One answer to this madness is to starve the beast: never buy any music or any content from an established company. Torrent everything. It may not work at all, but at least you can tell yourself you're not helping the bastards.
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The solution for me, in this specific case, would be for Beato to act against YouTube and take his channel elsewhere. He has enough followers to be able to start his own Peertube server, find a few sponsors and keep going forever.
Businesses/creators need continued distribution, see Nike as an example of what happens when you "take your audience elsewhere to monetize them better/more."
1. People buy the other option (in Nike's case they kept going to footlocker and buying other shoes rather than only buying Nike DTC, in Beato's case they would continue to go to YouTube to discover new guitar content)
2. The business can't get new customers because no one is on the new platform (Nike DTC/Peertube)
It's viable for a split second (covid, "stick it to Youtube cause they suck") then people just go back to living their lives.
He's in a unique market position though because he's got industry respect. Joe Bloggs in his bedroom can't compete with "guitar content" because Dave Gilmore, Pat Matheney and Glynn Johns aren't all going to sit with him for a 2 hour long interview.
People are lazy. If you add even a small complication for people to consume content, then it doesn’t matter how much respect that content creator has, people will just follow someone else instead.
Google knows this; which is why they can screw over content creators on their platform.
I nearly didn’t even open the link because I didn’t want to learn something new before I’d had my morning cup of earl grey. Chances are the average consumer wouldn’t bother — assuming they even discover about this to begin with.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLHU0ZUbXX8&t=123s
The beef is less with YouTube and far more with Universal Music Group. After all, it's not as if YouTube has upheld the copyright claims.
The proper outcome is for Universal Music Group to stop the insanity, trying this same thing (reportedly) hundreds of times against the same person across years of that person's video catalogue, and getting the same adverse result every time. (So much for the marketers's claims that "AI" systems learn. (-:)
Unfortunately, there's no obvious pressure point, other than some sort of public boycott of UMG, for making this happen. UMG's lawyers have no financial incentive to stop making claims, and are using robotic tools. YouTube would open a huge can of worms by (say) blanket rejecting copyright claims from UMG, and Google has no incentive for causing this sort of trouble with UMG for itself again. M. Beato doesn't have much in the way of levers to pull, and there's the matter of several other well-known YouTubers reporting (in response to this, but also before) that they continually have to deal with the same thing, which a Beato-only fix would not address.
That's all it would take to get a few hundred thousand people to download it, and you'd know that the those who are going through the effort are higher-value subscribers, so it would be even easier to bring better sponsors.
I really don't like arguments based on "I am lazy to do that, therefore everyone is". It's at best defeatist cowardice and at worst a malicious way to support the status quo.
There is oodles of research into this topic. It isn’t something I’ve just made up.
It’s why analytics exist to explore website user journeys and then promoting the most important calls to action in prominent places.
It’s why physical store fronts put the doors at the front of the shop rather than on the side (side note: a friend of mine does own a shop and when he had to have the front door closed for repair, he saw a sharp decline in random walk-ins because people didn’t want to use the side door).
It’s why Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn etc remaining dominant platforms in their respective domains despite almost universal dislike for those platforms.
It’s why supermarkets put their product with the highest margin in the centre of the shelves and the lower margin items at the top and bottom.
It’s why being on page 2 of Googles search results are as good as not being in Google at all.
I’d actually love it if your idealistic view were true in practice. I don’t want to depend on GitHub, LinkedIn, YouTube. But that’s where the masses are so I need to use it too.
I already ditched WhatsApp for Signal, but after several years without WhatsApp, I still haven’t converted all my family. So I miss out on sooo much conversations because of my ideals.
What you’re advocating simply doesn’t match the reality of how people shop for content. Be that free stuff on social platforms, nor purchasing physical products in stores. It’s not defeatist to say consumers are lazy. It’s just a sad fact of life. And ignoring that fact doesn’t magically make it untrue.
So when grayjay says "Follow Creators, Not Platforms" I'm pretty sure that the minute that regular people on the street know about the existence of "grayjay", they will become essentially also a platform that enshittifies in the same way (cf. https://xkcd.com/927/).
It's a common pattern. Be an aggregator first, then slowly introduce exclusives, and become a competitor that climbed up on the backs of the others. Somewhat similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Everything breaks. - Channel makes no money because sponsors don't pay (as much, it's a power law) for 200k subs (being charitable with your 5%. in reality it would be < 50k)
- Guest don't come because the channel is small and they don't get distribution for their projects
- Platform X doesn't pay out as well as YouTube, so you lose more revenue
- The channel can't function because there isn't enough revenue to run the business. Can't hire lawyers when Z Record Label sues you on Platform X.
- Other channels on larger platforms take the space that you filled. The market is not static. Slash starts his own YouTube channel, which has more credibility, and David Gilmour goes on that one instead. See the celebrity podcast/YouTube space for arguments that prominent celebrities don't become creators when the market signals there is money/opportunity available.
- When subscribers churn, there is no one new on the platform to replace them. Churn in this case means they no longer use the app I made them go to, or they no longer subscribe to or pay me. Creator payment churn is MUCH higher than any typical B2B or B2C churn.
Being a creator is like standing up a business on a set of toothpicks. Even if you are Rick Beato (which is why he is so upset)
The problem isn’t that other revenue streams don’t exist. It’s that they’re still dependent on the whims of YouTube to get their brand out.
And unfortunately, these other revenue streams are only more profitable than YouTube for the smallest percentage of video content creators (baring those who specialise in adult content, but that’s a whole other domain of content creation ;) ).
Of course they can. If they smell money and sell, they can change it to whatever they want. It's just a client for now.
It's like arguing for Skype back then based on tech aspects. It's P2P! Yes, P2P until it wasn't.
Youtube wasnt distribute in tech, but was in marketing and if you were there around 2007-10, you remember it was much less social-media-ified and felt more direct and raw. Subscribe and get notified. Just a platform.
The only way to avoid that same path is by remaining obscure and small.
I guess every new generation of tech enthusiasts has to get burned to get sufficiently disillusioned.
More importantly (c) why?
Instead of building up someone else's business/platform for free (and put yourself in the same position as you already are). This is why people sell a product. Online courses, have their own app, tequila, merch, live shows, signature guitars, etc. As a creator, you don't go to another platform; you have to own something. Unless it's a purely moral argument, in which case, I can respect that, but it's not a good business decision.
You can run a Peertube instance costs for less than $100/month, distribution included. And that's if you insist on running your own.
> with what time.
People publish to multiple platforms already. Adding another one is the least of the concerns.
> Unless it's a purely moral argument, in which case, I can respect that, but it's not a good business decision.
I for one can only respect someone if their decision puts their principles before their business. That's what "Skin in the Game" is all about. Beato can make all the fuss he wants against BMG, but I have no sympathy for him if his actions only goes as far as his dependency on YouTube/Google allows him to go.
Who gets to process the copyright strike and tell creators they need to remove the content in order to not have consequences? YouTube.
Who gets to close down the channel even before any lawsuit against a copyright allegation is conducted? YouTube.
Beato is fighting BMG because he sees YouTube as the hand that feeds him, but he could get rid of all the BMG annoyances if he was brave enough to own his distribution channel.
This one is doable.
And then a tort for wasting everyone's time and ruining the media.
Not seeing how that one would come to pass though.
UMG however has not any relationship with the author so they actually can be sued. If they hate their subcontractor YouTube for it, that's their problem.
They're the legal entity on behalf of which blocking is done, after all.
A lot of it is just CYA and enforcement theater. YouTube could pretty much have one dedicated account manager for someone with the subscriber count of Beato who would work as a first-line of defense against frivolous/bogus copyright claims.
> I would expect smaller platforms to adopt similar policies as they grow
But then the content creators who take ownership of their social media presence will by definition be a lot closer to those making these types of decisions, and they will be able to say "I don't think I am infringing on anything, if you really disagree you will have to go to court".
Are there any Youtube alternatives which actually do this, though?
I don't think it actually makes a difference whether Youtube hires the lawyer, or whether Beato hires the lawyer. It comes out of Youtube ad revenues either way. It's better for Beato to be the one to choose who he wants to represent him.
Which is why her saying "Only listen to my version" works, where as he would not. 5m subs is just too small.
I view Beato's stance as rational: he's picking one battle over the other rather than engaging on multiple fronts at once. He's only one man. He has limited social capital, and the conversion rate favors him spending that capital in a sphere of influence that resonates with his audience, fans, and industry contacts and associations. He knows where his bread is buttered, and due to his success and notoriety he may get away with biting the hand that feeds him, but he's a caged tiger as much as he's a cage-bird.
Beato wants to effect change in a specific way. To broaden the scale and scope of his grievance, he would dilute his own impact. I trust that Beato has given these issues some thought as a working artist, as he has a vested interest in helping himself, but he can already negotiate preferred rates because of his built-in audience and pull. His desired relief would benefit all artists working in America, not just Beato himself. To be drawn into a battle on two fronts would be a tactical error. He's wise to focus on the battle he has a chance of turning the tide of. Others have already engaged on the front you advocate for, and those others are better situated to engage there.
This is Beato's fight, as he drew the battle lines. He can't be sidelined so easily by bystanders, like us in the comment section, because us folks don't have skin in the game like Beato does.
There is no "Extinguish" for open source applications, systems and protocols. The closest attempt at EEE that one could try to argue was Facebook/Google leveraging XMPP at first for their messenger apps (FB Messenger/Google Talk) and then closing them down, but even that would not be accurate, given that the number of people using "truly open" XMPP has not gone down.
Talking about "branded" software is nonsense. People use what is most convenient and helps them achieve their goals. If there are no significant vendor lock-in, the cost of swithcing from open source vendor to another is essentially zero. GrayJay has no lock-in, all they do is aggregation of different video platforms.