idk what the obsession with #v4v is about

it's simply not how you do business

- business sets price

- customers buy, or not

- price is periodically adjusted to balance between supply and demand

- profit

not setting a price on an offer is just rude

people are free to disagree and not buy

businesses are free to raise or lower their prices based on their own strategic and financial criteria and projections

anything else is just throwing coins at the busker in the underground train station, and that's the suffering of the artist

artists are always begging, that's how it works, that's why there are galleries and promoters, most of the time their hardest thing is people learning about them, and that's why the content itself is free of copyright so it can circulate and become known and then streaming services and high quality downloads can be sold

bandcamp has been doing this very successfully for years, as has spotify and soundcloud

artists dictate the terms of their licenses... and yet you still see artists like Stellardrone who give away their music as well

anyone who publishes their music, directly, on youtube understands that the tragedy of being an artist is not being known

so, please, don't confuse copyright as a business model, it's not, it's anticompetitive, socialist practice that doesn't help artists at all, and if anything the whole point about v4v is simply acknowledging that artists make their money on delivering the art, and thus promoters and streaming services and pay-for-premium downloading is a thing

it's even a thing in software with gaming!

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Discussion

Going back to my notes from my governance course from years ago, the order of society is built on a combination of 3 functions: 1) Coercion, 2) Reciprocity, and 3) Exchange. Or expressed as institutions: Government, Church and Market.

The whole #v4v idea is great, but it’s a very church-y concept. I do something, circulate the offering plate, I get what people feel like contributing (reciprocity). Also great for buskers because it’s impossible to demand a price for your performance on a public street.

I think the long term will be markets - where you can demand a fair price for a fair exchange. Not sure how this will play out, but my gut feeling it will be more enduring than #v4v.

what i find sad is that people who are otherwise talking about freedom all the time don't understand a thing about free markets

Yeah…

Where and how is the creator setting a price?

If it can be copied at no cost, it can not have market price.

Only things that are scarce (hosting & computation) have a marketprice.

artists are scarce too, and without them there is no content to host and compute

the artist generally has to accept the offer from a delivery provider, or choose another one that they find more favorable, it's just the nature of art, and why for much of the 20th century it was monopolised by the publishers, back when delivering the material had a high cost and risk of non-marketability

a lot of artists do themselves a disservice (and inventors also) by trying to use copyright monopoly delivery providers and end up almost nobody hears about them and worse, their material doesn't sell and their contracts are cancelled

then it all ends up being given away for free anyway because this restrictive, customer-punitive delivery service simply was a bad choice for the artist, this still doesn't invalidate that there is a market price for delivering content and thus content itself, as a factor of this production, has a value as well

content that is popular earns more for the artist, and this also benefits the provider who is then also well known for this artist

The artist has zero choice in who offers their art.

Once Beyoncé signs her latest single, anyone that has access to that single can start hosting it anywhere else.

She cannot sell that single. She can only sell the concerts, merch, interviews, ... and other scarce things that go with that single.

"zero choice" don't be ridiculous

people still pay for the single even though they can download it off torrents

this conversation has bored me to death

Podcasts are a great example of this.

Where is the successful podcast app that charges the listeners?

People only really pay for the physical Beyoncé single (merch) or on #V4V-like platforms (for recognition, attention from creator, ...)

i literally just signed up for the monthly high resolution PDF magazine from SuspiciousObservers youtube channel yesterday

don't keep whipping at the dead horse