Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
A feeling that seems to underly this question is that record companies are some capitalist evil nightmare and that crypto is the saviour here. I don't think any of the comments here address that part so I thought I might try.
I'm guessing most of this post is thinking of small musicians but to think about how much money a record label makes I'm going to be lazy and use a number I saw recently - Taylor Swift grossed 2 billion from ticket sales for her Eras Tour and got about 190 million after tax and payments for services:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/12/09/taylor-swifts-eras-tour-grossed-2-billion-double-any-other-tour-in-history-report-says/
That's a similar sort of order to the fines we're seeing for laundering in crypto - Binance pleaded guilty to money laundering and paid 4 billion in resolutions:
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/binance-and-ceo-plead-guilty-federal-charges-4b-resolution
And similar to the gains Trump has made since shortly before coming into office, an estimated 1 billion from crypto:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/06/05/this-is-how-much-trump-has-made-from-crypto-so-far/
It seems like a lot of those payments that Trump made money from are some form of corruption. And a large portion of the amount that record labels make.
It's reasonable to look at the wealth of record companies and to wish it was more reasonable to distributed. It's also reasonable to look at how little artists make of certain transactions and think there must be something amiss. I honestly have no idea on the accuracy of those two, the world is counterintuitive sometimes but I'm sure there is a lot of room for improvement.
Aiming to use crypto as one of the mechanisms for improvement seems pretty far fetched to me from a pragmatic perspective. (But I think both the anti record company sentiment and the pro crypto sentiment have similar ideologies.) From what I've seen crypto has only demonstrated usefulness as a mechanism for:
Sorry, I know this is definitely a tangent from the OP but I was closing tabs and Trump's comment on pardoning Changpeng Zhao is too good not to share: