Holy shit, an actually reasonable take on Lemmy regarding subscription services. I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was reading and was waiting for the “LOL, JK! Pirate everything, they don’t deserve my money and fuck every ad and paid service ine the universe.”
ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.
I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.
That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it’s pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don’t provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.
For sure. Subscriptions have to have some sort of value add, and in a world where I was king they’d be illegal otherwise. Spotify: songs you don’t own are being delivered to you. Value add. Dropbox: storage you don’t own is being provided to you. Value add. BMW’s heated seat subscription: you already own the heaters, the controls, the vehicle, and are paying for the battery that energizes those heaters and the gasoline that charges the battery. No value add. That’s just rent-seeking.
I would also even say that a show/movie subscription makes sense. Except all of the services have already preenshittified themselves to the point where it’s literally more convient to just pirate everything.
So far spotify hasn’t done that so I’ll continue happily paying for spotify even though I’m a filthy pirate. Hell, spotify could double in price and I would still be perfectly happy with the service I’m getting.
The difference is that music streaming services actually offer a better experience to most people compared to movie/tv show streaming services for example.
Choose whatever music streaming service you prefer and you get pretty much the same huge selection of songs across the board. You can pick based on features and user experience. With movies and tv shows, most content is exclusive to a single platform. So you have to keep adding/removing subscriptions unless you want to pay north of $100 a month to have all of them at the same time. Every streaming app has a different interface and different features, and some might not work on all your devices. Piracy isn’t only cheaper in this case, but actually more convenient. It’s the better product, even when you leave pricing out of the equation.
Sure, some people will always resort to piracy, but there’s a direct correlation between the quality of service offered and the amount of piracy.
I can completely understand tv content piracy for convenience alone (and sure, it’s cheaper/almost free, that’s definitely a factor), but I never even thought about replacing music streaming with pirated content, because it’s just super convenient.
Holy shit, an actually reasonable take on Lemmy regarding subscription services. I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was reading and was waiting for the “LOL, JK! Pirate everything, they don’t deserve my money and fuck every ad and paid service ine the universe.”
Thank you!
ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.
I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.
That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it’s pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don’t provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.
Some subscriptions make sense for the consumer, or at least justifiable.
IMO a music service like Spotify is absolutely one of them.
Turning heated seats in a subscription? Burn in hell.
For sure. Subscriptions have to have some sort of value add, and in a world where I was king they’d be illegal otherwise. Spotify: songs you don’t own are being delivered to you. Value add. Dropbox: storage you don’t own is being provided to you. Value add. BMW’s heated seat subscription: you already own the heaters, the controls, the vehicle, and are paying for the battery that energizes those heaters and the gasoline that charges the battery. No value add. That’s just rent-seeking.
And speaking of rent…
I would also even say that a show/movie subscription makes sense. Except all of the services have already preenshittified themselves to the point where it’s literally more convient to just pirate everything.
So far spotify hasn’t done that so I’ll continue happily paying for spotify even though I’m a filthy pirate. Hell, spotify could double in price and I would still be perfectly happy with the service I’m getting.
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The difference is that music streaming services actually offer a better experience to most people compared to movie/tv show streaming services for example.
Choose whatever music streaming service you prefer and you get pretty much the same huge selection of songs across the board. You can pick based on features and user experience. With movies and tv shows, most content is exclusive to a single platform. So you have to keep adding/removing subscriptions unless you want to pay north of $100 a month to have all of them at the same time. Every streaming app has a different interface and different features, and some might not work on all your devices. Piracy isn’t only cheaper in this case, but actually more convenient. It’s the better product, even when you leave pricing out of the equation.
Sure, some people will always resort to piracy, but there’s a direct correlation between the quality of service offered and the amount of piracy.
I can completely understand tv content piracy for convenience alone (and sure, it’s cheaper/almost free, that’s definitely a factor), but I never even thought about replacing music streaming with pirated content, because it’s just super convenient.