Question about your art:

[Last Alternative]

Be it a painting, photograph, poem, short story, music...
Do you refrain from sharing it online or even in person out of fear of your art being stolen?
I have posted a lot of my music and some poetry but I always wonder in fear.

***Quick story***
When I was a teenager, I was gonna jam with this guy. He loved my stuff so I lent him my demo tape to get familiarized and when I got there to jam, he was already playing AND SINGING my tunes! But not like he wanted to be in a band with me: like he was obsessed and rocking out like they were his songs and just wanted to confirm he was playing them right! So I took back my tape and never saw him again. And I started doing the “poor man’s copyright (mail your tapes to yourself and leave them unopened in case you ever have to take it to court).

Ever since then and to this day, I’ve had nightmares about hearing my tunes on the radio unbeknownst to me, or someone stealing my music somehow. Yeah you should copyright your stuff but it’s a waste of money if it’s not the final version or whatever.
But it has made me very reluctant to post my poetry or more of my music or anything else for that matter and although I have and still do post some things of my art, I really hold back because of this.

Another thing was a guy on here who completely meant well when I had mixing/mastering questions a couple years ago, ripped my song off SoundCloud to do an example of mixing for me. And again: he meant well. However, I didn’t know that was possible to rip a song off the internet that I disabled the ability to download so it renewed the fear again.

It could be out of fear of your art being stolen, fear of rejection, fear of embarrassment — tell me why you hesitate to share everything; or anything.

[motuscott]

Many years ago when I set up a SoundCloud page, I set the prefs so you could listen but not download which served my purposes.

[Zac]

If someone ripped off one of my songs and managed to get a decent number of people listening to it I'd be well chuffed. I'd have the knowledge that I made that and people liked it.

If he made much money from it.... well.... I don't believe in miracles.

[DougalDarkly]

Deleted

[reggie1979]

Yeah, remember Allahoopa? Anyways, that left a sour taste in my mouth.