capitalist exploitation of artists. the way to solve it is to unionize, build mutual aid societies for your fans to donate to you, build more food banks, join a tenant’s union, making housing free or decriminalizing squatting. things like giving people a universal living standard instead of making them rely on money and predatory systems to survive
I think you’re describing an idolised world and ignoring the complications of resource allocation and practicalities around providing the trust required for efficient swapping of goods (ie. someone actually paying for the enjoyment of the music so the musician can eat).
most musicians are starving rn because of IP law and label monopolies on the industry. expecting this system to feed their bellies is the textbook definition of an idolized world
I never said the current system was perfect or that IP didn’t have problems that are frequently abused (including building monopolies and wrestling rights away from creators)
I just said the counterpoint being pitched has some flaws that I don’t think stand up to practice and included some processes that I think would be part of how it falls apart
More options for art is not a bad thing, constraints are.
“ability to pay for food” is not constraint
Sure, but how is your proposal any better than an artist just releasing their work on bandcamp or soundcloud? At least those platforms accept common payments. I really think that your insistence on crypto tanks the whole idea, as it significantly limits who would actually get the music in the first place.
Releasing music isn’t like software development, the audience doesn’t have the familiarity with or, for the most part, the facility to use crypto. As far as the average Joe knows, crypto is the domain of scammers and criminals, and it’s largely not useable as currency in day to day life.
I just wonder what music culture looks like if you strip out banks, ads, and algorithms entirely. Not saying crypto fixes it, just that it changes who holds the keys.
So a label where artists have even fewer rights and protections than with any other label? Why would anyone go for that?
Because the current rules are way out of proportion. It would encourage artist freedom without large constraints. It would be an alternate to the mainstream. It would foster new art that wouldn’t be possible with the current standard.
How would it do anything but the opposite of all that? For the majority of artists, they don’t break even on a release. Even most of those who do only do so long after 5 years have elapsed. If they’re really lucky, someone might come across a track a decade later and licence it for a TV show.
So you’re advocating less money for artists, and the loss of their rights (and potential income) after 5 years. And you think that would encourage or foster new art?
that label exists already, it’s called BitTorrent. no need to go on the dark web. there are artists who “leak” their own music on there either for revenge against their label or because they don’t wanna exclude their poor fans from enjoying the art
This would be an alternative to doing that and the fans could still donate.
There’s a few different layers to this. Others have jumped at you a bit, but I hope to talk about this a little more understandingly…
When it comes to music distribution, as in, giving your music to others, the solutions already are in place to provide a federated distribution of music (see groove shark) which would in theory be a good way to provide a place to stream music while also allowing distribution to others. Even if you want to go through paid services, it has never been easier to publish music (though there are caveats, you do generally have to give up royalties to middlemanagers. This is generally ignored by people in this thread, but it is a problem for most artists.) The alternate distributions like groove shark simply don’t have enough users yet, and I can’t attest for whether it has the right features to be a substitute for bandcamp (there’s no ability to set up payment, last time I checked.) It’s really the case that independent labels aren’t making good use of technology that isn’t just putting up a random Bandcamp page.
You’ll notice I didn’t make any mention of crypto above: That’s because I’m not sure of the practical uses of crypto in this particular regard beyond a “buy it as a collectors item” style distribution via NFT and I think that bubble has more or less completely popped.
There’s been attempts from the likes of iTunes to provide encrypted song binaries, and in theory you could encrypt a song using a crypto transaction to store the metadata, but it would both be unpopular and entirely centralized (you would need to have an authentication server for tying transactions to keys.)
So short of not having to deal with payment processors (which is good for anti-censorship, fwiw), there’s not a lot of benefit to using crypto specifically. And transaction costs would somewhat inflate the price of transactions and would basically force users to buy “albums” again (so that you don’t get hammered with transaction fees.)
Lastly, the 5 to 10 years of earning before the rights go “public domain” is a very flawed concept. I know there’s a lot of anti-copyright advocates here on lemmy, but there’s some truth to the idea that artists actually value copyright to protect their own work and it would be very difficult to convince an artist to sign a deal that would effectively limit their own ownership; This is especially true in the era of AI data farming. You’d be better off making the decision (as a label) to claim ownership up to x dollars in debt to produce the album (there’s always a cost, with a slim profit margin to be expected) and then hand the ownership entirely back to the artist once they’ve recouped the cost to produce the album to effectively put it back in control of the artist to let them do as they please. A record label isn’t just about making the music listeners happy, but to empower the artist to create art that they otherwise couldn’t afford. Most record labels are disliked by labels not because they withhold ownership from the listener, but because they aren’t always paid equally in royalties due to ownership clauses in their contracts that allow record labels to extract profit from work that they’ve already well earned the loss with profit on.
Copyright rules cannot be made “fairer” (whatever that might mean) in a small place. The big players would simply steal the work and make their profit from it.
If you want to change copyright, you need to start in the biggest places, that is, many countries together.
There are labels similar to that. Dingleberry Records for example. They finance records out of their own pocket, often together with other labels, and then produce and sell LPs and CDs for non profit. Records don’t go public domain though, as far as I know.
Why need darkweb when you have stuff like bandcamp? Or release directly to streaming service, lots of indies does it this way today. It’s better because artist get to keep their copyright and without label company telling them what trend they need to follow.
Streaming services make it to where you don’t own your music that you release onto the platform. Said streaming service does, and they’ll use it to make music using AI, which is why services like Spotify are doing just that, and the reason they DRM the music you want to listen to on the platform.
Wavlake is an example of what to do with a streaming service, given that they use RSS for their distribution, though it’s limited I think in some ways.
There just so happened to be a BTC-based label that’s clear web and currently being made, and it’s called 2020 Innovations. It’s currently being built right now, and is on Twitter and Nostr. No Fediverse as of right now, though I could maybe have my producer speak with the owner about it.
The name is idiotic but the concept has potential.
Phillip really needed a numerologist to help with the naming, and it’s clear he didn’t have one on hand.
only the tech bros or creepy dudes would access and pay darkweb currency
Seems too niche to be worth the time and money. However, advertising music only available for bitcoin on the dark web could work as a marketing tactic if the music appeals to that niche audience.
Thing is, I’m on the dark web, I use cryptocurrency and I like underground music, and this doesn’t appeal to me. In my mind, I’m wondering why they didn’t just build and host their own website instead, and sell their album for crypto. I would question why they only accept bitcoin if they’re trying to be subversive. I go to the dark web for drugs, not music, and would be paying in Monero.
Alternatively, some artists have already NFT’d their music so people can purchase it for crypto. And, long before that, radiohead released In Rainbows independently through their website, which only took donations. So there are ways to skip the middlemen without the gimmick.
Could it work? Yeah, it could. I don’t think it would work very well.
It doesn’t even exist yet and North Korea already stole the royalties
