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#monetization

2 posts2 participants0 posts today
wilfred

Anyone have alternatives to Spotify?

"AI-generated music on Spotify is not a secret at this point. Last week, a band with more than a million streams on Spotify, Velvet Sundown, made headlines when it finally admitted it was AI-generated. Last year, Sam wrote about AI-generated Christmas music flooding Spotify. But what’s happening with Clark and Foley is much worse. This is not someone trying to monetize AI slop under a new name, but assigning that slop to the name of dead artists without asking for permission."

404media.co/spotify-publishes-

404 Media · Spotify Publishes AI-Generated Songs From Dead Artists Without Permission"They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so."
#spotify#ai#permission
Aneesh Sathe

What do platforms really do? 

In 1986, David S. Landes wrote the essay, ‘What Do Bosses Really Do?’. He argues that the historical role of the ‘boss’ was an essential function for organizing production and connecting producers to markets. Digital platforms have become the new bosses. Platforms have the same functions of market creation, labor specialization, and management, but they have replaced the physical factory floor with algorithmic management. While their methods are novel, platforms are the direct descendants of the merchant-entrepreneurs and factory owners Landes described, solving the same historical problems of production in remarkably similar ways.

Design for a Teacup (1880-1910) painting in high resolution by Noritake Factory. Original from The Smithsonian Institution. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

So, why am I posting this on my own blog and not on a “platform”? I don’t view writing as a financial transaction. It is a hobby. By putting the financialization lens front and center, platforms are killing the mental space for hobbies. When you monetize tweets, you create incentive to craft tweets that create engagement in particular ways. Usually not healthy ways. 

If we think of old media or traditional manufacturing, we can compare them to guilds. Guilds kept up prices and controlled production. With the simplification of tasks factories could hire workers who weren’t as highly skilled but didn’t need to be. Nowadays, why should any newspaper or TV channel’s output be limited by the amount of airtime or page space they have?

Platforms take unskilled and train them. We are in the age of specialization of ideas.  Akin to the “the advantage of disaggregating a productive process”  Platforms leverage this by having many producers explore the same space through millions of different angles. This allows the platform to “purchase exactly that precise quantity of [skill] which is necessary for each process” —paying a viral star a lot and a niche creator a little, perfectly matching reward to market impact. Which is to say platforms make money through whatever sticks.  

In Landes’s essay, Management became specialized, today management will become algorithmized. Platforms abstract away the issues that factory owners had such as embezzlement of resources, slacking off etc. Platforms don’t care how much or how little you produce, or even if you produce. If you do, the cash is yours (after a cut of course). 

This may lead to a visceral reaction against platforms. This week when Substack raised a substantial amount they called the writers “the heroes of culture”. This should ring at least a tiny alarm in your head. The platform’s rhetoric of the creator-as-hero is a shrewd economic arrangement. In the putting-out system, the merchant-manufacturer “was able to shift capital expenditures (plant and equipment) to the worker”. Platforms do the same with creative risk. The writer, artist, or creator invests all the time and labor—the “capital” of creation—upfront. If they fail, they bear the entire loss. The platform, like the putter-outer, only participates in the upside, taking its cut from the successful ‘heroes’ while remaining insulated from the failures of the many.

So what do platforms really do? They have resurrected the essential role of the boss for the digital age. They are the merchant-manufacturers who build the roads to market, and they are the factory owners who discipline production—not with overseers, but with incentive algorithms. By casting the creator as the hero, they obscure their own power and shift the immense risks of creative work onto the individual. While appearing to be mere background IT admins, they are, in fact, the central organizers of production, demonstrating that even in the 21st century, the fundamental challenges of coordinating labor and capital persist, and solving them remains, as it was in the 18th century, a very lucrative role.

What Do Bosses Really Do?, David S. Landes, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 585-623 (39 pages). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2121476

#algorithmicManagement#Business#capitalism
*
Jan Penfrat

"In 2024, social media #VLOPs submitted their first risk assessments under the #DigitalServicesAct. None of the VLOPs identified #monetization systems as a #systemicrisk."

"Decisions over who is eligible for payment, & what actors & content get financially rewarded, can substantially shape the content that gets created, amplified, and consumed."

Crucial report by @whattofix.tech on how #bigtech's monetization schemes create systemic risks under the #DSA:

whattofix.tech/publications/sy

www.whattofix.techWHAT TO FIX’s Submission to the European Board on Digital Services’ Annual Report on Systemic RisksWe’re excited to share our submission to the European Board for Digital Services’ request for input, designed to inform its first annual report on systemic risks and recommended mitigation measures.
Continued thread
Fossery Tech :debian: :gnome:

(Linux news in previous posts of thread)

FOSS NEWS

Odysee presents new AR-based payment system, discontinues Stripe payment and LBC content boosting:
odysee.com/@Odysee:8/introduci
(Discontinuing LBC support probably means the platform won't be connected to the LBRY blockchain anymore. Also, content discoverability will be hurt pretty much, even if creators can get monetized, smaller creators will have a much harder time being discovered. I get that their new parent company Arweave is probably forcing them to switch to their crypto stuff and ditch LBRY, but it will probably just hurt the platform in the long run, especially because the new payment system requires signing up to an additional service, which many people are not a big fan of.)

Thunderbird 140 released with "Mark as Spam" and "Mark as Starred" actions for notifications, reorganized settings, bug fixes:
9to5linux.com/thunderbird-140-

ONLYOFFICE Documents 9.0 for Android released with OCR support, DocSpace version history, Markdown and OpenDocument Graphics support, etc.:
alternativeto.net/news/2025/7/

Matrix 1.15 released with OpenID Connect support, richer information about rooms before joining, better room discovery, additional text formatting options for messages, etc.:
alternativeto.net/news/2025/6/

7-Zip v25 released with faster compression, enhanced CPU support, improved legacy format handling:
alternativeto.net/news/2025/7/

HuggingChat is shutting down, will be replaced by another service better integrated into the Hugging Face ecosystem:
alternativeto.net/news/2025/7/

(more FOSS news in comment)

OdyseeIntroducing: Decentralized Payments on Odysee - For Everyone, EverywhereView on Odysee: Introducing: Decentralized Payments on Odysee - For Everyone, Everywhere
#WeeklyNews#OpenSource#FOSSNews
Brian Greenberg :verified:

💡 The open web just got a paywall upgrade—Cloudflare’s new move could reshape AI forever 🤖💸

Cloudflare is now blocking AI crawlers by default across its vast network, and it’s opening the door to micropayments for content access.

Here’s what’s changing:

🧱 Default Blockade – AI bots like OpenAI, Anthropic & Meta get no access unless allowed
💸 Pay‑Per‑Crawl – A new marketplace lets publishers set prices for bot access
📰 Publisher Power – Reddit, BuzzFeed, Time, AP, and others are already signed on
🧠 Advanced Bot Detection – Fingerprinting, honeypots & policy controls baked in

📣 For creators and technologists alike, this is a shift toward ownership, transparency, and value in the AI training pipeline. No more silent scraping.

✅ Takeaways for execs:
• Decide your site’s AI access policy
• Monetize high-value content via Cloudflare’s crawler paywall
• Anticipate new norms in AI training ethics and economics

#AI #Cloudflare #ContentEconomy #Monetization #WebInnovation #DigitalRights

🔗 businessinsider.com/cloudflare

Business Insider · Cloudflare to block AI crawlers by default, let sites demand paymentBy Alistair Barr
Wladimir Mufty

On the subject of #wallets #privacy #data #monetization

Why is saying:
“At least now they get money for the data they share”

okay’ish, but saying:

“Sure, they were abused at home….but hey, now they can at least get paid for a good beating on our SM platform!”

would be absurd…

H/T🎩: @michielschok for sharing the article!

restofworld.org/2025/brazil-dw

Rest of World · In a world first, Brazilians will soon be able to sell their digital dataBrazil is piloting dWallet, a project that lets citizens earn money from their data. It is ahead of similar U.S.-based initiatives.
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