Net Neutrality in the US

[Fade]

I just saw that in the United States they voted to get rid of neutrality. If this does actually go through then I'm wondering how this would affect any beatmakers trying to sell beats through various websites.

Not necessarily a beat-selling website, but what about sites where one could promote their brand and beats? YouTube? SoundCloud? Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? The list goes on.

This would be terrible for a lot of people that are trying to make a living through their music.

What do you think?

 

[BeatJawn Idasa]

I just saw that in the United States they voted to get rid of neutrality. If this does actually go through then I'm wondering how this would affect any beatmakers trying to sell beats through various websites.

Not necessarily a beat-selling website, but what about sites where one could promote their brand and beats? YouTube? SoundCloud? Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? The list goes on.

This would be terrible for a lot of people that are trying to make a living through their music.

What do you think?

I think we're witnessing the gentrification of the internet. Any added pressure is going to make competition more fierce and harder to cut through, but I actually welcome it. My hope is it weeds out the bullshit money producers that took an opportunity and leveled the whole playing field with low-prices and fast marketing.

This levels the playing field in my opinion. It's going to be a pain in the ass financially because hosting prices, apps, streams and all that will go up to compensate for the new policies and shit, but it is what it is.

If you don't have a website and are still relying on social media to carry you, it's no different than settling for an apartment and refusing to save and buy property but complain when redevelopment happens.

 

[Rodas]

Well it would depend how the internet suppliers would want it to be. As a person who lives in Portugal, where there is "no net neutrality" as many are claiming, I can tell you my personal experience with it:
- There are no speed issues whatsoever regarding visiting site X or site Y, the restrictions are imposed by the supplier and depends on the speed you signed with. There are also no traffic limits for home internet, just mobile data plans.
- There are restrictions on the sites you can visit (e.g. I can't visit most torrent sites, since they have been flagged by Vodafone, with whom I'm under contract).
- Mobile data is a bitch, and the main problem here concerns this issue. Cell phone networks have created additional packages and are charging more for extra access to a particular app. For instance, if you use social media a lot, you can pay X to get extra mobile data but just for FB, IG, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.. This is just an add-on, not the whole data plan. Their logic is if you exceed your data plan you still have mobile data for your social media needs. If, however you're stranded in the middle of the woods and need to use your gps and maps app, you have to pay for an extra data package, which probably is around 3€ for 200mb of internet. The biggest mobile add on by Vodafone currently is 5GB for their "post-paid" service. They (still) don't have any add ons like the competition, their add ons are for general use. They do however provide unlimited access to some apps (FB, IG, Twitter, Snapchat, Spotify, some extra Youtube GBs) in their under 25 plan which is fucking awesome if you're under 25, however they're charging weekly. So there's months where you pay 4 weeks, and others where you pay 5.

That's pretty much it for now, there's speculation that all companies are going to do the add-on shtick, but regarding home internet, as it has been unlimited for quite some years now, I don't believe we'll have that problem here. Our version of the FCC (ANACOM) is already researching the case of the add ons, we just have to wait and see what comes out of it.

 

[Fade]

See this issue is that even though it seems fine where you are, there's still no reason to even remove the net neutrality. It may seem okay now but who knows what they CAN do later on.

 

[2GooD Productions]

Net Neutrality is a thing Ive never bothered to find out about, I think as per usual there has been a lot of fear mongering on all sides. Im going to wait and see how it pans out.

 

[Drago Zetić]

I don't think beat selling websites will be a large enough target to suffer from the loss of net neutrality early on. The sites that are offered with a greater connection speed or free data in some countries are mainly mass-accessed social media and services like Netflix, YouTube, Spotify and Facebook, while competitors' sites count under the regular data plan (completely unfair). The same could happen to BeatStars, Airbit or whatever, but they're too niche for ISPs to consider it.

 

[Fade]

@Drago Zetić Yeah beat-selling websites are too small for that, but what I mean is what if you network on FB or Youtube for example? Especially Facebook. That could hurt sales I would assume.