I hear you on this. But in my rebuttal I’d contest that, on one hand, the size of the reward is immaterial. The important thing is who is being rewarded.
On the other hand, in terms of personal gain, the size of the PtP reward does tend to favour content aggregators: i.e. uploaders with significant catalogues. So that’s either established music services, or file-sharers. Not individual artists.
It’s simultaneously to small, and lacking in control, to be significant enough to act as an incentive for individual artists, yet enough of a carrot for the dumping of large catalogues.
I’d wager PtP is likely to provide similar levels of royalty, to a service like Spotify. Somewhere around $0.0005 per stream for an small indy artist. It’s difficult to tell though, as Spotify is suitably opaque about all this: another issue with a centralised corporation dominated music industry.
Spotify, quite rightly, gets a lot of flack for this, but they stay in place because they are propped up by the existing industry structures, and behind the scenes sweetheart deals with large catalogue holders like the majors. That, and the notion that it’s better to get paid something, rather than nothing, and that at least services like Spotify have infrastructure in place to get the money to the right people. Or what’s left of it.
It’s not a situation that’s very good for the vast majority of individual artists.
Now, just imagine for a minute that Spotify had a similar set-up, except all royalties were paid not to the artist, but to the original uploader, in-perpetuity. It looks even worse doesn’t it?
I’d say that if an artist doesn’t want to earn, that should be their decision. And they should probably be free to change their mind at some point too.
I can see why it would be desirable for the network. It would certianly help seed it with appealing, desirable content, but it would be founding the network on the backs of creatives, without giving them any agency.
PtP could work, but it would have to have some form of smart-contracting, metadata, trust, and arbitration mechanisms (community based or otherwise) built in. I’m not sure you’d want to have this baked in at a network level.
Yeah, these are the kind of projects that should sit at, what I’m calling, the platform layer. Although it seems like N99 it might span into presentation/curation a little too. I can’t tell if it allows artist to have any control of pricing or availability though.
I’d imagine there would be numerous forms of platform available to artists:
A raw platform, which allows artists full control over pricing, but with the associated, costs, risks, fluctuations, and management. And other platforms where artists may pool resource, and have royalties paid in accordance with the communities equity terms; say on a on a logarithmic basis; or in a way which aids smaller artist; or which smooths out currency/income fluctuations.
These platforms will need quality metadata, and smart contracting suitable to the task. But the possibilities are very exciting.
Jim