this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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I’m an artist with music on Spotify. I honestly don’t know how I feel about this.
I know Metallica got a lot of shit about Napster back in the day, but I can’t help but feel like they were right. They were (by my recollection) trying to ensure artists still have a claim to their body of work. I know the industry has come so far since then, but it feels like the moment everything started to slowly become “content” and not art.
I just want real people to actually enjoy my music. I don’t expect to make a living or even real money off my music, but I also don’t like someone else making money off my art and using it to train AI models.
I made something meaningful, no one else gets to decide that they wanna commodify it or use it to make slop.
As a former professional, now semi professional musician: we make our money playing gigs and selling merchandise, not by getting paid by Spotify. Go ahead, pirate all you want. But also go to shows, buy merch, if the bands are on bandcamp, buy their shit.
Random idea: do you think a platform for crowd sourcing / funding ideas could go well for musicians? Like a feature request in software, where users can like a post about a feature to show interest, except it would use dollars instead of likes. Fans could publish an idea for a song they like and donate $5 or whatever. If it’s a popular idea, more people donate to it and the artist takes notice (having now been somewhat paid to produce it).
i'm a musician and i don't really like the idea of Cameo-ing music. Also, $5 is not nearly enough.
Well, if it stays at $5 then it’s probably not a popular idea. If 1000 people like the idea and each put $5, now we’re talking $5k. Still probably not quite enough, but it is producing income via a novel way of getting in touch with the audience.
From a musician to another, as someone else replied, if you're making your work available digitally then you immediately lose control over if people pay for it or not. The good thing is, the ones who want to support you will if you give them a way. But you just can't coerce them anymore. Spotify and other similar platforms are getting the whole cake because of the convenience that they offer, that's it. And I'm sure you know how little of that cake trickles down to you.
As a listener, if a band I like is touring within 2 hours of where I live, I go see them live and get a shirt
I hope that's helping them more than whether I listen to a scraped digital copy or not
People are able to download your music illegally if they aware you exists and ai companies was also able to train models before the scrape
This was done by an archival group, primarily for the purposes of preservation. Don't know if it helps make you feel better, but at least personally I think complete archives of human cultural output, if possible, are important. So much has already been lost over the course of history
Anything you post online should be considered permanently online. It’s really outdated to think exclusive ownership is possible online. The way I think about it is that anything I put online is for everyone, good or bad, and not for profit.
I think that was op of the top comment here said - that they post it for everyone, without expecting a profit, for people to enjoy. But scummy actors are using their art to gain profit in immoral methods.
To bring the 2 points together - once something is online(fully agree with what you said) bad actors will inevitably use it to gain profit and commoditize it.
I get why this feels personal, but I think there’s a deeper problem with the framing. The internet was never meant to be anyone’s marketplace. It was meant to be a place for people to share ideas and work freely, not a storefront.
The moment we decided the internet should function like a sales platform, artificial scarcity became inevitable. That’s when art turned into “content,” and creativity got optimized for algorithms instead of people. Freedom and monetization can’t really coexist online the business model always wins.
And it’s probably training gen AI models as we speak to put music artists out of what little profitable work there is left. Very few people value music as much as they do visual art.
I don't think it was a good idea to upload it to Spotify then.
For the record, I support piracy and don’t mind that people listen to my music for free. I don’t like other companies making money off it though. They didn’t make it, they don’t get to use it to make money.
Its not so much the money I’m not making, it’s the theft of hard work artists put in and corporations profit off of that makes me upset.
In 2019 the only way to reach people was Spotify. It’s still kinda the biggest game in town. It’s slowly changing but the business and ideas of digital ownership of rights were different 7 years ago.
Oh my God 2019 is almost 7 years ago. That's insane.
Anyway, my point was ever since you uploaded it, it has been on the Internet for anyone to grab. Even before this, anyone competent enough to train an AI or host a competing music service would have been able to download it in the same way that these people did. The only difference is that now there's a copy being preserved that's not under the control of an evil corporation.
You have the right to feel any way you want about that, and you're entirely justified in being uncomfortable with how carelessly it may seem your hard work is being spread around and copied, but personally I think it's a good thing with very little drawback since it just makes it easier to do something that was already well within the abilities of the entities you're worried about.