Celebrities are the ones that made IG and Twitter big yet they complain about them banning or limiting them when black artists could've come together YEARS ago to make a black-owned social network big. This might seem harder now since theyve already made Zuck and Dorsey richer and let their user bases grow to billions but I've been saying this for years. it's so stupid to me

They complain about Spotify or Apple not paying anything and don't even do anything about it
when alternatives like Audius or sound.xyz exist that they could promote (those are decentralized streaming sites giving the user 100% royalties)

They can go direct to consumer with merch by paying a software dev 1/10 of the money they currently lose to create an direct payment system but instead they all used the preexisting sites like Shopify, Patreon, etc. which take a huge percentage of revenue, or they can sell as NFTs and ship the physical item (yes there are ways to buy with a normal credit card your customers don't need to know anything about crypto)

They can sell tickets directly to consumer same way I said about merch instead of giving away 20% to ticketmaster which is basically a monopoly

Let's go back to streaming. They don't even negotiate with companies like Youtube or Spotify about what counts as a stream if that makes sense. The incentive for any streaming service is to find any way to minimize the amount of streams they pay for. For example in Youtube's policy they REMOVE repeat streams coming from the same IP address (seen this happen myself from just legit rewatching something and it took off all my repeated views the next day) and you have to play it for X amount of seconds which makes it harder to get more streams. Artists don't even think about this enough to read the policies that make them money. OR again they can promote an alternative like Odysee which is basically a decentralized youtube that pays you more for streams instead of keeping the profit

They can direct their fanbases to their own websites, apps, platforms and maybe even run ads on those or whatever instead of complaining how there's only 1 route that's not paying them

They actively make people like Bernard Arnault the 3rd RICHEST person in the world off promoting Hennessy and Louis Vuitton but anything black is uncool

These niggas so dumb bro it's like chattel slavery with invisible chains and they don't care cuz they can make a quick buck and buy that Rolex meanwhile a kid in their hood is starving

Did you pay for a Tidal subscription?

If they tried to start some s*** all that would be necessary to stop it is allegations/gay rumors/etc any story to ruin their credibility and persona whether true or not. I damn near believe you gotta do some s*** for them to hold over you to even get to Ye Drake Hov level and they always have that button to press.

But yeah up until a few years ago you coulda took the heavyweights of 2000’s rap alone + Dot Cole Drake and made a streaming app or social media app that would have changed things.

Nothing is a coincidence it’s a reason why that or black owned major distribution will never happen. That’s just not how this is finna work without some type of climactic event lol

yes and I bought TLOP for $20 and got nothing out of it. 5 of those dollars probably went to whatever payment company processed that and another 10 to the label

Because a random forum poster would be able to do far more productive things if they were in the same position

well clearly I could if I'm enumerating these things they never care to think about. Saying random forum poster doesn't take anything away dummy

looked into that soundxyz streaming service op mentioned and it’s literally some wack ass nft crypto garbage. if this is your idea of an alternative my nigga i also got a beach house i could sell you in idaho. otherwise yeah you right

yeah if it was gonna happen they waited too long. the powers that b way too entrenched now and the death of the monoculture has killed a lot of their power. drake seems more concerned with gambling on stream anyway. music is losing priority with the youth over streamers and lowest common denominator video games anyway

Regular niggas made twitter popping tbr

the entire point of this system is that you have to promote it to reap its benefits

You see the term "nft" and automatically think anything to do with that is garbage but okay let me break it down for you. I don't care about NFTs they just have a negative connotation from the people that are salty there were kids were making their yearly salary off of jpegs but forget that part. The point of something like soundxyz is

1. you can have every stream automatically paid to you because they payment is automated in computer code called a smart contract. There is no centralized company that keeps your money, calculates the percentage you should get and then sends you a fraction each month, it's all transparent

2. you can track things like intellectual property transparently on the blockchain which is basically a public database everyone can see. If your song is used in a commercial or sampled, you can automatically receive royalties without the need for having to go through annoying negotiations and long chains of contacting people for clearances etc,

3. you have better ways of interacting with your fans. Let's use the example of me buying TLOP and getting nothing out of it, If that transaction was on the blockchain then my wallet address would forever by linked to Kanye as someone who purchased it. He could then continue to send exclusive things like maybe an entry pass to an in-person event involving the album, maybe exclusive pictures of info. Maybe automatically sending a reward for the person who has the most amount of streams, Or sending the fans he's previously connected with a token that represents them being able to vote on something so they can give input. You have direct access to information and ways to build community

to be clear im not “salty about kids” im concerned from the massive amounts of people that have lost a lot from crypto/nft scams in recent years, rightfully so, so it’s suspicion, not anger and i ain’t forget s***, so weird reaction but ok. anyway you prolly should’ve included this in OP, but thanks for breaking that down. although id be concerned about the environmental impact because all this s*** you’re discussing requires unjustifiably massive amounts of power so.
techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/Are-NFTs-bad-for-the-environment-Carbon-energy-and-more#:~:text=NFTs%2C%20despite%20their%20digital%20nature,Judge%20Business%20School%20in%20England.

Because they’re artists not academics, intellectuals, etc

artists not cutthroat businessmen/capitalists, you mean. ain’t nothing academic about it

nft brehs in chat

out

Cutthroat businessmen and capitalists definitely aren’t the smartest bunch either

Shortsighted, opportunistic, and unempathetic robots

100% right. i mean idk who you mean by either because a lot of artists are really smart so… i can think of many artists who’ve had smart and innovative ways of getting around the entire system like thom yorke getting paid directly for his one solo album then distributing it through BitTorrent. he seemed to treat that more as a one off thing though for some reason

I do think they’re creative and provide productive perspective but most can even be anti-intellectual at times

I’m not going to say Kanye is STUPID but when you say you actively avoid reading then how much can I really trust your intellect

yeah artists definitely include a wide breadth of “traditional intelligence” from the zenith to the nadir so to speak lmfao. the many intelligent artists we have usually aren’t in positions of serious power either

Lupe

OP with performative word vomit

This decentraland dumb s*** doesn’t work because nobody f***ing cares about it and no way on earth people will use it and make a dent in any of the big platforms user base

artists are not what made social media pop

OP is just a sound.xyz shill