Taylor Swift Would Make 3x Her Current Salary on LBRY - an interesting slack convo

I was shooting the shit with Reilly Smith on the public LBRY slack channel. We started talking about piracy.

My concern is that, while the platform is awesome, it may suffer the fate of Napster. If too many people grab onto it as a convenient piracy platform, would that result in legal troubles that tank the whole project?

Perhaps not. And the conversation led to an interesting place, as the title suggests - that musicians could make more of the money they deserve through LBRY, rather than losing money to piracy. This chat is posted with permission:

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heymattsokol [11:49 AM]

There is definitely a serious issue re: people uploaded copyrighted shit. Cuz if LBRY gets popular, every teenager in the world is gonna use it the way napster was used
I love LBRY but yea that's a problem

reillysmith [2:34 PM]

@heymattsokol the key is incentives + tools, in my opinion.

(1) Incentive: sharing pirated content on LBRY versus traditional pirate venues is less anonymous
you’re more likely to get caught hosting on LBRY
(2) Incentive: if you charge a key fee, or for hosting, you’re now profiting
the penalties for profiting off unauthorized resale in the US are arguably an order of magnitude stiffer than just sharing data
(3) Incentive: it costs LBC to claim names
you have to expend resources every time you publish a piece of content and claim a name. that’s one threshold that could limit piracy volume, as you do not have infinitely deep pockets I imagine
(4) Tool: publishers bid on names
the highest value bids (e.g. the people who spent the most money investing in a namespace) are what resolve most often, meaning the “legit” publish is also most likely to propagate.
this allows the app to go, “only resolve this bid,” which means no matter how many pirated copies publish, they will not appear/be downloadable by all but the most tech savvy of individuals with the app.
(5) Tool: blacklisting
we are legally obligated to comply with DMCA takedown requests as best we can. in our case, that means blacklisting from appearing in the app.
if Disney is not on LBRY, we will obviously know, and if they sent a DMCA, that is fairly easy to comply with WRT blacklisting disney things.
(6) Tool: obscurity
extension of above: people can publish Disney content to not be caught--but that would mean the name is so obscure that no one can find it with tags.

heymattsokol [3:00 PM]

That's good stuff @reillysmith. Sounds like similar incentives / barriers to entry as YouTube, where some piracy exists but it's not a major issue

Making it so that piracy, while technically possible, is no fun and not effective.

reillysmith [3:04 PM]

and i think the most important aspect: enabling people to really pay the artist directly for the first time ought to make people feel good about supporting creators, and socially reinforcing that behavior, that until now has had barriers to entry in itself.

take Spotify for example: users love it, artists range from hate to mixed feelings about it, despite accessibility, since apparently they get shafted. a Spotify on LBRY would change their mind entirely.

Taylor Swift could charge half a penny per listen and make 3x the money

heymattsokol [3:05 PM]

yeaaaa the math is incredible. I've been using the "1 cent per view gets you 5x what the best youtubers make" line on people

very good point. It's like how, at least anecdotally, most teenagers are fine with pirating music but would not steal a t-shirt from the merch booth. different perceived victims

Bandcamp has profited handsomely from a similarly artist-friendly model, as you probably know

I'm very curious to see how my friends / colleagues react once the app is public and I can actually try to get people to put content up on there

Who knows, maybe I'll try to set up a publishing house and do it for them in exchange for a cut :wink:

reillysmith [3:07 PM]

actually i just did the math, and it's even worse than i thought:

even if YouTube gave you 100% of what you earned on youtube and no 45% cut, it would be less than half a penny. best case it's about 1/5 of a penny per view

heymattsokol[3:08 PM] whoa

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I'm SO HYPED about LBRY. Public beta for the app is happening within the next week or two - you can enter your email at https://lbry.io/get?r=zfSjN to get on the list. Full disclosure - that is my referral link, I get a few credits for using it. Here's the plain link if you prefer: https://lbry.io/

follow me: @heymattsokol