S1E10 - How Corporate Greed Stifles Art

Episode Notes

Ben and Eric discuss corporate greed's affect on the arts and what can be done to correct it.

Ben started by sharing some good news – his band’s song had reached 25,000 streams on Spotify. Eric mentioned that it may have earned them about $0.20 and Ben decided to do some math to see how much that was. He calculated that 25,000 streams was equivalent to 800 streams per day for 30 days, which was the equivalent to almost two packed Lee’s Palace concerts in Toronto.  Then we moved onto the issue of not getting very much of the money from ticket sales anyhow. The conversation ended with a discussion about how ad revenue goes a long way and is a major source of income for many people. The talk highlighted the importance of understanding the complexities of the music industry and the potential for exploitation.

The record companies negotiated with Spotify in the early 2000s to get a cut of the profits and have privileged access to playlists. The record industry is compared to a cartel that controls the resource of music, and we discussed the recent Wizards of the Coast debacle and how the community responded to this, showing that they are not willing to put up with such restrictions.

The updated Wizards of the Coast (WotC) license for Dungeons and Dragons-related content had people up in arms about WotC tightening their license, which could have impacted many businesses that had been built up around D&D content. We also tackled the recent developments with YouTube’s monetization system, which has been used to silence independent media organizations under the guise of misinformation. Ben shared his experience with Napster and how it gave him access to music that he wouldn’t have had otherwise, which he believes led him to become a musician.