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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Okay, lets say I accept the thesis that Spotify is directly to blame for the demise of physical media and the rise of streaming. In the current moment, what is Spotify supposed to do that would satisfy you?

    For every dollar I pay to Spotify for their music service, Spotify sees 33 cents of it. Much of that goes to running the service that people want access to. The label takes the other 67 cents. They pass about 2 cents of it on to the artists.

    Let’s go full fantasyland, say Spotify cuts their own take entirely and somehow subsidizes the entire thing. The label is now making the full dollar, a full 150% of what they were making before. Well, is that better for artists? 150% of what they were making before is 3 cents on the dollar. Is that a solution? No, it’s barely a difference.

    Let’s say Spotify triples sub prices so they can take only 10% for infrastructure. Most of their current subscribers won’t pay that, but let’s just pretend. Is 5.3 times what the artists were making before an acceptable amount? Six cents on the dollar? Weird Al would’ve made $60 off Spotify this year instead of $12. Is that satisfactory? Because that’s literally the most Spotify can do, even theoretically.

    Spotify can’t solve the problem.

    The problem is labels locking artists into contracts where the label gets to keep 90% or more of everything they make. Spotify has no say in that.

    Conversely, if we go back to the current split, but have the labels share their cut with the artists 50/50, the artists are suddenly making 1650% what they were before. Snoop’d be taking almost a million dollars for his billion streams. These contracts made some shred of sense in the physical era, when you needed to own a studio and audio engineers and marketers and media factories to push and print a band, but even back then they were widely known to be exploitative. Nowadays, when any tiny town has a studio for rent and anyone can edit a killer track in their bedroom and go viral on social media? They’re a fucking joke.

    The villain in this scenario is blindingly obvious, and anyone who believes otherwise is either a plant or a useful idiot.



  • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlsoak and jump hump
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    2 years ago

    It was worse when I was a kid, in winter we had to heat the house to blistering on friday afternoons and just hope it stayed warm enough til sabbath ended (if it wasn’t, we had to get a non-Jewish friend to come turn the furnace on for a bit, and there was all sorts of rules about whether that was allowed too). And if you turned a light off at night by reflex, it stayed off. Nowadays there’s all sorts of “sabbath mode” gadgets lol


  • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlsoak and jump hump
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    2 years ago

    The really short version is that the jewish belief is that an omniscient god wrote the torah with the complete foreknowledge that people would be debating over its intent in edge cases for the rest of time, and so he wrote exactly what was necessary for rabbis to collectively come to the correct conclusions. If an interpretation would’ve been wrong, then god would’ve written that part differently.

    Essentially it’s D&D rules lawyering



  • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlsoak and jump hump
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    2 years ago

    those loopholes are the fence around the Tora?

    That is essentially correct. The torah itself is sacrosanct, and Rabbinic derivations are not seen as loopholes, so much as expert notes to aid in understanding the intent of the torah and accidentally violating the letter of the law. The really short version is, god is omniscient, and therefore knew when he spoke how his words would be interpreted for all time, and so if he didn’t want people to interpret them a certain way, he would’ve said something different. In other words, following the letter of the law is integral, but rules lawyering is not just allowed, it’s expected. There’s actually a famous jewish parable about a time rabbis exiled god himself from a debate because if he wanted to influence the proceedings, he should’ve done so in the torah.

    “The torah says we can’t start a fire on the sabbath. But what counts as ‘fire’ or ‘starting’, exactly?” “The torah says we can’t carry a heavy object more than 4 cubits while outside our private domain on the sabbath. What counts as heavy? What is a private domain?”