Because money laundering regulations in the UK (and I believe in the US and Europe) at least have made free use of one’s cash pretty difficult:
Designated accounts to transfer cash so that you have at least twice as many transactions to do as necessary. Inability to remove modest amounts of cash from your own account, or even pay it in.
Corporate banks operating HFT and dark pools to significantly push up the cost of personal share dealing.
Water companies dumping sewage into rivers and failing to fix leaks whilst raising water processing charges and bonuses to the board.
BBC and their sponsor-a-paedo TV tax collected by harassing elderly people, guilty until proved innocent. Used to be wonderful, educational and funny. Now useless woke shit.
Politics. Come back Guido, all is forgiven. Thieving Boris Johnson handing out multi million pound contracts to supply PPE to his local pub landlord (who have no fucking clue about that sector) and his bunch of duplicitous cronies.
I might have got carried away towards the end. Sorry, not sorry.
I mean fucking over people is bad but surely fucking over musicians is a lot less evil than Nestlé willingly murdering habies and draining wells for profit, no?
Yarrr. I’ve not taken part myself, but I hear there be extremely affordable ways to obtain digital files in this age.
Spotify is a last gross gasp of the dying music industrial complex, before direct payments for early access, directly to artists, becomes the primary form of music sales.
Don’t think that will happen so smoothly. People will go where it is easiest to one stop shop. I’m not jumping to multiple artists pages or different delivery services/shops when it’s all available at once, together, curated, with algorithmic lists and suggestions for new content. Sorry man the more I realize what Spotify and yt music offer the funnier the suggestions people would go straight to artists. Artists can’t offer all that.
I’m all for paying for a discovery algorithm, and Spotify has a good one. But as Google found out, staying the top player in a discovery space is hard.
A serious risk that Spotify faces is that new federated social networks are popping up, with great support for finding new artists.
Without the Discovery portion of Spotify, and with the constant pressure by record labels to enshittify the service, I don’t see a long runway ahead for Spotify.
The new default is going to be piracy, again. (The old default was piracy, before streaming got good.) The paid option will be patronage. Then we will see massive amounts of bundling in the patronage services, as they re-discover that people are willing to pay for a discovery service.
If the record labels even still exist at that point, they will pressure the bundled patronage services to enshittify, and the dance will start over at piracy.
For anyone on the selling side who wants to skip a step or win for awhile, here’s the lesson: You can’t sell digital files. You never could - not from day one. You can only sell easy access and discovery.
Digital files are the ulitmate perfectly elastic good, and the consumer community will swing back and forth into piracy or paying, based on how well they are treated as customers.
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