Under your same logic nobody should buy anything from your employer because they don’t pay you 100% of their profits. Probably only 2 or 3 dollars of every 10 they make goes to salary.
But we all know running a business has costs that aren’t salary.
Artists who sign to major labels get promotion and other assistance that costs money. That’s the trade off.
And they’re making less money than before because people pirated with Napster. Just look at music industry revenue charts. It only just recently exceeded pre-Napster levels and that is before adjusting for inflation. The average person is spending less money on music than they did in the 90s.
A new release CD was like $17 in 1995. So that’s $34 today. That would buy you one album. Today that buys you 3 months of listening to unlimited music.
So the price of Spotify is like when someone only buys 4 CDs every year.
Luckily for me, I don't feel like my employer has tasked me with working against our users interests. I want them to succeed at the things they're trying to do and I'm working in support of that goal.
But if things were otherwise? Then yes, the users should either walk away or they should circumvent whatever handcuffs I'm hypothetically building for them.
In that scenario, I'd absolutely participate in cutting my employer out of the loop so that I could do less evil work and instead get paid directly by the people who benefit from what I'm working on, and I hope you would too.
Sounds like a pretty luxurious position to be in. I wonder if your local Walmart associate ever thought of working for a more morally upstanding company? Maybe they could start their own retailer with better values. Should be pretty easy to spin up some distribution centers right?
Agreed, I'm fortunate, as are many of us on this site. We have opportunities to keep the powerful in check that others do not. Therefore we have a responsibility to take advantage of those opportunities, because it's a bit much to ask the Walmart employees to do so.
Also, you seem to me implying that a malware author and a shelf stocker are equally culpable for the actions of their employer, which is an odd sort of moral stance to take. Treating your users like enemies is a rather direct thing, and working for someone who behaves badly in some dimension unrelated to your work is quite another.
But we all know running a business has costs that aren’t salary.
Artists who sign to major labels get promotion and other assistance that costs money. That’s the trade off.
And they’re making less money than before because people pirated with Napster. Just look at music industry revenue charts. It only just recently exceeded pre-Napster levels and that is before adjusting for inflation. The average person is spending less money on music than they did in the 90s.
A new release CD was like $17 in 1995. So that’s $34 today. That would buy you one album. Today that buys you 3 months of listening to unlimited music.
So the price of Spotify is like when someone only buys 4 CDs every year.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/05/arts/pennies-that-add-up-...