If I’m reading this right then you must really like the pay what you want economy, I forget exactly what it’s called. Maybe it works maybe it doesn’t but what you’re saying is like me saying telling you, you probably get paid too much at your job for whatever effort you put in and even if most would agree you don’t get paid enough, I still think you should be happy you got anything at all. It almost sounds like you have a grudge against the arts?
Not against the arts. I agree that the money that was made never should have went to the labels. Artists got like a penny on the dollar. But I am concerned about the public. Someone said don’t bring up IP but you have to. Its like drugs in the US. Seems like a little bit of lactobacilus water with some other strains of bacteria mixed in- like some sort of kimchi juice can be applied to psoriasis and it goes away but the public has suffered with 5 decades or more of tech suppressing rent seeking over greed and drugs that make the condition worse and are radically marked up beyond the cost of manufacture. The artists don’t need protection from the public or fans, thats ridiculous. This idea that they are leaving money on the table is outrageous. If someone is a channel for rare material and they have joy in producing it and the energy to produce it they already have a charmed existence and life, the kind money can’t buy. But this crowd wants to reproduce the rights holder idiocy and infinite copyright in the form of “uncontract.” They want to in short to over charge for music and they want money to be a barrier to access to music and they in short want to set up a Disney like situation or be its competitor. They also don’t like the winner take all situation. They want to shift the risk onto the end user so that people can be bilked and and skimmed with ads and puffing. No to all of that. The price should be just enough so the public gets the maximum of what they have to offer and enough so the artists development isn’t stunted and the works keep coming. These artists are selling something that has like zero marginal increment to cost on production they are selling to a huge number of people at scale- lucky we have 7.5 billion people. No one should be paying every time for it. There also shouldn’t be any bs about playing music at gatherings that’s fair use and raw publicity. In a sense these artists are not stake holders- the public is the only stake holder that matters here really- its interest is a billion times greater and it is the public interest we need to protect. We could easily have a culture that didn’t believe or accept paying for music or movies regardless of economic input. Could say its covered by a universal income. Covered by fair use. Or covered by P2P or covered by Spotify any alternative the public finds more valuable it will turn to.
SAFE to my way of thinking first and foremost is a political playform that protects speech. It means forks or content that will make the Jams offerings defacto free. That is the feasibility baseline you’re playing with. It could put spotify under but the price free or voluntary. Really it reduces music to defacto FOSS as it should be.
Remember how bad this nonsense got? Sony was root kitting people, it was saying in the US it would determine if other companies could release movies or make movies. It wanted to make it a felony to skip past force fed bluray ads. It developed a token so it could degrade the quality of your video feed if the player couldn’t phone home on you. It wanted eternal copyright. It didn’t want to allow broadcast HDTV in the US because it couldn’t control it. It suppressed the realease of DAT and high fidelity recording equipment. It didn’t want microphones inphones to be able to record with fidelity or duration. It wanted to limit the number of times you could watch your wedding videos. Beyond the root kitting it asserted a right to preemptively brick people’s hardware with viruses and malware. And it was at one point impersonating the police and trying to force its way into people’s homes to rack and sack. It tried to have arrested for exploring their own hardware. It fought streaming services. Sony ended up getting doxed by its own employees and customers and having them take its network off line for months then it was driven into effective bankruptcy by Apple and Microsoft before the Japanese state bailed it out but it got the Obama admin to say it was NK that was the source of its total reboot. Sony was like a client states spy agency it became the heart of the RIAA and MPAA its business model was profiting from enclosure, censorship and sponsorship. But now the US has taken up the game of surveilance capitalism- look at the behavior of Amazon, Microsoft and the NSA/CIA.
So SAFE should be more of that top down bs but use artists as mascots or an excuse? Sony pimped artists like it did developers. If a Korean developer wanted to launch a game on their 3rd console Sony insisted on 50 million cash to Sony and ownership of that companies IP. That is what you call being pimped.
So use SAFE to create a situation like where MS can use a subscription to charge people more and more every year for its broken aps like its mere text editor Word which was never good always broken and gets worse every year?
Pass on that.
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@Warren your posts never cease to be cryptic novels 
I quite enjoy them but I’m a bit busy at the mo so I’ll try to respond later tonight! Thanks
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@JimCollinson you have experience in the industry, do you have any opinions about any inadequacies that might be addressed. Any input from your inside experience is appreciated.
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I’m not sure if this is what you are suggesting but in what sense do you think I’m advocating for protection from the public besides the simple exchange of value? Even a PUT on the network has a cost. Even energy cannot be created nor destroyed but only transferred. I know that’s pretty meta but to me a creative or artist creates and because everyone has to make a living they deserve at least enough to survive and eventually thrive. Just like anybody. If they want to give their music for free then we could actually make that an option, to opt out of pay per play. Heck we could make multiple models, pay up front to own, pay what you want, free and copyleft, stream to own, or the default pay per play. Freedom is choice after all and artists could extend expressing themselves by picking different models. I do think the choice is mostly predictable though and as you add more options it can complicate the UI. I think it can be done to be fair. I don’t think it’s at the top of my list but it will go in my notes for sure.
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Can’t help but expect if it is a society it will provide, within reason, everyone with what they need to fully develop and without undue burden. Less than that isn’t a society worth keeping. Presume no society has ever done it on the “everyone scale” but it needs to be the sincere aim if its really a society worth the name. In most only the few have that possibility. So we agree that supports and incomes should be enough to maximize potential.
But the default should not be artist gets paid a set amount each and everytime someone listens and at the rate the artists sets. I don’t even think that is realistic. I think that just means people turn to piracy with an attitude that music was meant to be free if anything was and that particular artist is very lucky if I care to listen to what they put out.
That is why I think the best is let me give $50 straight to David Gray because I love what he does and I want to support him directly in thanks for what he does and in the wish that he will be willing and able to continue- could even set a recurring subscription. And music is a spiritual thing its beyond a cheap trick in motel room even if you’re not into the personality of the artist. But what if someone gets tricked into buying a whole album of Lars from Metalica and they hate it but by the record label’s way of doing things even if you liked a song you’d be forced to buy a whole damn album and couldn’t get your money back for what you didn’t like short of a pawn shop gouging. So under this model we’d be back to labels re-enforced by the power of SAFE if this greed could fly. Could even have ads trying to barrel scrape and puff demand for stuff people don’t actually want. No one should be paying for music they aren’t happy with, no one should be over paying or feeling ripped off. Music should be fundamentally honest with no friction. Add all the models but the music should speak for itself.
Also as a consumer the idea that I am opted into a model where I pay more and have to opt out of it? Why. And on a cable pay per view stunt model. Whats next ads and selling people’s info. Its dirty. If people have alternatives and they do and will have more with SAFE they will choose what gives them value and will only choose more charitable options if its also a good value- really a better value. Paying more for a system to get gouged or manipulated is not a value added situation. Its just a great thing the thieving labels got dis-intermediated. Just like fossil fuel pushers they came to hide behind under paid employees jobs used employees as human schields. But they went the way of the long distance scam. Seems like a nasty unnecessary gimmic like a download cap or paid prioritization to break neutrality and make censorship pay, meaning we are always to keep the network in-adequate. There would be so many dirty little spamy tricks with opted in my default pay per play (like quarters in a juke box or arcade game) like the service setting its cut and and iflationary floor.
Its outrageous that as usual even with SAFE we have people lining up to suffer fools and create a lottery type taxes on fools. Why must it be dirty, why must it be cash in all the market will bear mentality? Why must it be rent seeker rip off based? Its a criminal mentality. I thought in the EU your contract good faith requirement meant no sharp dealing but making sure both sides got a fair deal or it would be subject to being vacated. This is implied contract stuff. And doesn’t the EU have these know a fraud or a crime when they see it provisions for pro juorors to rule against unethical practices. Good luck enforcing right?
Customer is not always right. But speech is a commons that for vital political reasons belongs to the public as the public as a commons.
Just back from a few days off. Lemmie take a good read of the thread… I think i’ll just respond to some individual points as I read through—from my experience in the industry—and hopefully it is useful.
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Yeah, we have some great tools on the Safe Network to allow this to happen… namely the Safe ID.
When adding a file to the network, it can be permanently associated with a verifiable identity, and then the UI layers above that can be utilised in myriad ways to facilitate different types of curation, financial distribution, and connections between the artist and audience.
It could be, via the upper layers that folk like @Nigel are conceiving, that users could decide on a voluntary monthly contribution (to replace spotify/netflix etc), and then pick a distro algorithm for dispensing those funds… perhaps it’s split between actual plays, or all given to their fave artist, or only to new artists, or logarithmically, just a flat rate to all, or maybe it goes into the musician’s collective.
The data distribution of Safe + Safe ID + Linked Data + microtransactions without fees via Safecoin mean all this is possible.
Such collectives have existed for over a hundred years as it happens: Collection Agencies. In the UK it’s PRS-MCPS. I don’t think any of them run on a guaranteed income model, but they certainly do introduce a degree of equity in redistribution of earnings.
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This whole subject is dear to my heart, and is one of the major reasons I began working for MaidSafe to being with. For those that don’t know; back in the day I was a musician but also ran an artist management company, record label, music download service, and have had many dealings with artists large and small, and everything from helping out tiny one-man-band labels, right through to deals with the majors etc.
I think we probably need to get past the thinking that the Safe Network will be a magic bullet for musicians—it won’t be—however, what it has the ability to do is strip out a very large layer of middle men right out of the music industry. Of course, you must realise that that is what the music industry is: just layers of middlemen between the artist and their audience.
Some middlemen in there do provide useful value to musicians—the aforementioned collection agencies might be an example off that—but many do not. The fact that Daniel Ek is a BILLIONAIRE tells you most of what you need to know about what kind of middle man he is, and it also tells the story of how since the dawn of P2P, the music industry has been see the concentration of capital into fewer hands, a fewer artists, fewer risks are taken on new music. The risks have also been very much pushed onto the musicians now too, as Ek seems more than happy to openly admit.
I think that SAFE would effectively be the end of Spotify’s current business model, and they would be forced into doing what they do best which is software and making a good listener UX. I figure there will be a sharp correction in the value of the company, as they will have to move from being a rentier, to providing actual utility to end users. I’m sure he’ll have to work harder, and I will lap up the schadenfreude!
As far as UBI is concerned, I think that would be something that had to be decided at a societal level, much in the same way as society needs to appreciate the value and richness that the arts provide. Commodification of the arts is not good for the arts nor society, and neither is the dismissal of anything that can’t be linked to GDP.
Capitalism has always undervalued the arts: it simply doesn’t have the necessary capabilities to do that, it does not have the vocabulary for that. Safe won’t solve this by itself—as I said, it’s not a magic bullet—but perhaps it will provide the platform and the tools to facilitate a new model, once society at large finds a new language to describe it.
Perhaps with Safe Network becoming the defacto distribution layer for all digital arts, and electronic commerce, this would allow agencies to work across online and meatspace revenue streams, and facilitate the kind of collective responses you guys are wondering about?
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Me too. I see music like data in many ways. It has value and that value must be recodnised. However the creator of the value needs to be rewarded by the consumer of that value and nobody else. To me this is a core goal of SAFE. I am not sure how far we will get (i.e. marketing/distribution/enforcement and more) away from all the middle layer of meatspace, but I feel it should be core to all data. Don’t want to bring up PtP again, but there is a huge debate coming I think and when we have headspace, all rewards will need algorithms in place and locked and we go for it.
I 100% believe in simple rules we all know with no loopholes and complex procedures and laws. That causes imbalance in society, if we all know the rules we can all play the game. Right now the game is controlled by those who have the preceived power where in actual fact it is really those who can walk the fine line between complex laws and loopholes. We can do much better.
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I’ve got a fair bit of experience with the music industry too, and would second all of what @JimCollinson says, particularly the fact that SAFE is not a magic bullet for all the problems (that goes for life as well!)
I’m never sure whether musicians should be flattered or offended that they are such a lightning rod for copyright issues. I’d guess even a band such as Metallica are pretty small fry compared to the world of patents and software. I suppose like land ownership it’s one of those emotional subjects (probably because in both cases it’s all fundamentally stolen anyway,) and as we know, music heightens emotions…
In the digital world I think it becomes more apparent that the main value a middleman can add is as a curator. Curation is something I don’t think has been done all that well yet on the internet, so making a good job of a decentralised curatorial system would be useful in itself, with really comprehensive categorisation and classification, like a great record shop! It’s not difficult to upload music to the internet, but getting it found by the right people (or any people) is very difficult, and still tends to require some kind of patronage.
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I view this as a contradiction. PtP, being paid out of the network’s balance of unissued coins, is paid by all existing holders of the coin by diluting their stake. Seems very far from being paid by the consumer of the value. What am I missing?
Assuming this
probably does lead to
The key will be to allow data that’s widely downloaded/viewed to be rewarded proportionately. Size or num bytes is not great here as videos will always beat a well-crafted paper/poem/story etc. So it’s not a done deal as I believe the details are not close to being stated yet. We need the design and that design should be unbelievably simple. I am certain we can do that, but no headspace right now to do that.
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I will be responding more in depth tonight to all of the excellent posts here (@JimCollinson, @david-beinn, and others) but to address David’s point on PtP real quick. I consider PtP to be kind of a UBI but the only way you get it is by being a denizen of SAFE which means uploading data. It’s not in any strict traditional definition of UBI besides that it is universal as in anyone can upload and get it.
PtP could be used in unique ways such as creating a new link that points to a song or playlist, in this way the curator that is sharing from anywhere on the network can get some PtP just for sharing and the Artist also gets paid (with hopefully a Pay Per Play (PPP) token payment distributed by JAMStand on top). In effect this can really incentivize people to share and digitally distribute their favorite music or music they think others would like, like a value chain that cascades the value when someone listens.
Edit: Why this approach is most attractive to me is it would be the defacto monolithic and parasitic streaming service killer (Spotify, Apple Music, et al) because it means JAMS is free to the user to streams, no ads, premium service. The only time you have to pay anything is to upload (pay the network) or to purchase music, donate, or patreon an artist or curator.
Also I see that many here have been looking at the token payment to Verified Artists as coming straight from the consumer whereas I’m trying to think of how it could be distributed much like Safecoin is paid from the network and given its underlying value by tying it to the music economy in some way, and instead of trying to get more or less farmers, the supply is algorithmically adjusted to be a more stable value so it’s reliable as an income.
Also considering how a UBI could be achieved and given value.
Just to spill some beans. I’m thinking there will be exclusive content provided by Verified Artists that could only be purchased via these tokens and of course these tokens would allow you to purchase anything for whichever model across the platform. Though I don’t want to turn away Safecoin either as a form of payment for most things.
More later. 
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Currated music? Seems like Popcorn Time can already handle that. Better curated for video than Netflix apparently. And free and P2P and automated.
Who pays the end user for their attention? Current models attempt to steal people’s attention and then sell it. Would these artists pay people for their attention? Its time and attentional bandwidth the people won’t get back.
The idea that its pay per view and the risk is shifted to the public again is like trying to armor the consolidated media mechanism with decentralization, crypto and further automation.
If SAFE has any way of stopping something like Popcorn Time or an updated Pirate Bay from running it obviously won’t be secure or really even desirable.
Think my issue and huge turn off is more of this stuff where SAFE is supposed to help business first, its supposed to help suppliers, its supposed to help rentiers first. Nah business is the problem. Look at all the trouble we’re having in the US. All the race baiting and all the stuff with Trump and none of that comes down to more than not having the courage to straight kill the fossil fuel business- everyone sees its an obvious criminal enterprise which ran out of the right to exist long ago but we can’t pull the plug on it and properly criminalize it because its business first instead of last where it belongs. SAFE is like Babbage’s Analytic Engine, its necessity is now totally obvious like the need for a general purpose computer became, it is obvious we need a decentralized, secure, yet open internet with privacy its just hard as the Analytic Engine was to build. MadeSAFE already built a Difference Engine demonstrator equivalent. But SAFE itself may be less relevant than a standard or set of principles like FOSS or a licensing convention like GPL3 if it gets compromised by dirty business. PtP and the coin are suspect. Crypto coin is suspect because in wildest ambitions it seems to have 1/billionth the potential of the already present radical implication of meatspace soveriegn fiat which crypto will only reinforce.
Jim’s point that SAFE is not a panacea is accepted. As is his point that there has to be a place for the arts. But supplier welfare is NOT the point of leverage. End user welfare is and I think David acknolwedged that when he wrote (if I understood) to paraphrase that valuation will come from consumers.
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Just addressing this small bit real quick because I find some of your comments confusing. People aren’t forced to consume music. They want music and so they go to where they can find it, so artists aren’t stealing people’s attention and since there are no ads then there is nothing on top of that to steal attention. I’ll read the rest tonight.
I don’t think anything that what I (or anyone else) has suggested is very far away from what you’re wanting to achieve @Warren.
I think there’s a significant difference between big business like you’re talking about, and someone trying to make an honest living whether that’s making music, cleaning floors or chopping down trees. At the end of the day most of us need to make a living somehow. Personally I’d rather we all paid more attention to using devices that aren’t made using slave labour than worrying about musicians, but unfortunately that’s not within the scope of SAFE!
I don’t actually have a particularly strong opinion on whether people should pay for music or not, but the trouble is that without some sort of a plan, then the big players will jump in and dictate things for their own ends.
As far as I can see, that’s what happened with the internet quite early on, and without some tools that are aimed at helping people making honest transactions on a small scale, SAFE is as vulnerable to the likes of Google as anything else. Even now, it’s not that it’s not possible to have pirated stuff on the internet, it’s just that the big companies have got together and decided they’re going to make it difficult enough (or impossible) to find that stuff, so most people no longer bother fighting.
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Yes, they are the network’s coins. Imo viewing them as unissued is the wrong perspective… they are owned by the network and the network does what it wants with them based on the final farming/reward algorithms…
. Just like you do what you want with your coins based on your own internal algorithms. The total supply is fixed, so arguing against some of the coins being owned by an AI just shows prejudice and greed. (EDIT: Forgot the clarifying emoji’s on that sentence…
)
No, you’re wrong about it being paid by the existing holders and diluting value. The process adds value.
Analogy: when Elon Musk spends money to commission a nice piece of artwork, it does not lead to a dilution of the value in your savings account. Instead It enriches all parties involved.
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Yes! JAMS will have zero middle men but also no pay per play token or verification. For verification we might require middle men JAMStand, though I want to see how much of the verification process can be automated. Verification would just leverage already existing social media verification by proving you own the accounts by sending unique codes to the DM you have to confirm. Kind of like two factor. As social media pops up on SAFE those platforms will begin to be added IF they provide verification. Then I would like to introduce decentralized governance for JAMStand as a co-op. Of course this would all come in phases and is a huge endeavor but one I think is worth it.
I had a veeery long post written and it didn’t save because my internet went down 
so what is above is all that was saved. It’s late so I’ll have to rewrite and address everything again tomorrow evening. A lot of stuff I was excited to respond to.
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Ok, your response is pending. With the original internet it was less coercive but its growing more so. Its becoming a patchwork of interacting weaponized data bases. So no one would be forcing anyone. But the dream would be to get most artists behind a paywall and have it pay per use and with each artist arbitrarily setting what they want in price per use. I hate that model because if it reaches critical mass it means the public pays a lot more for a lot less access and less music and that competes with other things like safe food and green products. And that model will attract ads and pushing because modal ads will be part of the stream locked feed. Its like everything bad about micro-transactions. People will have agents again pushing on the outside in meat space. And even if you’re paying with your SAFE coin you’re just indirectly trading your electricity or attention or gambling on SAFE based winnings. This recreate hollywood music under the iron logic of a distributed automated organization with smart contracts and all that is so ugly. Its like resurection of the labels and content mafia. If the medium is the message do it the SAFE way, its GPL3 in spirit its FOSS in spirit. If it hits critical mass there will presumably be scale for people to make a living and focus on music. Consumption and impact of music went up under napster and Limewire and Muel.
Corporations will get involved and what they want and the ways they try to get it doesn’t change much because we’ve adopted such a stupid culture about the point of an organization being profit for lazy disconnected threatening overlords. There is this notion that much of SAFE might run out of corporate data centers. That will create a massive sense of entitlement. I keep thinking of Popcorn Time vs Zoom, maybe I am missing something but I think Popcorn time performs essentially the same task without the centralized data systems the spy ware and privacy pimping and the stupid unnecessary capitilization which creates a sense of entitlement to return on equity from a bunch of ignorant self destructive rent seekers. So imagine the rent seekers stay but we have people paying to use Zoom but Zoom using SAFE when Zoom should be free because its opensource in place software using the latent capacity of hardware and public networks we own or have paid for many times over. Its like reinventing the long distance scam. Think of the dot com bubble, people thought it was going to be a rennaissance of demand creation barrel scraping based on ad cramming like with scams like the old net zero.
The risks have also been very much pushed onto the musicians now too. But that is where they belong. Like a Musk comment spend on making your products better not trying to pitch them.
I am not arguing anything new I’ve been arguing it here for 5 or 6 years. It was Flitter or Flicker or that retrospective creation of the Pirate Bay guys.
I still don’t get PtP and its connection to the coin. It seemed vaguely possible. I still question whether storage or associated resources will remain scarce enough to boot strap it. I don’t know if Fabrunella is still around but early on he said he too was looking for the same kind of model I’ve been arguing for- as expressed above people don’t think there is much variance in the visions or desires.
But I wonder because the economic imperative or mindset asserts itself and we get on a slippery slope. For a while here there was “the janitor” and it seemed to be his intent to take out the trash of what he considered altruism. His goal seemed to be to make the project real or non offensive by making sure the project was selfish in essence. The Open Bazarr guy came over here and he didn’t like the GPL of the project didn’t seem to think it was serious because it lacked a core cash in sell out aspect. Always wondered if Mr Lambert had a more economic take. IBM was trying to make its own version of SAFE and we know where it would try to take that I think. Google’s Vint Cerf made David’s acquaintance. SAFE is on the radar becaus ee know the status quo doesn’t want a pin in its dishonest balloon- nothing against Vint.
Not a panacea as Jim said. Always have to remember that about social systems. Aldous Huxley made a similar point about structures. You can get people on a football field to play foot ball but if they don’t want to play there won’t be any foot ball. So the solution to that is always slippery slope or slow boil the frog. And if we want to “all of the above” that sounds like
Obama’s energy plan and green washer Microsoft. Its President Brad Smith said to its employees who were pissed about its actual behavior against its rhetoric and total business suport of fossil fuel companies: in the future we will need more energy so its imparative we help ‘energy’ companies transition. No its imparative we put them out of business so as to make a proper example of actual dumb money. But then just today Gates was bad mouthing electric cars again saying they weren’t good enough and that their battery production by implication was too dirty. Before that he was saying divestment does nothing (a lie to high heaven) and then wanting to sequestor CO2 but really only so it could be pumped into the ground to get more fossil fuels.
His actual wealth and power is apparently totally tied to idiotic fossil fuels especially light cigarettes sold to teens natural gas but in the mean time MS is saying it will wipe out all of its historical carbon by 2050. Gates just stepped down from the Birkshire and MS boards. But I think if his wealth and power are so tied to fossil fuels how smart and how ethical could he actually be? The answer seems to be that his advantages came from cheating and from nepotism. Maybe the Sony of yesterday can be brought back by SAFE? You can smell that tree a mile away by its economic models it will convert the commons of SAFE into privatized toll roads for entitled welfare barrons.