Maybe it's not about the money primarily. There are enough parties out there that want the people behind Anna's archive behind bars and I'm afraid this will end the same way as for the Pirate Bay guys in the best case and like it ended for Aaron Schwartz in the worst.

I don't know how to feel about any of this.

First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists.

I hate the hyperscalers being in this business (Google, Apple, Amazon) as that's another thing they do that devalues an otherwise healthy market. Bringing in outside business division revenues to dump on another market's prices is ecologically unhealthy for optimal capitalism and healthy competition.

On the one hand, while I want cheap media, I also want artists to make money. While Spotify puts real price pressure on artists, piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all.

I get Gabe's value prop with Valve. Make the service easy, cheap, convenient, good, and piracy begins to diminish.

But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all?

Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists. I feel like paying piracy services is the opposite of that.

But ethical quandary - doesn't Anna's Archive also support spreading research papers, etc.?

Complicated feelings.

I wish we had better ways to pay originators of things. Art, music, authors, researchers, ICs, ...

I feel like studios and middlemen and companies themselves are entities that exist because rewarding work or value or happiness at the site of exchange is hard/intangible.