Maybe they can work for a living. Like go on tour and perform live. Selling tickets and such. If they are any good, people will want to go see them live. Look at the Grateful Dead, they allowed people to copy their music. There are massive sites dedicated to archiving all of their music recordings and you are free to download and listen to it. Yet they made a fortune on touring and performing. Not playing the song one time and then trying to sell copies of it.

Making a recording is work.

Saying "maybe they can work for a living" is saying that people don't think that has value, in which case it's weird that anyone uses Spotify at all.

"Playing the song one time" is minimizing the work/time that goes into learning to play instruments, writing a song, coordinating the musicians for recording, and working on the production.

And it's a lot like saying software developers shouldn't be able to write a piece of code one time but get paid for people buying a copy or using a service running it on a server somewhere.

I have been saying this again and again, but not every artists is a rock band. There are countless releases that are best enjoyed in a home-listening environment and attract a mature audience that couldn't care less about t-shirts and merch. Thankfully the album still seems to be the primary product in those circles, but obviously even those artists will be affected by the expectation of having their discography available on Spotify.

> Maybe they can work for a living.

> Not playing the song one time and then trying to sell copies of it.

As in writing a few lines of code and selling copies of it? What a condescending and out of touch take on the issue. Those albums and songs aren't made of thin air - it's actual work that goes into them.

Yeah, it was weird. I don't want to have to keep track of a particular object, whether it's a physical recording or a downloaded file.

Make sure the music is available when I want it. Send a bit of money to artists I want to support. But don't couple them together with a bunch of transactions I've got to manage individually.

Retailed-recording doesn't mean you have to manage the file. That nut's been cracked for at least a decade. Every digital purchase I've made through outlets like Bandcamp or Amazon (and some of Apple, IIRC) is kept track of by the service and has a cloud player I can use. And the artist actually sees revenue from each track that's a fraction of a dollar rather than a fraction of a penny.

But you can actually download/manage the file if you want to. Which is nice, because it's the most practical distinction between owning and a long term lease, given the fact that few things are forever.

> Retailed-recording doesn't mean you have to manage the file. That nut's been cracked for at least a decade. Every digital purchase I've made through outlets like Bandcamp or Amazon (and some of Apple, IIRC) is kept track of by the service and has a cloud player I can use. And the artist actually sees revenue from each track that's a fraction of a dollar rather than a fraction of a penny.

You still have to keep track of what you've bought when and where. You have to answer questions like which release of an album you want (extended edition or not? Explicit or clean?). It's not a huge amount of effort, but it's extra faff compared to just listening to what you want when you want, and sending money to who you want when you want.

I gave up on buying after I moved countries and found I couldn't access my old cloud player and my new one at the same time. Yes, I have mp3 files of everything I bought in my old country, but it's such a fiddle to actually listen to them that I don't bother - particularly when I can find almost all of them in the service that I'm paying monthly for in my new country.

> It's not a huge amount of effort, but it's extra faff compared to just listening to what you want when you want, and sending money to who you want when you want.

While we're talking about extra faff, how do you figure out how to send money to "who you want when you want"? Doesn't seem to be just one service everyone's taking OR sending money through any more than there's just one service anyone might buy recordings through. Or do we just say "If they're not on Kicktreonattrpaymo when it's on my mind I guess they don't want my money"?

Doesn't sound easier than keeping track of a few places you buy music. I've certainly never had any trouble at all figuring out whether I bought a recording on Amazon or Bandcamp.

And I know that my ledger's clear and doesn't depend on when I decide to get around to kicking a donation over.

It's interesting how the tenuously more convenient value proposition of cloud recording buffets features the convenience of pushing the hop through the hoop of actual economic support out into the undetermined and perhaps entirely optional future.

If this is all about convenience, Spotify could probably largely solve the economic problems by bumping up what they charge 5-10x and directing additional listener revenue by specific listener choices.

> Or do we just say "If they're not on Kicktreonattrpaymo when it's on my mind I guess they don't want my money"?

Yes. I don't owe them a business model, they're the professional here, it's their job to be where I want to pay them.

> And I know that my ledger's clear and doesn't depend on when I decide to get around to kicking a donation over.

There's no ledger here. If you want to pay them, pay them, if you don't, don't. If that wasn't an arrangement they were content with, well, revealed preferences.

> If this is all about convenience, Spotify could probably largely solve the economic problems by bumping up what they charge 5-10x and directing additional listener revenue by specific listener choices.

What economic problems? There's no shortage of content being created, so evidently the deal for creators isn't actually that bad.