Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes

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.

Few people are buying anything in this world where streaming is the norm and the labels make money by cutting deals with the distribution platforms.

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.

Neither the GP or this comment are viable in the real world.

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.

> in Beato's case they would continue to go to YouTube to discover new guitar content

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.

The GP is still correct.

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.

https://grayjay.app/ solves this quite well.

Same problem applies: That’s another site to read. Another app to download. Another product to discover.

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.

"Hey everyone, I'm Rick Beato. I am tired of dealing with YouTube constantly threatening my livelihood, so now I will be focused on my own channel. I will be posting here as well for whatever they let me, but to get full videos just download the GrayJay app (link in description) and look for my channel (link also in description)."

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.

I’m not being defeatist. I’m literally just pointing out the reality of consumer trends.

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.

You are confusing "optimal" with "feasible" and you are ignoring the fact it can be more profitable to serve a niche (people with a minimum of ethical standards) than to be just yet-another participant in the commodity marketplace.