from Hacker News

Streaming Music is Ripping You Off; Fight back with this simple hack

by dimmuborgir on 8/31/15, 11:49 AM with 7 comments

• by strangecasts on 8/31/15, 1:13 PM

  The band Vulfpeck [1] tried this a year ago, releasing a completely silent EP and telling their fans to loop it. They did get some cash from it, but Spotify ended up taking their album down [2].

  If you want to support artists, this honestly seems like a really roundabout and ineffective way of doing it. Buy a CD or something.

  [1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/08/spotify-silent-albu...

  [2]: http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-sil...

• by lsiunsuex on 8/31/15, 2:05 PM

  I always thought it was (roughly) general knowledge that artists make their money from going on tour, with the label taking most of the money from cd / record sales from the beginning of time.

  I remember some tv show / documentary (years ago) of a rapper who had millions in cd sales but was still broke and living with mom because media sales don't generate money for the artist - tours do.

• by startuphacker on 9/1/15, 2:53 AM

  I have been working on an alternative streaming service that uses the Subscriber Share method. We are mostly targeting independent musicians, youtube musicians, and anyone without a label. I feel label are dead weight these days and just eat up a large piece of the pie for hardly any work.

  My goal is to cut them out starting with independent artist of today, and maybe in a few years more artist will relies you don't need a label to get popular any more and can do it on your own.

• by rem7 on 8/31/15, 6:19 PM

  If you want to support your artists, go see them live. Not only you will be more happy about it, they will too, and they'll make money that way.