Pete Madigan
https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-ai-honk-tool-derivative-works-licensing/
Spotify is worth $98 billion.
They just admitted they can't solve this alone.
Billions sitting in derivative value.
No one can touch it.
Here's why.
Most hit songs get remixed.
Fan edits. Bootlegs. AI covers.
This happens constantly.
Artists get paid nothing.
The money leaks to YouTube and TikTok.
Platforms that don't pay the original creator properly.
Spotify wants to change this.
Let fans remix inside the platform.
Artist gets paid every time.
Old catalogue starts earning.
Songs compound.
Simple idea.
Can't happen yet.
No legal system exists for it.
Nobody knows who owns a remix.
Nobody knows who gets paid.
Nobody built the tracking.
Spotify has the tech.
They have 600 million users.
They have royalty money sitting there.
Just no pipes to move it.
The visual shows the gap.
Remix gets created. Two paths.
Left: No framework.
Value leaks. Artist earns nothing.
Right: Infrastructure exists.
Value captured. Artist paid.
Music is stuck on the left.
Movies solved this decades ago.
One film becomes toys, sequels, theme parks. The original IP keeps earning in new forms
Music never built the equivalent.
Song comes out. Earns streams.
That's it. Remixes happen anyway.
Money goes elsewhere.
Most people think Spotify is the gatekeeper.
In reality, they're stuck too.
Their Co-CEO said it straight
"We can't build this alone."
Someone has to help.
Payments. Tracking.
The whole system.
vers1ons exists because this moment was coming. Wasn't expecting Spotify to pitch our thesis.
Appreciate it though.
Lorand Kedves
No legal system? I think this is the perfect example of Ted Nelson's Transcopyright. If the content and access-related microtransactions are managed within Spotify, I don't see why they could not implement it.
https://ted.hyperland.com/tcoSum04.html
https://youtu.be/x3l7CpnpyGw
Background: a few years ago I created a partial Xanadu prototype, populated with the Civil Code of Hungary (and another instance with some volumes of the Taekwondo Encyclopedia) but dropped the character-based references (the "locspec=charrange:166/258" URL part in the above article).
Dr. Nelson rejected this change.
Pete Madigan
Thanks for sharing, this is interesting. Do you see this becoming a wider standard or just a Spotify feature?
Lorand Kedves
Your suspicion is legit - the question is, how far you want to go down the rabbit hole? 🫣
Spotify is promising because all the referred sources, the products (remixes), and the control over monetisation is inside one company. They can have both financial and marketing benefits, and they don't have to mess with integration with outer parties (possible, but lower ROI). This creates an excellent environment for a proof of concept implementation. Win-win.
The real scope is much wider. Xanadu started at the same time as the World Wide Web, and could have been a better solution to share knowledge (can go into details). It only had one fundamental problem: EDL as described is perfect for any streaming content - except text... 🤕
https://youtu.be/_vE2ZNSf1l0?t=532
I walk the talk. The mentioned prototype proved the advantages: following changes in the Civil Code, translations in the Encyclopedia. It is on the todo list of my TAP (The Anything Platform) project. PoC should move in a few months, depending on external factors - I am a wage slave, smuggle strategic tasks into paying projects. 🤫
Of course, this was the end of the "communication".
