Residues and residuals
Likes and downloads and shares, oh my!
There is much to be said about postmortem digital assets, which is why I will say much in a forthcoming paper. This is both a “teaser trailer” for the aforementioned paper and a new home for a tangent that took a life (or death) of its own. My dear friend, Jess Morley, once suggested that I create a Paper Graveyard (imagination abound) for anything that doesn’t make the final version of a paper—either for its length, redundancy, weakness or simply because it wasn’t all that relevant. “Residuals for social media content” was resurrected from that very Paper Graveyard and is now being presented to you fine people as a blog post hereafter. My beautiful zombie is glad to have been given some extra attention.
The Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI) (coined by my teachers, Öhman and Floridi) has surfaced as a direct result of an increasingly deceased online population. The “digital graveyard” (e.g., the digital remains of folks who have died in real life, but live on through their Internet presence) is ever-expanding as we spend more and more time online. Naturally, large firms have capitalized on this idiosyncrasy and their commercial interests have increasingly fixated on the profit-generating potential of digital remains. Much more on this in Öhman and Floridi (2017), tagged above.
We are entering an era of newly lucrative potential within the DAI. While a Facebook profile has limited profit-generating capacity,* a TikTok page—with several million followers, brand deals, and network extensions—carries far more financial incentive. But what exactly happens when an influencer dies? Thankfully, many influencers are still quite young; some few freak accidents and health events aside, deaths have been relatively rare within the TikTok empire. Nonetheless, it is a mistake not to consider the economic implications of these new digital empires under the DAI, especially if these digital remains belong to a market valued at roughly USD 24 billion.
* Given that social media users are not owners but rather licensees of their accounts, Facebook reserves the right to use posts (e.g., user photos) in their promotional marketing. Many of these users may be dead. The dead ones are also less likely to stir up a fuss.
About residuals
Residuals are payments made to artists and creators in the entertainment industry for the reuse and redistribution of their work. For instance, if you have a Spotify account (we are not Team Apple Music in this house), residuals are paid to an artist each time you stream a song. When an artist dies, residuals from their work are usually collected by their loved ones, under a contractual agreement between the artist, their company, and their designated beneficiary or beneficiaries. This agreement is legally binding; the artist’s work is a part of their estate that is then passed onto surviving beneficiaries through their will.
Streaming platforms have contractual obligations to pay artists for their content. All of these platforms have faced increasing industry pressure to publish their payment metrics and royalty calculations as streaming has quickly become the most popular method of consuming music (replacing the vinyl and CD sales of the past). Platforms like Spotify have been under fire for their lack of transparency, leading to the publication of explicit royalty agreements and “music economics reports.” The bid to make residual payments clearer has benefited estate representatives who are now better able to understand the industry’s payment structure. Transparency eases some of the burden faced by bereaved beneficiaries, many of whom were not previously exposed to the legal complexities of the entertainment industry, and who may now find themselves balancing their grief with residual contracts.
Digital asset valuation and “immortal residuals”
Much like Spotify, social media platforms pay their creators on the basis of content engagement: views (including how many times a particular piece of content was opened and how long it was opened for), likes, comments, and shares replace streams and downloads as valued metrics. As a result of these variables, algorithms used to determine social media content payouts are often more complicated than their streaming predecessors. For example, some metrics are valued more highly than others (e.g., likes are more lucrative than mere views), and many are weighed on a continuum rather than as a binary (e.g., opened for X seconds, rather than streamed versus not).
The payment calculus for dedicated works (e.g., for each song) has become relatively robust, owing to the industry’s stepwise development. Vinyl sales became CD sales, became Walkman and iPod purchases, became Spotify and Apple Music downloads over a relatively long (or, comparatively long) period. Social media companies mirrored this calculus in their “Creator Funds” and “payouts,” simply swapping streaming metrics for content engagement. But the complexity of engagement, the speed of content creation and propagation, and the shortening attention spans of the audience all make digital asset valuation remarkably complicated…let alone if someone dies.
The legal status of posthumous digital assets is blurry at best. These assets don’t enjoy the same defaults as material estates, because so far, they haven’t really had to: Grandpa may have a Facebook page, but he probably didn’t own Dogecoin. Static assets are also easier to handle than dynamic assets, and TikTok videos are about as dynamic as it gets. The characteristics that make a TikTok viral are a measure of the times, not some perfect video recipe (no matter how much those “Earn followers FAST!” pages want to convince you otherwise). So, if a creator dies, and then their TikTok goes viral, who gets paid? The short answer is no one; the long answer is TikTok. Posthumous fame isn’t new, but posthumous virality is.
What about if an already-famous creator dies? Who gets paid then? Welp, if they haven’t designated a digital estate beneficiary (and let’s face it, most 19-year-old Californians haven’t), then they’re S.O.L. The opportunity for one’s family to collect immortal residuals (e.g., engagement payouts, forever) off of a 30-second-video is lost to the digital abyss, because social media platforms aren’t built with estate law in mind. Up until now, we’ve been able to ignore it—and maybe we can still ignore it for, like, 50 years. But at some point, Gen Z will die, and their Creator Funds may just die with them.
tl;dr
Companies don’t really care if you die, they care about if they can make money off of you dying…fair enough!
We’ve set up a residual structure for artists who die, but what about content creators? NOPE.
The valuation of digital assets is pretty difficult because most assets are dynamic and engagement metrics are inherently complex.
Your family could technically get paid residuals forever if you just…write a digital will.
More stuff
I’ve linked you to a billion readings throughout this article, but in case that wasn’t enough:
Here’s the book “Stiff” by Mary Roach.
Here’s Carl's new book which you should read (shameless plug).
Here’s a link to MomTok, the Mormon TikTok phenomenon that’s taking over the Internet. Also watch The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives on Hulu…trust me.
Unfortunately I know from experience that crypto companies are real jerks about turning over the wallets of deceased people, even to the legally appointed executor of a will 🙃 make a will and write down your passwords somewhere, y'all.