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Artist Led Pricing, Scene ownership and defecting from Spotify with Audius
🕑 Added 2020-11-24 20:49:25 +0000 UTCIn this episode we welcome the full Audius squad, Roneil Rumberg, Forrest Browning and Clayton Blaha to discuss their new music protocol, how it establishes the rails for artist led, rather than centrally mandated, pricing and design of economic and interactive relationships, Soundcloud and the dangers of platform risk, and the ways in which we might drag people away from centralised platforms and communicate the benefits unlocked by decentralised scene ownership.
It was a wonderful discussion and I left it feeling very confident that this group of people are onto something! Head over to audius.co to take a look around.
Have a sweet week, we’ve got a lot more coming!
LINKS
https://twitter.com/AudiusProject
https://twitter.com/ForrestBrowning
https://twitter.com/FerrariJetpack
Comments
Mat
I see your point and largely agree. I think what they were suggesting is that they are building the rails for a diverse array of institutions to emerge on top of ("free market of interactions"). I can imagine as you said that if each individual artist were to be priced differently on a shared interface it wouldn't work, and ultimately my enthusiasm stems from the ability for squads to build collective arrangements on top of stable infrastructure as you proposed. If the infrastructural costs, and stewardship, can be handled by audius as a protocol I think it gets us closer to those kind of arrangements, particularly when file hosting and streaming is so complicated
In other words, Mat, where is the DAO guild that can take over the network and enforce collective pricing + distribution. ;)
I haven't quite finished the episode, so sorry if this gets discussed later -- but if I don't write things out now I'll not remember. :D Once again really torn by this. In general, I think this is a great idea and sorely needed. But I'm a bit puzzled how these projects that are so committed to community and democracy etc. default to "free markets are best for pricing". I mean, I'm not an artist, so maybe I'm getting this wrong, but how is it desirable to have a side-job as speculator on your own work, figuring out where on the "supply and demand curve" your art is, how you should dynamically price it? I mean if you look at the app store, which is not even a free market but free pricing (?), the ability for each developer to individually price has basically destroyed indie apps, or forced them into insane subscription models. Wouldn't it be much better to have a collective kind of price-setting where you can say "ok, a song is worth at least X and if someone hits it big, the collective also wins, and some money gets distributed to everyone", kind of like how labels worked at some point?
