Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Spotify's relationship to artists can be kind of confusing. On the one hand, they pay a laughably low per-stream rate, as in homeopathic residues of a penny. On the other hand, the Big Three labels get a *fortune* from Spotify. And on the other other hand, it makes sense that rate for a stream heard by one person should be less than the rate for a song broadcast to thousands or millions of listeners.
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silverwizard
silverwizard
Cory Doctorow's linkblog
@silverwizard Ah, I just hadn't hit publish!
Cory Doctorow's linkblog
@silverwizard It's entirely up, maybe your node is having synch problems.
silverwizard
Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Creative workers should be banding together with other labor advocates to propose ways for the FTC to prevent *all* AI-based labor exploitation, like the "reverse-centaur" arrangement in which a human serves as an AI's body, working at breakneck pace until they are psychologically and physically ruined:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
The US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that AI-generated works don't qualify for copyrights, meaning everything AI generated can be freely copied and distributed and the companies that make them can't stop them. This is *fantastic* news, because the only thing our bosses hate more than paying us is not being able to stop other people from copying the things we make for them. We should be shouting this from the rooftops, not demanding *more* copyright for AI.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Here's a thing: FTC chair Lina Khan recently told an audience that she was thinking of using her Section 5 powers (to regulate "unfair and deceptive" conduct) to go after AI training:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg
Khan has already used these Section 5 powers to secure labor rights, for example, by banning noncompetes:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
On the other hand, if we address the problems of AI and labor as *workers*, and insist on labor rights - like the Writers Guild did when it struck last summer - then we ally ourselves with every other worker whose wages and working conditions are being attacked with AI:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/
Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
As with the mystery of Spotify's payments, this isn't a mystery at all. You just need to understand that when creators are stuck bargaining with a tiny, powerful cartel of movie, TV, music, publishing, streaming, games or app companies, it doesn't matter how much copyright they have to bargain with. Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch-money.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
There's no amount of money that will satisfy the bullies and leave enough left over for the kid to buy lunch. They just take *everything*.
Telling creative workers that they can solve their declining wages with more copyright is a denial that creative workers are *workers* at all. It treats us as entrepreneurial small businesses, LLCs with MFAs negotiating B2B with other companies. That's how we lose.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Here's a rule of thumb for tech policy prescriptions. Any time you find yourself, as a worker, rooting for the same policy as your boss, you should check and make sure you're on the right side of history. The fact that creative bosses are so obsessed with making copyright cover more kinds of works, restrict more activities, lasting longer and generating higher damages should make creative workers look askance at these proposals.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
After 40 years of expanded copyright, we have a creative industry that's larger and more profitable than ever, and yet the share of income going to creative workers has been in steady decline over that entire period. Every year, the share of creative income that creative workers can lay claim to declines, both proportionally and in real terms.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Here's @ryanbroderick putting it better than I ever could:
> At a certain audience size, you just assume those people are locked in and will consume anything you throw at them. Then it just becomes a game of lowering your production costs and increasing your prices to increase your margins. This is why executives love AI and why the average American canβt afford to eat at McDonaldβs anymore.
https://www.garbageday.email/p/ceo-passive-content-obsession
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
In other words: Universal's copyright claims over AI training cash out to this: "If anyone is going to profit from immiserating musicians, it's going to be us, not Tiktok."
I understand why Universal would like this idea. I just don't understand why any musician would root for Universal to defeat Tiktok, or Getty Images to trounce Stable Diffusion. Do you really think Getty *likes* paying photographers and wants to give them a single penny more than they absolutely have to?
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
As we learned from George Orwell's avant-garde animated agricultural documentary *Animal Farm*, the problem isn't who holds the whip, the problem is the whip itself:
> The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Entertainment execs and tech execs alike are obsessed with AI because they view the future of "content" as fundamentally passive.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
And now, with total predictability, Universal - the largest music company in the world - has announced that it will start training voice-clones with the music in its catalog:
This comes hot on the heels of a massive blow-up between Universal and Tiktok, in which Universal professed its outrage that Tiktok was going to train voice-clones with the music Universal licensed to it.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
This is true across the board. The Big Five publishers categorically refuse to include contractual language -romising not to train an LLM with the books they acquire from writers. The game studios require all their voice actors to start every recording session with an on-tape assignment of the training rights to the session:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don't want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai's CTO's use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
This isn't hypothetical. Remember last summer's actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
But you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, right? For some creative workers, legal uncertainty for computational linguists, search engines, and archiving projects are a small price to pay if it means keeping AI from destroying their livelihoods.
Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license *will not* stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Many of these workers are accordingly cheering on the entertainment industry's lawsuits over AI training. In these lawsuits, companies like the *New York Times* and Getty Images claim that the steps associated with training an AI model infringe copyright.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
This isn't a great copyright theory based on current copyright precedents, and if the suits succeed, they'll narrow fair use in ways that will impact all kinds of socially beneficial activities, like scraping the web to make the @internetarchive's Wayback Machine:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
This brings me to the debate over training AI and copyright. A lot of creative workers are justifiably angry and afraid that the AI companies want to destroy creative jobs. The CTO of Openai literally just said that onstage: "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldnβt have been there in the first place":
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
When you understand the business mechanics of Spotify, all the contradictions resolve themselves. It is simultaneously true that Spotify pays a very low per-stream rate, that it pays the Big Three labels gigantic sums every month, and that artists are grotesquely underpaid by this system.
There are many lessons to take from this little scam, but for me, the top takeaway here is that artists are the class enemies of both Big Tech *and* Big Content.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
The Napster Wars demanded that artists ally themselves with either the tech sector or the entertainment center, nominating one or the other to be their champion.
But for a creative worker, it doesn't matter who makes a meal out of you, tech or content - all that matters is that you're being devoured.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
The lower the per-stream rate is, the more of that minimum monthly payment is unattributable, meaning that Sony can line its pockets with it.
But these monthly minimums are just part of the goodies that the Big Three negotiated for themselves when they were designing Spotify. They also get free promo, advertising, and inclusion on Spotify's top playlists.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Best (worst!) of all, the Big Three have "most favored nation" status, which means that every other label - the indies that rep the 30% of music not controlled by the Big Three - have to eat shit and take the ultra-low per-stream rate. Only those indies don't get billions in stock, they don't get monthly minimum guarantees, and they have to pay for promo, advertising, and inclusion on hot playlists.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
That means that Sony still gets $30m from Spotify, but only $10m is "attributable" to a specific recording artist who can make a claim on it. The rest of the money is Sony's to play with: they can spread it around all their artists, some of their artists, or none of their artists. They can spend it on "artist development" (which might mean sending top execs on luxury junkets to big music festivals). It's theirs.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Multiply the per-listener stream rate by the number of listeners for a typical satellite radio cast, and Spotify is clearly getting a *massive* discount relative to other services that didn't make the Big Three into co-owners when they were kicking off.
But there's still something awry: the Big Three take in *gigantic fortunes* from Spotify in licensing payments. How can the per-stream rate be so low but the licensing payments be so large? And why are artists seeing so little?
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Again, it's not hard to understand once you see the structure of Spotify's deal with the Big Three. The Big Three are each guaranteed a monthly minimum payment, irrespective of the number of Spotify streams from their catalog that month. So Sony might be guaranteed, say, $30m a month from Spotify, but the ultra-low per-stream rate Sony insisted on means that all the Sony streams in a typical month add up to $10m.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
But as labels representing creative workers - musicians - it was in their interests for these payments to be *high* as possible.
As it turns out, it wasn't hard to resolve that conflict after all. You see, the money the Big Three got in from dividends, stock sales, etc was theirs to spend as they saw fit. They could share some, all, or none of it with musicians. Big the Big Three's contracts with musicians gave those workers a guaranteed share of Spotify's licensing payments.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Accordingly, the Big Three demanded those rock-bottom per-stream rates that Spotify is notorious for. Yeah, it's true that a streaming per-listener payment should be lower than a radio per-play payment (which reaches thousands or millions of listeners), but even accounting for that, the math doesn't add up.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Their execs routine hop from one to the other, and they regularly cross-license samples and other rights to each other.
The Big Three told Spotify that the price of licensing their catalogs would be high. First of all, Spotify had to give significant ownership stakes to all three labels. This put the labels in an unresolvable conflict of interest: as owners of Spotify, it was in their interests for licensing payments for music to be as low as possible.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
But the whole thing makes sense once you understand the corporate history of Spotify. There's a whole chapter about this in Rebecca Giblin's and my 2022 book, *Chokepoint Capitalism*; we even made the audio for it a "Spotify exclusive" (it's the only part of the audiobook you can hear on Spotify, natch):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
Unlike online music predecessors like Napster, Spotify sought licenses from the labels for the music it made available. This gave those labels a *lot* of power over Spotify, but not all the labels, just three of them. Universal, Warner and Sony, the Big Three, control more than 70% of all music recordings, and more than 60% of all music compositions. These three companies are remarkably inbred.
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Cory Doctorow's linkblog
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed
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