I worked in music streaming for several years. Yes, there is spam, but in my experience this was less than 1% of total consumption, even if now it is a huge share of available content (also a lot of it seems to be mostly for money laundering). Also, the share of revenue that Spotify and the other services pass on to rights holders is roughly on the scale of old brick and mortar retail. But how people spend has changed. Indie music nerds used to spend much more than the average mainstream listener on records and CDs. Under streaming, both mostly pay the same subscription price, so enthusiasts spend, while casual listeners spend more. On streaming platforms payouts are tied to streaming consumption not purchases, so music with strong branding, playlist support, and promotional backing does well, and the major labels are good at that.
What share of what Spotify pays out makes it's way into the pockets of song writers and musicians is a more complicated story, generally more if the artists are with a good indie label, generally less if they are with a major. At the same time, majors have had to offer less abusive deals than they used to, because DIY and indie distribution more viable.
The other big shift is that in the retail days new releases drove most purcahse, but with streaming catalog is a source of reliable recurring revenue, and the majors own a lot of catalogue, especially stuff they acquired outright in an era when artists often had their work basically stolen from them.
The key difference between Spotify and LLMs scraping the open internet is provenance. Music on Spotify does not just appear there out of nowhere. It arrives through an accountable chain: a label, a distributor, an aggregator, a publisher, a rights holder. Sometimes this chain is thin, like with self-serve, pay to publish distribution through companies like CD Baby. Most of what is actually streamed has a provenance that reflects serious editorial and financial commitment by an organisation in the form of money spent recording, developing, and promoting an artist. This provenance chain is critical contextual information about who vouched for the work, who invested in it, who holds rights to it, and when it entered the culture. Art, music, writing do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of an ongoing cultural conversation, and who said what, when, and under what institutional backing is integral to its meaning.
So I share OP's hope the long-run equilibrium for LLMs looks more like licensed media than scraping and open web search. I want a world where models license published content from rights holders, not for training, though that would be nice, but to surface answers with links to identifiable sources in a verifiable published database, and let part of my subscription pay for access to the underlying referenced material. Information is valuable, and it's reasonable to pay for it. Aligning incentives around truth is the challenge.
Putting ink on paper and moving books around is the least important part of what a publisher does. The important part is selection, investment, positioning, promotion, and accountability. This curatorial function has always been important, and it can only become more important the tsunmai of ai slop and misinformation grows. I hope that chatbot manufacturers partner responsibly with rights holders and lean into the value that publishers have created instead of potentially destroying it.
This is really the essence of it. Section 230 is critical to a healthy internet, but there is large grey area between editorial and platform. Places like youtube, meta, X, etc. are pretending to be platforms when really they are algorithmic editors, gatekeepers, and curators. They are much more like traditional media newspapers than say your ISP, and they need to be treated as such.
Really nice to see someone else bringing this up. Algorithmic editorial decisions are still editorial decisions. I think ultimately search and other forms of selective content surfacing should not have ever been exempt. They were never carriers. I appreciate that this would make the web as we know it unusable. I think failing to tackle this problem has will also make the web unusable, and in a worse way.
> I think ultimately search and other forms of selective content surfacing should not have ever been exempt. They were never carriers. I appreciate that this would make the web as we know it unusable
I can’t be the only one confused at these calls to have the government destroy things like searching the web, am I?
How is this a real idea being proposed on Hacker News, of all places? Not that long ago it was all about freedom on the Internet and getting angry when the government interfered with our right to speech online, and now there are calls to do drastic measures like make search engines legally untenable to run in the United States?
It’s also confusing that nobody calling for banning things or making the web unusable appears to be making the connection that the internet is global. If we passed laws that forced Google and Bing to shut down because they’re liable for results they index, what do you think the population will do? Shrug their shoulders and give up on the internet? Or go use a search engine from another country?
> How is this a real idea being proposed on Hacker News, of all places? Not that long ago it was all about freedom on the Internet and getting angry when the government interfered with our right to speech online
I can be upset about the government trying to make the world worse, and about other huge balls of power who have been making the world shitty in an ongoing fashion. Freedom of speech doesn't mean shit if a handful of people can buy up or otherwise absorb control of 90% of media and choose who gets heard. The call for regulation is an acknowledgment that the market fucked this one up. When the government threatens speech, I'll call for civil disobedience and proactive protections. When oligarchs threaten speech I'll call for regulation and punishment.
> It’s also confusing that nobody calling for banning things or making the web unusable appears to be making the connection that the internet is global. If we passed laws that forced Google and Bing to shut down because they’re liable for results they index, what do you think the population will do?
You assume that the only way to get a good, free search engine is to give control of it to some private entity. That if we don't do it in the US, people with turn to someplace else. I think you may be lacking in imagination. At a minimum, the possibility exists for nonprofit organizations to run quality search engines, but it's also possible to decouple the indexing business from the ranking provider. Google could run an index and charge for access, and ranking providers could build on top of that and recoup costs with non-tracking ads, donations, sales, whatever business model they please. Just because an unregulated market doesn't come up with a good solution doesn't mean a market under different constraints won't find a better way. And if nothing works out you always have the option of grants or a public digital infrastructure approach. There are so many things to try beyond shrugging and declaring that the market has ordained five dudes arbiters of the internet as experienced by most people.
> I can’t be the only one confused at these calls to have the government destroy things like searching the web, am I?
if you find this distressing then i imagine you find it equally as distressing as a couple of corporations destroy something.
the reason the word *enshittification” has become so ubiquitous is because corporations are actively destroying the internet and desperately trying to convince us the internet is separate from “the real world”.
sometimes stopping a person from burning the house down is necessary. no matter how loudly they cry about their freedom to have a bonfire in the living room.
What we need is quite simply a very good protocol for distributed search. It takes some storage, some bandwidth and some cpu cycles. Have people contribute those and earn queries and indexing. Make it very good but simple enough for a half decent programmer to make a lvl 1 node that can only announce it exists. Trackers, supper nodes, ban lists, ranking algo's etc etc Write server code in all the languages, have phone and desktop clients. There can be subscription based clients too so that the cpu, storage, bandwidth can be done for you by a company.
The article seems to gloss that this is one of the most potent pay to win loot-box hustles of all time, primarily targeting minors. The game is amazing but has this sleazy side. For this reason most grown-ups I know jumped to one of the living card games, Netrunner or Game of thrones.
If you show up to play a round of golf, and your opponent has a nice set of professionally-made clubs while you're using some sticks you carved by hand, you're probably going to lose, badly. But that doesn't make golf "pay to win" -- at the competitive level of golf, everybody has made the investment in that baseline of good equipment, and you're back to practice and skill as the differentiator.
Magic is similar. If you show up to a constructed tournament with whatever you could cobble together from a few booster packs, yeah, you're going to get crushed by people with competitive decks. But at the competitive level, everybody has made the baseline investment to have access to the full card pool, at which point you're back to skill (of designing/choosing/playing decks) as the differentiator.
Anyway. Top-tier Standard decks are in the couple-hundreds-of-dollars range, and even if you just go out and get the cards for one of those decks and nothing else, there's enough value in the cards that you can trade/sell and get back not 100% of what you paid in, but enough to make switching to a different deck not all that bad.
That’s a bad analogy. If golf had specific rules about length and material of each golf club that also changed every year, requiring you to buy new clubs to match the rules, you might have a point.
Interesting idea for a new type of golf tournament: at the start, everybody gets a closed bag of random golf clubs, they pick one to keep, and pass the rest of the bag to the golfer to the left while they get to choose their next club from the bag they get from the right.
And competitive Magic players don't buy booster packs unless they're planning to play draft. They go to a store and buy the individual cards they want.
Non rotating formats, although more expensive, are very popular, especially Modern and Commander. Outside of bans, the playable card pool is very stable and changes relatively little even with new expansions. I don't play golf, but I assume that equipment wears out and need to replaced (balls, bags if not bats).
More relevant than the equipment cost is the fees. For the price of golf club memberships you could make a lot of magic decks and enter a lot of tournaments.
Non-rotating formats are more expensive up-front than Standard, but tend to be cheaper long-term because the cards stay legal and usually things don't shift enough to make them completely unplayable.
Nothing (except maybe hearthstone or force of will) compares. I'd say it only partially targets minors though. The cost is too high in constructed. Most players at a given FNM are 25+.
Standard: $500 per year (more if you have to buy into a completely different archetype)
Modern: $1200 per deck (with a revolving door on the ban list)
Legacy: $2-4000
Vintage: $15,000+ (mint power mox and lotus would cost $35k+).
Look at the diversity, globally, of behaviors supported by an equally diverse set of culturally formed ethos. It's about dropping orders of magnitude off the frequency of these situations.
There's a lot of assumptions baked into that cake. The most obvious being what's considered acceptable behavior in a man by his female colleagues. There are a lot of countries where this kind of thing is considered part of the job by women.
What share of what Spotify pays out makes it's way into the pockets of song writers and musicians is a more complicated story, generally more if the artists are with a good indie label, generally less if they are with a major. At the same time, majors have had to offer less abusive deals than they used to, because DIY and indie distribution more viable.
The other big shift is that in the retail days new releases drove most purcahse, but with streaming catalog is a source of reliable recurring revenue, and the majors own a lot of catalogue, especially stuff they acquired outright in an era when artists often had their work basically stolen from them.
The key difference between Spotify and LLMs scraping the open internet is provenance. Music on Spotify does not just appear there out of nowhere. It arrives through an accountable chain: a label, a distributor, an aggregator, a publisher, a rights holder. Sometimes this chain is thin, like with self-serve, pay to publish distribution through companies like CD Baby. Most of what is actually streamed has a provenance that reflects serious editorial and financial commitment by an organisation in the form of money spent recording, developing, and promoting an artist. This provenance chain is critical contextual information about who vouched for the work, who invested in it, who holds rights to it, and when it entered the culture. Art, music, writing do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of an ongoing cultural conversation, and who said what, when, and under what institutional backing is integral to its meaning.
So I share OP's hope the long-run equilibrium for LLMs looks more like licensed media than scraping and open web search. I want a world where models license published content from rights holders, not for training, though that would be nice, but to surface answers with links to identifiable sources in a verifiable published database, and let part of my subscription pay for access to the underlying referenced material. Information is valuable, and it's reasonable to pay for it. Aligning incentives around truth is the challenge.
Putting ink on paper and moving books around is the least important part of what a publisher does. The important part is selection, investment, positioning, promotion, and accountability. This curatorial function has always been important, and it can only become more important the tsunmai of ai slop and misinformation grows. I hope that chatbot manufacturers partner responsibly with rights holders and lean into the value that publishers have created instead of potentially destroying it.
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