Dude, are you living under a rock?

These bands are creating new music. But the money that allows them to do so comes from their old music. I have bands in my collection that have been making music for 30 years.

No they don't. They don't even make ok money. Tours are expensive and a lot of people, from road crew to venue security, take their cut before the musicians. The big guys, they make a killing on tours. But the small ones sometimes don't even break even.

In fact, a common wisdom in the industry is that touring is worth it not because the tour itself makes profits, but because it builds a fanbase and drives what is called "catalog discovery" - both old and new fans looking buying the albums with the songs they liked (and for the old fans, didn't know).

This study: https://www.giarts.org/article... says that 28% of income across all the musicians surveyed comes from tours. The share is larger for the rock/pop sector where it nears 40% but even that isn't easy money. And if you consider that only 20% of the rock/pop musicians make more than $50,000 a year, then it becomes a hollow statement.

Plus, it goes directly against your first statement - while on tour the band is not creating new music. So if you want to drive musicians more towards constantly creating (which most of them already do), then you can't make live performances the main income source.

There is more than one study and more than one way to look at it. Especially for streaming, having a catalog matters, especially for the smaller artists who will never have a charts-level hit:

"In 2024, nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify aloneâ"likely translating to over $4 million across all recorded revenue sources. What's remarkable is that 80% of these million-dollar earners didn't have a single song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart. This reveals a fundamental shift from hit-driven success to sustainable catalog-based income, where consistent engagement from devoted audiences matters more than viral moments or radio dominance."

https://cord-cutters.gadgethac...

Also don't forget that many studies such as DiCola's "Money from Music" focus on the superstars and the big hits. That is true, the charts pop music generates 80% or so of its income within the few weeks it stays in the charts and then drops of sharply.

Honestly, I don't care about the charts and superstars. They wouldn't starve if we cut copyright terms to six weeks. I do care about the indie artists that I enjoy. Who after ten years get the band back together for another tour through clubs with 200 or 500 people capacity. I'm fairly sure they would suffer if the revenue from those albums disappeared. And disappear it would. Maybe fans would still buy the CDs from the merch booth, but Spotify would certainly not pay them if it didn't have to.

He's basically a newborn :-)

Yes, but there is an important difference: TV had to appeal to an average audience member. Meanwhile the social media algorithms are intentionally working against you, trying to specifically find and use your triggers.

That's quite a different intent there.

On the TV, parents could also check the program for what they thought was suitable for their kid or not. They could watch the same program, even if not in the same room. Social media is a lot more personal and a lot harder to track and filter.

Hard disagree.

Not everything is subject to hype cycles. A lot of especially the SMALLER musicians, for example, basically live off their back catalog. I routinely buy the entire collection of artists that I freshly discover and fall in love with. And I totally feel that it is right that I pay them for music they made, no matter when they made it.

What is an abomination is copyright terms of DEATH + 70 years. Or whatever Disney pushed it to by now. I'm ok with inheritance of creative work, but it should not put the children into "never have to work in their entire life" territory.

Then again, there are two aspects: Creative control and money. I think that the Tolkien estate did a generally good job of protecting the integrity of JRR's works. Well, if we ignore Rings of Power, I have no idea what lies Amazon told them to get the approval for that shitshow.

And let's not forget that coypright law is also what protects GPL software.

Why? We already have machine code. What could an "AI-optimized programming language" do that neither machine code nor current programming languages already do?

Uh, you can do that today. That "intermediate language" is any programming language that has enough stuff on the Internet that the LLMs have trained them.

Now whether or not that's a good idea or a recipe for desaster is an ongoing discussion. As a security professional, my take is simple: Thank you AI, my job is secure until I retire. Just when technical solutions like W^X or Rust's memory ownership to list just two of dozens, were eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities.

The best part? I don't even need to learn anything new. AI has trained on insecure code, example code, "why does this not work" Stackoverflow questions and a whole lot of other stuff full of bugs and vulns. They're all showing up again in vibe coded slop.

Oh that part is really easy: Stop giving billions to AI startups.

Right now, the whole AI bubble is heavily subsidized by investor cash. Once the AI companies have to charge users the actual cost plus a profit margin, we'll see AI usage drop considerably. Because that shit ain't cheap.

does that mean the profits from his last scam are over, he needs a new job and has decided that honest work still is something for peasants?

Next week in these news: Companies who went to $random_startup_of_the_month found out that they now bought into being at the START of a five-year crusade to eliminate bugs, performance issues and usability problems.

That is the problem. "Right to read" was visionary and will really soon be reality.

Given how much capitalism insists on copyright and prosecution when it comes to THEIR works, how they get custom-made laws like the DMCA passed just to protect their rights... well, let's just say that if the big AI models weren't from the corporate sector but had been created by nerds on github, the copyright police would already have broken down our doors to arrest us all for copyright infringement.

So please, please, pretty please, let them have a dose of their own medicine. Heck, let the courts classify LLMs as "software" and find just one instance of the training data containing GPL3 content. Whoopsie, all your code belongs to us.

If you want to stay anonymous, who am I to uncover you to the public, for a few clicks and a pat on the shoulders?

If anything, we need to fight for our rights to remain anonymous. Online, offline, anywhere. The most massive clue that we need anonymity should be the zeal with which politicians and powerful corporations try again and again and again to force us into using real names online, make everything trackable, and pierce any pseudonymity or privacy layers. These fuckers never, ever, have our interest in mind, and constantly lie to us about what their real reasons are (seriously, in countries where laws can be made by public vote, we should pass laws that any politician saying "because of the children" is put into jail for a year).

Don't just let Banksy remain anonymous - let us all be anonymous whenever we want.

Really soon now, we'll figure out that the entire purpose of Earth was always to calculate Pi. Douglas Adams was right, he just lied about the actual number. :-)

Someone get this one a soft chair to drop into and explain how many real studies are based on surveys.

Susceptible people are exactly who need protection.

We don't make scams legal because people could just be more careful, do we?

If the math is correct, that means we can calculate the circumference of the known universe to a precision much, much smaller than the Plank length.

So in other words: No, there isn't any practical application for this, not now, not in the forseable future, and probably not before the heat death of the universe.

recent studies beg to differ.

These and others show a strong correlation between lootboxes and problematic gambling i.e. gambling addiction.