Streaming services today sell musicians access to their own fans; SoundCloud shows a better way
Back in January, Walled Culture wrote about an interesting initiative by the German online audio distribution platform and music sharing service SoundCloud, with its Fan-Powered Royalties (FPR) approach.…
Generative AI in Google search is great news for the true fans model, but what about publishers?
Most of the analysis of generative AI – things like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT – has focused on how it will affect creators. But another important aspect is…
Writers and publishers face an existential threat from AI: time to embrace the true fans model
Walled Culture has written several times about the major impact that generative AI will have on the copyright landscape. More specifically, these systems, which can create quickly and…
Copyright has been one of life’s certainties: but will it always be?
Copyright seems to be a fixture of our legal, economic and social systems. For 300 years, it has formed the backbone of the structures used to incentivise and…
How Minecraft’s “End Poem” ended up in the public domain
Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time according to Wikipedia, with hundreds of millions of copies sold. The game concludes with the End Poem by the…
SoundCloud’s “Fan Powered Royalties”: a halfway house towards the true fans approach
Regular readers of this blog will know that Walled Culture is a fan of the true fans concept – the idea that creators can be supported directly and…
Copyright isn’t working: all around the world, writers are struggling to earn a decent wage
One of the central themes here on Walled Culture is that copyright isn’t doing its main job. It is supposed to provide fair remuneration for the work that…
Why the “true fans” model is great not only for creators, but for entrepreneurs too
The “true fans” idea has appeared in many posts on this blog, and also makes an appearance in the last chapter of Walled Culture the book, as a…
How music platform Corite is turning true fans into digital street teams
The last chapter of Walled Culture – the book looks at how the many problems of copyright might be mitigated. It concludes with Kevin Kelly’s idea of “1000…
Interview | Glyn Moody: Walled Culture – A Journey Behind the Copyright Bricks
Glyn Moody has been writing about copyright, digital rights, and the Internet for 30 years. He is the editor of the Walled Culture project and author of Walled…
Best-selling organic chemistry textbook to be freely available, supported by enlightened patronage
It’s well known that textbook prices are generally high. That’s in part because academic publishers effectively have a monopoly when it comes to standard texts. Very often, there…
Ireland shows how to take the true fans idea to the next level, with a bold new arts funding programme
One of the recurring themes on this blog is the idea of true fans: hard-core supporters of an artist who are willing to send money directly to creators…
Why the true fans model is coming into its own now, and how to ensure its sustainability
Regular readers of this blog will know that we are big supporters of the true fans idea – that artists can thrive by building stronger connections with a…
Running up that hill: Kate Bush shows the best way to make lots of money in pop music
Anyone who watches the Netflix sci-fi drama “Stranger Things” probably also knows about Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)“, originally released in 1985.…
What exactly is plagiarism? And does it really matter anyway?
There’s a fascinating article by Rebecca Jennings on Vox which explores the vexed question of plagiarism. Its starting point is a post on TikTok, entitled “How to EASILY…
How “merit-based monetisation” works for game streaming, where copyright fails
An interesting development in the digital world has been the continuing rise of gaming as a hugely popular activity, and a hugely profitable industry. Flowing from that rise…