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.
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.
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 ;) ).