this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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People also should be able to pay the artist directly and not some billion dollar company who continue to try to squeeze the artists and limit creativeness all in servitude to the almighty dollar (or any other currency)
Okay so what I'm hearing is you want companies to make investments in artists directly - so a form of profit sharing essentially. Why would a company invest in artists if artists get all of the profits when its successful and the company loses all of the capital if it fails? Why would any business want to partake in a system like that?
No, fuck the middle man, we don't need billion dollar conglomerates to distribute our media. The people have the tools and connection to create and share without these old business models trying to keep us in the 19th century as wage slaves, happy for the peanuts that their monopolies allow us to have.
I pirate things, and I also pay artists directly for their work when I can. Companies like Netflix manipulate the data and the market to ensure they are making the most profit possible. That is their entire goal as businesses. This exploitation should be separate from art altogether.
To be fair, the billion dollar conglomerates are the ones that fund the creation of the media. Without those billions, the media just doesn't get made.
They spend the majority of those billions on marketing, higher tier salaries, a very small portion goes to the artists. Without those billions media would still get made because there is always demand for entertainment and art.
Nobody is saying that. You made that up as a stupid alternative to what we're saying is bad to make the bad thing look like it makes sense.
Imagine paying $1 to each name that appears in the credits of a movie or tv show, which would be paying the artists directly for their work. It's not feasible, but that's what I read when folks toss out paying the artist directly.
Let's assume that this hypothetical movie had 2,000 people working on it, which isn't a crazy number to assume. You think people should pay $2,000 to watch a movie?
No, that's exactly the point they were making.
But if we assume a movie that made a billion dollars, and assume a high ticket price like $20, then that's 50 million tickets sold. That math only checks out if each person paid $0.01 per worker. If we cut out useless executives, that number goes way the fuck down. So yes, let's pay artists directly, and we'll save money at the same time. Even if it were a tenth of a penny to each credit per viewer, that's $50k on average, which is higher than the actual average wage for crew.. I know actors and directors make more, but that's why I'm not going so far as to say we should only pay $2 for a ticket.
Where does the money come from to actually make the movie?
Based on actual ticket prices, from producers that expect to triple their investment I guess. Us idiots are fantasizing about ~10% while they're hitting triple digit percentages.
The movie production has to be paid for before the movie hits theaters. Again, where exactly does that money come from?
Maybe start at a much lower number. If the movie is popular, then millions of people will watch it. Pay each person who worked on the film a penny per view. If the movie gets viewed by 10 million people in the movie theater, each person who worked on the movie gets paid $100,000. If the movie was made by 2000 people (a bit big for most films crews) then each viewer would have to pay $20 to see the movie, or roughly what a normal movie ticket costs anyway. The difference is the studio would make zero dollars and not have a marketing budget.
Wouldn't that just be a bunch of QR codes in the credits? That would be easier to automate than it is to pay middlemen.