Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

It’s certainly a question worth exploring. The CC community has been exploring the tension between universal access and fair renumeration since the turn of the millennium, and the software freedom movements for 20 years before that. So luckily we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Some facts that I think are worth acknowledging as a basis for any discussion along these lines;

  1. The Streisand Principle is a thing (as John Gilmore famously said, “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”).

  2. This also applies to attempts to keep people from disseminating music and other media online, even before it started being born digital.

  3. The RIAA, MPAA and other industry consortia invested in massive warchests for fighting “piracy” (unlicensed fan distribution). They failed, and it blew up in their faces quite spectacularly, just as it did when McVomits when they sued London Greenpeace for libel.

  4. Which is why they switched strategy to licensing their media to low-friction platforms. Where fans can access it for a more reasonable fee than $1 per MP3 downloaded. Side note: the iTunes approach failed for the same reason all micropayments fail; people hate being nickel-and-dimed

  5. Any system for getting audiences to pay artists for online distribution must start with the assumption that

a) it is optional, and always will be

b) we want we want to support artists (when we can afford to)

c) it’s the predatory intermediaries pirates are avoiding paying, not the artists