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Ethical online media

The days of rampant piracy are well and truly behind us. While some people still pirate media and there is little to dissuade them from doing so, for the most part consumers have opted to pay for the less dicey, less-virus-fraught world of legitimate online media consumption. And this is good. Where is goes wrong is with some bad actors, particularly on the music front. For over a decade now, Spotify has been the go-to music player for the majority, unfortunately, because it pays almost nothing to the artists whose work it capitalises on, pays record companies substantially more than independent artists, pays music writers to create generic music fodder which it doesn't have to pay ongoing royalties for, and generally scams artists out of a good time. Apple music, Google music and so on aren't so much different - in the radio world, a single playback of a song earns the artists something like $2. To earn the same amount from most streaming services, a song has to be played around 4000 times. To be fair, many of these services are ad-supported and can't afford that much. But when the CEO of Spotify earns more than any musician in the history of earth, you can bet that the majority of money isn't going to people who earned it.

Independent video production is no different - youtube has made it almost impossible for content creators to get paid a living wage on it's platform, no matter how much they produce. It removed the dislike counter to discourage review-bombing of advertiser's products, making it difficult to tell which videos are likely to be good, and mainly uses it's interface to psychologically manipulate users into staying on the platform, consuming, and watching ads. And of course, Youtube ubiquitously hosts pirated content, a problem present since it's inception. But it's the only platform for independents which does pay it's video creators. This is slightly more understandable given that video takes substantially more bandwidth than audio, so there are higher costs involved in providing such a service. At the higher tier, things are a little more rosy. Services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ act as executive producers for a lot of mainstream and niche content, and artists get paid well. The main downside to these services is that they're so divided now - if you want to watch one thing, it's on Netflix - another is exclusively on Amazon Prime, or Hulu, etc. This means many turn to piracy to support their habit - not a morally defensible position, though an understandable one. If the audio world were to take the same approach to content distribution, people would return to piracy in a heartbeat.

So we're locked in this neverending struggle between consumer and corporate greed, neither of which can win because the central problem is greed, not the things that people're greedy for. A better approach is to support artists directly, where possible to do so. Platforms like Bandcamp do this for music, while taking extremely minor cuts in profit from the artists, while others like Vimeo do the same for video. Unfortunately both seldom feature `big name' artists or media, because those are locked into the corporate platforms and delivery systems. In some sense, the little guy wins out here. But you have to start looking for the little guys, and supporting them.

- Matt Bentley, computer expert at Bentley Home PC Support.
Email info@homepcsupport.co.nz or phone 0211348576.

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