Ive gotten paid more on my steem posts so far than most musicians earn in royalties across a decade sooo I doubt im being shortchanged. I dont need to rely on the hopes of a big payout down the road cuz I have a real income stream that lets me do this now.
Furthermore the investment of time that I am able to put in NOW - 30-40 hours a week of music time that other musicians spend at barista gigs and shit - is a huge advantage that can't be regained later on, time is more precious than money by far, especially factoring in that most successful musicians "lock in" their careers by their early 30s.
Anybody whose career strategy involves seeing long term payouts like The Beatles did is frankly delusional so Im not worried that I'll never see that. I appreciate the devil's advocate but in this case, im not seeing it at all
I'm going to join @seanlloyd in playing the devil's advocate here. :D
The shortchanging is especially significant when you have a post which tends to rank very well in search engines and continues to get both traffic and upvotes for months after the rewards window was closed.
With the ever-growing Steem ecosystem this is going to become a more often felt sentiment as well. Two platforms where the 7 days window may be shortchanging would be Steemhunt (upcoming ProductHunt on the Steem blockchain) and any Q&A project like What Q&A (apologies for link to own article about it but the Steem account of the project is less detailed in info IMHO).
In both examples, there is a case to be made for the content to have longer lasting value than the 7 days window. A solid product (say Vessel) is a solid product, not merely for 7 days. Same applies to a great answer to a question.
Both should be able to continue to be rewarded.
But dude there is no mutual exclusivity between these options. You can list up all of your music across all of the traditional platforms - Spotify and Apple Music and all the rest, you can be on YouTube, you can do a music video, you can mirror or provide alternate content on your own blog with your personal website getting the SEO juice.
I see absolutely no conflict between these things. All I see is an additional income stream via the Steem blockchain, in addition to everything you could have done prior to 2016.
I'm not limited to music though.
In fact, neither of my examples were music related. We are talking "Steem could shortchange", right. Not about all else you could possibly do.
Fair enough. Maybe for the average musician, the short-term payout is ideal.
Maybe it's easier to see with something more common...
How about the person who posts a tutorial -- spends 10 hours researching, writing, proofing. No one finds it in 7 days, so they get 0 upvotes, $0. Then people come to find it later through search terms. Over then next few years, they get 200 upvotes. Then let's say they have 100 posts more or less like that.
The long tail of work adds up to real value. And yet...
Author rewards = $0
Value donated to Steem blockchain way more than $0
(1,000 hours of work for quality content)
Yup I agree with you there. Newer users without an audience have a weird gamble - create longform content that is valuable, or, create smallform content because it's not likely to get rewards in the short term?
That is a tough one.
I'd posit one approach is to create high quality, "medium-form" content of about 500-1,000 words + some photos, etc, to try and attract votes from upvote trails like Curie, OCD, Sndbox-Alpha, and many others.