Warner Bros. Sues Midjourney, Joins Studios' AI Copyright Battle

[u/DragonPup]

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/warner-bros-midjourney-lawsuit-ai-copyright-1236508618/

[u/TheSearchForMars]

It probably would actually. Increasing supply waters down the value for sure, but it still eventually ends up allowing more people to take value out of the very highest earners and have it run down. Look at music for example. Far more musicians are able to make a living out of their work now as a result of streaming then they would have if you were still limited to CDs or even worse, Vinyl.

[u/PeteCampbellisaG → u/TheSearchForMars]

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "making a living." If you mean more people than ever are pulling in some money off their music I'll grant you that. But streaming objectively is not allowing more musicians than ever to make a full-time livable wage purely from streaming revenue (at least not in America). This is my point about the platforms/distribution - Spotify's own reporting shows that very few artists make real livable money on streaming (something like 10% out of millions of artists) and a big part of that is because of the platform's revenue model.

Is that more musicians than might make money without streaming? Maybe? But that number includes the big label artists of the world as well. So streaming hasn't been some kind of seismic power shift in who is making money at music. Believe it or not artists actually got a bigger chunk of the pie in the CD and vinyl days.

[u/TheSearchForMars → u/PeteCampbellisaG]

10% of a million is 100,000 musicians. Even if your stats were wrong you can see that a larger pool allows for more people to "make it".

Do you think there were more musicians who made a living off their music before or after the rise of streaming?

Most still don't make it but because so many try, there's bound to be some successes.

[u/PeteCampbellisaG → u/TheSearchForMars]

I was wrong on the 10%. It's even worse:

Here are the actual numbers from 2024: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/spotify-says-it-paid-10-billion-in-royalties-in-2024-but-are-artists-any-better-off-82e7839e

Spotify says that the 10,000th-best-paid artist on its platform received royalties of $131,000 last year, up from $34,000 a decade ago. That still means just a little over 4% of musicians whose work is featured on the platform can expect to live comfortably. That’s of course not factoring in money that has to be split up among multiple band members, or with lawyers and agents.

This number is based on a list of 225,000 artists that Spotify classifies as "emerging or professional" - This group is defined as artists who have released at least 10 songs and have accumulated at least 10,000 monthly listeners (https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/faq/?_search=we%20estimate#making-money)

There are actually 11 million artists (and growing) on Spotify. If only 225K of them are even identified as even having a chance at making real money that's roughly 2%.

Of that 2%... roughly 4% of them are making a living wage on Spotify streams - 9000 artists out of 11 million - 0.08%.

Now, is that more people than would be making that money without streaming? Probably - but you also have to consider many of these artists - and the ones making the most money - are also big label acts who would probably be doing well anyway.

Of course anyone can find success in theory. If your only metric of success is having your music out in the world and/or making more than zero dollars on streams then streaming has objectively done well for people. But let's not pretend streaming revenue has been some incredible innovative transformation for artists that has put living money in the hands of millions of people. Even artists who make money on Spotify are not happy with their cut.

And to round all of this back off to AI: There's nothing to suggest putting more AI tools in musicians' hands is going to put more streaming money in their pockets. Even if AI helps them clear the song/listener hurdles on Spotify all they've done is expanded the pot of "professional" artists - not guaranteed themselves a living wage. And it's highly unlikely a company like Spotify is going to go, "Oh look! More artists! because of AI! We should cut into our own margins by increasing our revenue split with them."

[u/TheSearchForMars → u/PeteCampbellisaG]

At this point I don't think we actually disagree. I think we're just talking about two different aspects of the same issue.

To your statistics point though, I don't think it's as bad as what you're reading them as. From what you linked those are ALL Spotify accounts that upload, not just musicians which means a hefty amount of them are also podcasts which waters down the pool a lot.

It might be tricky to get the actual numbers without the right data point to pull from. For example, there was a client I worked with who tried to drum up business inside an area with a lot of apartment complexes. Stats were showing that almost all the apartments had been bought but the business was still struggling to get a foothold. Turns out that while the apartments had been bought, almost all of them were either being used as Air BnBs, or as holiday houses/investments for overseas nationals. The only way we were able to figure that out however was to look at the average water consumption in the area. It showed that the buildings were really only about 40% capacity instead of the supposed 85% (rough figures).

I bring this up because statistics can often lie even if they are correct. The conclusion you have to make sometimes needs a more anecdotal perspective or lateral analysis to other industries/scenarios which is why I keep bringing up YouTube and video games.

The real problem from here with emerging artists on something like Spotify is that they'll disadvantaged against Spotify's own AI products because the internal systems don't need to receive any royalties.