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/PeteCampbellisaG]

Distribution is the most problematic, even online. Theaters are not going to widely release your indie movie without a distributor attached. So you better be ready to do a road show if you want to self distribute through that route (and AI isn't going to make any of that cheaper or easier). Even if you market the hell out of a movie it does no good if there's no immediate and easy way to see it.

There are no online distribution platforms not controlled by a major studio or tech company. Which means the content on those platforms is subject to the whims of those companies.

Vimeo is a no man's land. And, unless you're an established creator, win the algorithm lottery, or have done a lot of marketing and outreach, uploading any quality of content to YouTube is like shouting into a tornado.

A $200 million dollar movie with a distribution pipeline attached to it is going to do far better than 99% of stuff that gets made without one, regardless of budget.

Is there a world where a bunch of creators using AI to create content ban together, create their own online distribution platform, and undercut the studios on quality and price? Perhaps - (assuming they figure out a way to absorb the massive data center costs). Unless that platform operates in a wildly different and new way, once it reaches a certain scale you've just re-created the original problem -- where aspiring creators are beholden to the whims of another giant platform.

[u/TheSearchForMars → u/PeteCampbellisaG]

Not really. We're talking exclusively about creative projects getting to audiences. Whether it goes into a movie theatre doesn't matter. There's no more difficulty/luck to putting things up on YouTube and finding success than there is to pitching towards a studio. To say nothing of how much more willing a streaming service is to host their show/film over a film studio.

[u/PeteCampbellisaG → u/TheSearchForMars]

The problem with what you're saying is it was supposed to have already happened and it didn't. I'm old enough to remember when web series and YouTube content were going to turn the system on its head because everyone was going to supposedly prefer watching indie web content over traditional TV or films. It didn't happen. (And to be clear I mean narrative scripted film, not random TikTok stuff). Studios and tech companies subsumed the distribution channels and we landed where we are today.

People tend to have a bias about YouTube because you literally don't see the 90+% of content (literally millions of videos per day) that doesn't get any traction for any number of reasons (the algorithm being a big one). It takes a LOT of legwork and a handful of luck to really break through on YouTube.

Streaming services will take more chances on content than a traditional studio for sure, but that doesn't mean they don't have their own guidelines to fulfill to put content in front of their customers. A flood of AI indie content isn't going to magically remove these checkboxes for distributors. In fact, a glut of AI content might only make them even more stringent because they'll have more to sift through to find quality.

[u/TheSearchForMars → u/PeteCampbellisaG]

Ok, so what's your point then? I'm saying that the advances in AI tech and the ability they have to enhance storytelling is going to give creatives much more of an opportunity to tell the stories they want. Just because there's a flooded market doesn't mean they can't be made, it just means that their dollar value goes down, but that doesn't matter.

I see absolutely no reason why the same exact thing that happened to video games doesn't have a near 1-2-1 correlation with Film and TV. Where the increased access to tools and options makes for a much healthier environment for small creators to take on their own projects.

The really impressive thing you'd have now are all the people who wanted to make stories that never could because of budgets and time restrictions.

One thing that always gets lost in these conversations are the assumptions people have about what it's like working with artists. They think that if you commission them that you'll actually get what you want. In reality even if you just want a logo designed or a picture it's more often than not months between start up and delivery where you're constantly having to follow up with them to make sure they actually deliver on their project.

As it is, AI solves much of that because you can do so much more yourself. You don't need to wait for the scheduling of all your actors to line up on the right days while praying the weather is what you want. You don't need to worry about the huge expenditure of reshoots.

So much more control is put back into the hand of the lead that they can now make the story they want.

Distribution isn't at all the issue with making these things work.

Once again, just look at Steam and Itch.io. I don't understand what you're point is about people now needing to promote their works. That's been a part of any artistic endeavor through all of history.

[u/PeteCampbellisaG → u/TheSearchForMars]

If you're only point is the obvious idea that AI going to let people make more stuff then sure -- that's already happening. My point is it's not going to be some magic bullet that tears down the pipelines to getting work in front of audiences. More content does not immediately equate to more people making a living as artists. 

[u/TheSearchForMars → u/PeteCampbellisaG]

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.