Vtubers

Is it just me or do other lainons also hate VTubers? I used to watch Kizuna AI sometimes a few years ago, when it was still a very new type of content and I found it relatively entertaining. But recently a lot of VTuber streamers have exploded in popularity (especially Hololive) and I absolutely despise their content. It all seems so vapid and fake and their entertainment value is on par with Twitch thots in my opinion. It's just generic gameplay of the same 5 or 6 games with an anime girl saying random things once in a while. A lot of my friends have started watching them and tried to get me into it, but I've tried watching them and I just can't bear listening to them for more than 5 minutes.

Dont be one of those retards that consume media just to rage masturbate to it.

>Virtual Youtubers You know what, you do you. God bless.

>popular bad

There's still a few out there carrying that original torch to push the tech further, push boundries of real and not-real, etc. But they're all indie creators that get a tiny sliver what the mass produced Hololive style 'idols' get. That's problem when big companies get involved with anything, they will always try to get the biggest numbers with the lowest investment.

>>6610 Long-ass blogpsot-esque opinion piece of someone with a very minimal depth of experience with the subject incoming. Feel free to discard and move along. I don't keep up with platforms such as YouTube much at all anymore, but I'm aware enough that I know the concept of "animated YouTubers" has been around for easily 10 years already. Particularly those kind that tell stories from their life, or do some kind of podcast, and have an animated avatar. It probably draws lineage from various animated Flash games of the decade preceding it, and that a large portion of users that grew up on the late 90s/early 2000s internet like anime and/or cartoons. Why would they choose to do this, which arguably takes more effort than just showing their real face? From the point of view of the author, I could guess it gives them some kind of anonymity. The same kind you're used to on an imageboard, or posting behind an avatar on a forum. They may feel they can be "more real". From the point of view of the audience, anime characters are - ideally - designed around being striking and memorable. The thing with real people is that very few of them are that naturally memorable or attractive, visually. There is also the idea that those watching may feel someone alienated from many others around them that don't share their interests in common, so may find someone speaking as an anime character easier to imprint upon. Personally I think this is a lesser component, but probably plays a role. Up until the last few years, these people that spoke behind animated avatars generally did so in pre-planned videos. One of the 'positives' I spoke of - that you can be "more real" behind an avatar - can't really be played to it's full fruition in a pre-planned video. The rise of "live-streamers" playing games and talking about one topic or another gained a lot of momentum for a few reasons, I think - you are "more real" when you're spontaneous, and it also offers a means for the audience to directly "interact" with the host, allowing more channels for that kind of parasocial relationship these internet personalities capitalise on, knowingly or otherwise. As such, once the technology existed, I think you could have probably guessed back then that virtual YouTubers and virtual live-streamers would have risen out of it, as they can get the best of both worlds - "realness" via anonymity, and "realness" via spontaneity. Maybe you consider using anime avatars to appeal to that part of your brain some kind of evil - though you can always just switch them off and watch something else. I honestly believe it's just some new brand of entertainer, facilitated by the technology and infrastructure we've developed in the last decade. >vapid and fake >generic gameplay This is nothing new brought to the table by virtual streamers. I don't think being virtual innately does anything to lower content quality. Although, you could argue it does because being visually entertaining means they can afford to be less intellectually entertaining. In that case, maybe your best bet for stimulus is to find some aged, bearded men to entertain you, as they'll be the least visually interesting and rely on their genuine wit. tl;dr I don't think there's anything wrong with them, same way there's nothing wrong with cartoons. There isn't a need to "hate" them, as they're not really hurting me nor anyone else. As a wise man once said: "N*gga just walk away from the screen like n*gga close your eyes".

>>6615 >Why would they choose to do this, which arguably takes more effort than just showing their real face? From the point of view of the author, I could guess it gives them some kind of anonymity. I completely disagree on that, I think the whole reason they choose to use anime avatars is to appeal to an audience who will simply enjoy almost anything as long as it's anime-style. I think that audience isn't small, just look at how popular anime-style mobile gacha games, like Fate Grand Order or Azur Lane, are. >I honestly believe it's just some new brand of entertainer, facilitated by the technology and infrastructure we've developed in the last decade. I don't really have anything against the technology itself, it just bothers me that the market has become dominated by these mass-produced corporate idols whose commercial model is closer to that of K-pop rather than indie creators. >This is nothing new brought to the table by virtual streamers. I don't think being virtual innately does anything to lower content quality. Of course normal streamers like that exist as well, but such content seems much more prevalent when it comes to VTubers.

>>6615 Adding on to this, the concept goes back far before Youtube. Stuff like The Gorillaz, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, The Ricky Gervais Show (in regards to Karl Pilkington, who for years was known only as a cartoon character), etc. This is just an evolution of a concept that's been around for decades. It's only moved to the livestream format because that's where the audience is, and because we have the technology to do that now. As for why it's seemingly all anime style, I think that's obvious. The trend started in Japan. Anything 'animated' is going to use that Anime aesthetic. Anonymity isn't the only good reason to go through this effort instead of a webcam either. Some people like Projekt Melody may be genuinly interested in seeing just how far the tech can be pushed, or there's others like Ironmouse who have serious medical conditions and think a vtuber persona is the last shot they have to interact with the outside world. I also don't think it's fair to judge the whole thing based on something like Hololive, which is just some corporation cashing in on a popular trend with cheap an easy content. Look beneath the surface and there's a wide variety of content out there. There's camgirls, twitch streamers, radio hosts, artists, even a vtuber editor, who just stream himself editing other vtuber content and giving people tips on how to do stuff. A lot of them exist purely in vr too, and simply organise events and parties in the virtual world. Hololive is seriously just the boring tip of an otherwise fascinating iceberg.

it's just normal streamers with virtual animu waifu. It's all done for the always online anime crowd. Combine this with the rapidly improving chat bots and voice ai reading. It will not be long before the last thread of humans are not needed. https://chatbotsmagazine.com/build-a-cnn-news-chatbot-44b90691e83 https://www.lovo.ai/

I don't like them either, but I never got the appeal of game streamers in the first place. I like Kizuna Ai's stuff other than her gameplays, but even that I haven't kept up with in a while. That said, I think the medium is really interesting, and I'd like to see more people use it as a way to make art, or even a kind of homemade anime production. I really enjoy Hatoba Tsugu, it's like arthouse film and VTubers combined.

I actually really like vtubers in theory, I just don't like what people are doing with them. Every vtuber channel I've watched is like a hollow pantomime of the (already incredibly banal) youtuber/twitch streamer personality, kind of like they're playing the role of a streamer rather than actually embodying it. Who knows, maybe some of that is just that it's harder to suspend disbelief and ignore the fact that these people are, on some level, acting when you're looking at an animated character. I don't think that's the whole story though, as those channels >>6615 mentioned that use a stylized avatar to represent themselves in videos don't give me the same impression. Ultimately I'm glad that they exist. They're such a weird concept and anything that gives (relatively) normal people an opportunity to play around with their identity is a step in the right direction (i.e. away from the facebook "directory of real people" style of social media). >>6623 >That said, I think the medium is really interesting, and I'd like to see more people use it as a way to make art Agreed. This is off topic, but I actually feel the same way about ASMR videos. Not the cringe roleplay ones, I'm talking about the ones that are like 4 hours of making weird noises with a microphone. The idea of creating auditory work that attempts to appeal directly to the physiology of perception, bypassing conscious mediation as much as possible, is really interesting to me. It's basically high concept experimental music, but nobody's approaching it that way. Vocaloids too, for that matter. There's still so much cool experimental stuff just begging to be tried out with them and people are leaving it all on the table to make soykafty j-pop.

>>6624 It would've been so nice to be in the timeline where YouTube is a bunch of independent, homemade TV channels. I was really fascinated with YouTube and vlogs, and even game streaming to a degree. I had a lot of faith that all the derivative content would become something creative, and naively I supported it and now I'm only ashamed that I did. It was all a bunch of crap, and this kind of end game was probably planned from Day 1, it was set up to become grassroots advertising all along. We are all so much dumber than the people at Google. EVERYTHING that piggybacks on something else is parasitism, and creates a soykafty convergence toward the top. This kind of stuff is like an invasive, aggressive weed that chokes everything else. By the late 2000s most "content creators" were already chasing trends. It just works better for visibility, so much better. People who understood this trick are still making money for almost no effort. These were the Garfields of the 2000s. Horrible. I used to like stuff like RLM, a few retro game streamers, things like that. Now I think it's all crap. It's lazy. This is about as valuable as art or movie critics. I don't care how much heart you put in your meme video of let's play or opinion piece or compilation or fandub, it's a parasitic mode of creation. For every RLM there's something else with substance and cultural value that never happened, or will stay buried under the army of ticks. And people have normalized this mode. I think people are slowly becoming hostile to new things, to any kind of effort that isn't standardized or packaged in a familiar way or with a familiar brand. The only way to prevent the destruction of culture is to reject everything derivative on the basis that it's derivative. Everything that references, parodies, makes a homage to, subverts and reinvents something without changing the name, that stuff is the devil. It's so incredibly paradoxical that people used to punish plagiarism, but now in Billboard World the same practice is encouraged. Your work has no value, just like your life has no value to the corps, and all they're doing is tell you to let the weeds grow in your garden until you're starving. I can't wrap my head around how we went from a strongly individualistic world where people produced media and kept producing it if people liked the book or movie, not the person, to a world where the actual thing you're discussing doesn't matter, and people support YOU for being a good advertiser? What kind of absolute nightmare is this? I was so shocked when I saw this kid laughing and liking Star Wars memes, I asked him if he saw the movies, he said he didn't. I said "oh, you've seen the new ones", "no I haven't seen any". Even the soykafty lowbrow entertainment has been replaced by this complete non-culture... It's not even fast food anymore, it's just slop, it's the kind of slop they give you in prison, or animal feed for the chicken in the cages. you don't care what it is, you just gobble it up. Consume consume consume.

>>6623 >>6624 Something like Kizuna Ai started out as an experiment, but then she was overshadowed by these big v-tuber groups. Like this experiment got hijacked really, really quickly by people looking to grift otaku and weebs. I think the anonymity aspect is valid, but some of the advantages were lost by how quickly it became industrialized. So while the actresses remain unknown to the public at large, they're gobbled up by contracts and obligations like "live" events and the production of a constant stream of content. A few argue that this might be more demanding that the actual idol industry. Hell, some of the characters have been hired to do voice acting. The characters, not the actresses. Of course, these are complaints mostly levered at the big groups. I guess it's just unfortunate that really dumb soykaf is the first thing you see when you look up yuuchuubas, though that's inevitable. Though niche stuff keeps itself going (https://www.youtube.com/c/%E3%82%A9%E9%80%85/ comes to mind) Though I guess overall vtubers just reflect the wider state of YT, which honestly makes criticizing them just an extension of criticizing contemporary web culture. Which is a larger conversation. And it's not like humanity didn't find a way to turn each new form of media into a vehicle for vapidity. >>6626 >I can't wrap my head around how we went from a strongly individualistic world where people produced media and kept producing it if people liked the book or movie, not the person, to a world where the actual thing you're discussing doesn't matter, and people support YOU for being a good advertiser? What kind of absolute nightmare is this That's been a thing for a long time, even before the internet. As long as mass media has been commercialized, being extremely derivative has been a creative issue. Sequel stagnation is one symptom of this, ironically due to the whole "kept producing it if people liked the book or movie" ethos.

>>6610 I don't hate them but that's not to say I particularly like them either. I view them appreciatively though. This is where I wanted the technology to be 10 years ago. There are a lot of voice actors/actresses who benefit immensely from this technology and I'm happy for them. Take Nyanners for example. She is a voice that has been making content for a while now where she was just voicing over premade animations and other video content. Now, with the tech, she can became a VTuber, and using her voice, and give life to an original character of her choosing. And it gives her the ability to do it live and interact with her fans. It's pretty beautiful. This was the dream that I imagined many years ago in my head. People have always fabricated personas and other masks to live under, and through which they can become even more true to themselves than if they were just themselves in reality. That's what I always believed. I can be my true self on the internet, because no one can see what I really look like and make assumptions about me that color their judgement of my words and actions. I can be as I am, and not live as people expect me to be. That said, there are definitely many people who will be exploiting this purely for monetary gain. And there will be many people trying to uncover these online personas (doxxing) so that they can out them and make them targets of harrassment based on things totally unrelated to their online life. It's a shame.

Having an animated avatar was no big innovation in any way, this is a lot more about "I get to interact with anime girl". It's not like Kizuna Ai and the others just do twitch floozy stuff, but it's true most of the content it's pretty basic. What would you do with it? I think yes, there is untapped potential for some actual serious projects involving the virtual personalities but that would require a decent amount of work, and the people behind the vtubers are making the right decision not to bother because they know who their audience is.

>>6626 >The only way to prevent the destruction of culture is to reject everything derivative on the basis that it's derivative I agree with a lot of your post, but I think you're off the mark here. Firstly, I think the thing you're perceiving as "lack of originality" comes in cycles, as the result of contextual forces, and is not actually the primary driver of anything. Secondly, originality (in the sense that you're framing it) is somewhat ill-defined. Creative works do not actually emerge from the ether nearly as much as you seem to think they do. Seriously, think about the most creative musician you know of and then go try to find an interview where they talk about their influences. Art is always made as part of a dialog with the surrounding culture. The thing about good or "creative" art is it has something interesting to say in this dialog. So really I would argue that the problem isn't reference, parody, homage, subversion, or reinvention; rather, it's *bad* reference, parody... etc. (or, more to your point, unnecessarily slavish derivation. no use saying the exact same thing someone else has said already.) Maybe this seems like an obvious point, but I bring it up because I'm contradicting the notion that there is some dichotomy of "creative" work that actually adds something unique to our society vs. "derivative" work that parasitically appropriates this work until the next spark of ingenuity descends from the heavens. Finally, I think the thing you're observing can be better understood by looking at what "user generated content" actually changed about our mass media. The way I see it, there are two key points: the creation of a tight feedback loop that shortens the cycle of exposure and creative response, and the elimination of the barriers that once resisted the leeching of "alternative" subculture into the mainstream. The latter means that once something is created, everyone knows about it, and the former means that once everyone knows about it they can immediately appropriate it (and create something else in response). There are some good things to be said for this, but as you've already pointed out there are a lot of negatives as well.

>>6624 >>6626 >independent creators/interesting mediums/commercialization etc I'm not going to quote every relevant line I can't agree with this more, but I think there's two conflicting but equally valid counterpoints to the whole "what happened to individualist creative types". The first is that for every 1 creative person worth paying attention to, there's another 99999 who aren't. This is well known. But I don't think it's very well known that this is also a very big problem for "experimental" media. For example, I can vouch as a musician in this field that for every good indie noise artist I've discovered, there's a whooooole lot more awful ones. I think this is more of an issue than when it happens with independents in mainstream-appeal fields, because it gives the already small niche a bad name when the loudest in the scene is utter dogshit, and makes it harder than hard to attract new audience. Similarly with the Vtubers, if everyone thinks that their "huge revolutionary idea" is worth promoting, it's gonna also end up in an oversaturation of the niche. Most people unfortunately do not have the patience to slog through an oversaturated field to find the things they might like. That's why some of the best musicians I know only get a dozen plays on Soundcloud, or why some of the best artists I know get maybe a handful of retweets on their drawings, etc. It's a problem that seems like a recent thing simply because of how many more people are on the internet today compared to 10-15 years ago. Yeah, I miss the personal websites of the 90s and 00s too, but how much bigger is the internet now than then? The second conflicting point is that online popularity is - to varying degrees, sure, but absolutely always to some degree - fake. Views and plays are ALWAYS bought. Nearly anyone who makes content online can vouch that they've gotten sketchy messages like "10k plays for $15 bro you in?". Lots of people are drawn to what's popular, so you can quickly get people to check you out by making them think everyone else is doing it. Most people doing independent, boundary-pushing, fresh content creation, either don't have the money to do this or value the dignity of their project too much to consider selling it out. This also isn't new - the personal websites of yesteryear we all miss so much were able to be hosted halfassedly at home because you didn't expect many visitors and traffic. But on the bright side, I think people are coming around to the idea of helping the little guy in recent years, just that their actions are uninformed. Like for example, I've noticed a very recent trend of people being anti-piracy, and paying for subscription services like Spotify because "they pay the artist!". I think the best course of action one can take is to urge said people to look into how predatory and cheap those services are and to look into actual ways of supporting creatives, be it subscribing to their Patreon, buying their album on Bandcamp, sending donations, etc. We need a good YouTube alternative for the same, and maybe on that you'd see more actually interesting Vtuber content. Anyways sorry this is kind of offtopic, but I don't think the user base of this site has enough overlap with Vtuber appeal to warrant strictly keeping a thread on that topic without straying to related topics. Feel free to call me a derailing asshole if you disagree.

I hate vtubers, I think Kizuna AI was more original when it first came out but all of these other ones are like children man, they scream so loud that it hurts your ears. Not to mention that it's a grown person sometimes doing this (even man) I hope this trend dies, anime and normal people always ruin good niche thing

>>6632 There might not be a lot of overlap now but at the rate their audience is going we might end up with some of them. A few people here watched AI Channel at least. Then again my takeaway from the usual Vtuber fan (i.e. hololivers) is that they really wouldn't fit in here.

Some of them are cute, that's good-enough for me. It's not like I stop multitasking anyway.

>>6632 >The first is that for every 1 creative person worth paying attention to, there's another 99999 who aren't. Parasitism doesn't change that one bit. If anything, it's the main cause of the 1 to 99999 ratio. It makes the situation worse because it tends to give an impression of credibility (thanks to the brand being parasitized) to a person who would be simply skimmed over if they were creating something original. If people had to walk on their own two legs because people actually looked for something interesting instead of something derivative, and actually had to be creative, the vast majority would do something else. The very idea that there is only "experimental media" or >New thing that just came out REACTION!!!! Really shows how normalized this is. It isn't normal to make this kind of stuff. No "creative" person in their right mind would hop from one trending thing to another, or dedicate his whole creative life to a pop culture meteor that has as much depth as a puddle. That's usually a braindead consumer groupie thing, and it usually happens with people who have addictive personalities and care little for the actual content. These "content creator" personas are engineered from the ground up to cater to this kind of thing. I can't possibly imagine a storyteller or musician or artist being inspired by a thing and thinking "I want to make fanworks of this until I hit the bucket!" it just cannot be. Even the people I've personally known who made tons of fanworks still made a lot more original content. It's just a natural thing if you have that instinct in you. >I've noticed a very recent trend of people being anti-piracy, and paying for subscription services like Spotify because "they pay the artist!" I hate the "I support the artist!" thing, you shouldn't support "the artist" you should support his work. Godjammit. Anyway, people lie a lot. I bet the majority of people who are anti-piracy do pirate just as the others do (especially now that piracy isn't necessary because it's become the standard, everything's forced to be "free" to download to have nonzero relevance), and they claim they're against it because >they have a finger in the pie - they make "content" and have been a victim of piracy (ironic that the content the lament has been "stolen" is entirely built on something copyrighted they have no rights to) >they want to virtue signal It's not all bad though I don't know what the cuts are for the music sites. I've only given money to Bandcamp artists. I think music is a bit more even (I might be wrong) but outside of that, I feel like people who get any money are either the huge ones, or people who beg really hard. I've also made digital stuff that I put online for sale (on the side). In my personal experience, I've noticed that when I put my "content" as PWYW I got the vast majority of the money from a handful of people who gave me like 15$ when the official price tag was like $1. Almost everyone else would just download, so it all boiled down to a literal 1% of people who gave something. I later switched to free or $1 (so you couldn't splurge more than that) because I didn't like how that made me feel. Predictably, the ratio of paying to nonpaying remained the same. So it's really just about milking the whale minority. If I were another person I would've made premium tiers or something. The platform itself had tools to do just that, as does Patreon. The "tiers" thing is awful. I cannot think of this environment as a good thing. It should really just be that everyone pays one dollar and they get the same thing. I shouldn't hope that a really rich guy takes notice of me and gives me 20$ every time, it feels like receiving charity. I don't want to be a beggar. And I shouldn't have to think of ways to "monetize" my work. My work should be the thing I'm selling, godjammit, it's what I put all my labor into. Why should I sell other "premium" soykaf as if those were the things that had value? Can't you just pay for the actual thing I worked on? As it is right now your "content" is just advertising for the product you're selling. And this has been a thing for a long time, look at 80s cartoons like He-Man or GI Joe that were just glorified toy ads. I'm not surprised that people have simply stopped putting any effort in the "product" because they can just piggyback on the advertising and popularity of a franchise, and directing all their effort on the "premium" so they can actually make any money. >The second conflicting point is that online popularity is - to varying degrees, sure, but absolutely always to some degree - fake. Views and plays are ALWAYS bought. Honestly the only reason why popularity matters at all is what I described above. 99% of the "customers" consuming your "content" aren't going to pay a dime, so you need to find as many whales as possible. It's a completely different kind of economy as the model we have adopted since the dawn of commerce. The problem again is just people, the masses of consumers have created this situation.

They aren't all that bad. When someone can stream continiously for 20+ hours playing old obscure game without any sign of fatigue or frustration while making happy stupid noises it really shows how they enjoy what they are doing, and it provides great entertainment value for viewers who are often willing to pay. Yes, this is all an act, as it supposed to be, but it takes dedication and some talent to stay in character for hours and hours while able to entertain audience, even if it means just to make random noises to avoid dead air, it's still pretty hard. Of course, most of them are here for the money and will do anything to pander to biggest audience, like pretending to be a lesbian, saying things like "I'm not wearing pants right now, lol", making soykaf jokes, reviewing retarded wojaks memes from reddit while reddit users wetting their pants from seeing how their queen noticed their 'art'. The thing I can't stand the most is the "we're happy family" vibe and turning separate YouTube channels into a reality show, which clearly scripted. Fans are pure cancer too, mainly hololive of course. They often say they're praising them for the talent, while clearly all it takes at this point is just brand recognition, if they stumbled upon previous work of their waifus before they became a part of the company, they just couldn't care less. And to be honest most of them always were mediocre. Menwhile, sometimes all it takes to cause their rapture is: scream so loud your eardrums pop off, puke, drink till you drop, fart, drop f- or n-bomb or just say something in English with sometimes fake accent. There is nothing that they can do that isn't kawaii at this point. But as a whole, this phenomenon is a positive thing. There are hidden gems here and there, and even some of the popular ones can be genuinely good, you just have to not to overtink this to be able to enjoy it. There are literally thousands of VTubers out there, and number is growing. Everyone can find something interesting here.

>>6632 I've just done some research into Spotify. Apparently, despite the fact that I pay around the equivalent of $14 for my Spotify subscription, the artists on Spotify only make around the equivalent of $0.0015? How is that possible? How does Spotify get away with giving away an artist's music for less than a fifth of a cent, per play? Yeah, Spotify do pay the artist but no rational human being with a healthy sense of trust in people would ever suspect that the situation was this terrible. It sounds cartoonishly evil. It's something I'd expect from Mr. Burns' character and even then, it'd be something I'd expect when the writers are exaggerating his miserliness for comedic effect. Apparently, artists put up with this because it leads to exposure. How much did artists make when MTV would show their music videos on TV? I think that might be a good comparison to look at as it might help me rationalise the situation if they've always been ripped off.

>>6693 The amount of renumeration artists get from spotify has steadily decreased over time. There was a period where a few eastern european organisations realised that they could set up computers that just listen to some minimum length tracks which would earn more than they spent on electricity and the membership fees. Combine that with the fact that Spotify is now large enough to dictate this kind of thing to artists and its easy to see why it ended up this way. For what its worth though artists have pretty much always not made much from people listening to their music at home be it from CDs, records or music videos. The money has always been in selling merchandise and touring so for a decently sized artist getting the exposure actually is worth paying for because the lions share of revenue has always been from things enabled by exposure.

>>6693 There are two different things going on here. First, spotify is has a near monopoly in their niche so they can do whatever the fuarrrk they want (it's not like the few competitors they do have pay any better anyway). Second, performing rights organizations (PROs... aka the people who actually obtain and pay out royalties for you) are fuarrrked up in their own special way. People aren't actually paid per stream. This actually dates back to radio and synch rights. It's easy enough to give artists a commission on every cd sold, but how the hell are you supposed to keep track of how many times your songs are played in any commercial context? If a cafe puts your album on the PA, you're technically entitled to a payout. When you consider that this entitlement is sometimes transitive across media (e.g. if a movie studio uses your song in their movie, and then that movie gets played on tv, and then a bar has that tv channel playing in the background, it's conceivable that the bar could technically owe you royalties). Any way, point being there's no way in fuarrrk you're going to get that to work. So that's why PROs exist. You basically give them the right to collect royalites on your behalf, and they do "their best" to estimate which percentage of the money they bring in is your money. Needless to say, the result of this is that the big names get almost all the money (because they're actually worth litigating) and the small guys don't get soykaf. So back to spotify: I suspect that that fifth of a cent is what your average person is getting. Actually, the median is probably lower. However, spotify gets away with this soykaf because the chart toppers are getting paid (quite a bit), so the music industry is satisfied.

>>6694 >There was a period where a few eastern european organisations realised that they could set up computers that just listen to some minimum length tracks which would earn more than they spent on electricity and the membership fees. Did you perhaps mean "broadcast" rather than "listen" because your post is incomprehensible to me in this aspect, otherwise, very informative. I have in the past watched a pianist on YouTube complain about how companies will offer to pay him in exposure and he rebuffs that exposure won't pay his bills and I've seen this sentiment in another animator who claimed that he turned down working for Kim Kardashian because they similarly offered to pay him solely in exposure so I thought this was a common thing for artists to reject being paid in exposure but in hindsight, this actually doesn't make sense. The fact that companies offer it in the first place must be because it is commonly accepted, not rejected. I would like to hear stories however of people offering work for exposure and getting ripped off. On that note, I wish to say that making money as an artist sounds so difficult. Then I remember what Jordan Peterson said about how artists have no choice but to be artists because anything else will make them suicidally depressed. The "suffering artist" trope seems to be very real. >>6695 >because they're actually worth litigating You make it sound like it's desirable for the PROs to take the Music Companies to court.

>>6698 >You make it sound like it's desirable for the PROs to take the Music Companies to court. Desirable for whom? PROs take big corporations to court when they violate copyright, not music publishers. PROs represent the music publishers (sort of... it's a weird relationship). I'm saying that if walmart plays taylor swift over their store radio without negotiating a license to do so, PROs are a lot more likely to sue than if some barista plays your album off spotify at a cafe, because there's actually money to be made. Even if they don't actually settle for more than the cost of litigation, the fact that they were willing to take it to court means that people who have money are more willing to buy a license from the PRO, which is how the PRO (and its clients) make their money. It's basically a protection racket combined with an index fund. Technically PROs aren't necessary in any legal sense. You can deal with licensing on your own. But from the customer side (stores, movie/tv studios, brands, radio stations, some streaming platforms) it makes more sense to buy the package deals that PROs offer rather than seeking out licensing on a per-use basis. On the client side (publishers and other rightsholders), they're essentially allowing the PRO to manage their intellectual property assets on commission. I don't even know the exact nature of the deals that spotify makes with big PROs and artists. They may even offer a contract where you can get paid out per stream for the indies, but I'm assuming this not how the bigger deals work. I'm really just saying all this to point out that behind the scenes the financial structure of the music industry isn't centered around this idea of pay-per-play, and hasn't been since basically the invention of the radio. The way they make their money is structured more like an investment fund where the underlying commodity is intellectual property. How much they get paid out per stream is totally immaterial to them.