Good thing from the current situation is it being the end of times for these services. Constant need for income increase to appease share holders means infinite growth, which is impossible. But individual doesn’t see that, they just want more. So progress of any software towards service model is pretty straight forward.
First they start splitting software into smaller versions and selling both for slightly higher price combined than when they were single piece. Then they start releasing more frequent versions but that has limited impact. So they start introducing forward incompatibilities. Only new software will support both old and new versions of the document, forcing buyers to buy latest. When that reaches its optimal maximum they decide to switch to yearly subscription and force everyone to use those by same ways as they forced them to use newer versions.
Subscription based model is limited. It has no progression other than increase in price and it’s only a matter of testing how much people are willing to pay. Sometimes even go above reasonable price but then go with “exclusive” content as if to justify higher price. This of course works for a while, but exclusive content costs money and is harder to produce consistently at high quality…
And after that, there’s no progression. It’s a battle royale among service provides but they can’t back out because of share holders and can’t revert to other business models. So some of them will stretch themselves thin and burst others will keep on living from that vapor until a new contender comes.
Yep, absolutely. My family still has spotify and netflix subscriptions, but i already canceled prime before the previous price hike. I’d have already canceled netflix if it was my decision and the only service i still see value in is spotify.
Unfortunately, I believe that feeling will change if you look into how Spotify actually harms the artists by forcing them to use their product even though they make slim to none profit. The more you know.
A crazy trollface stick figure hides behind a crudely drawn square, holding a shotgun and saying “I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES” as an army of harp darps wearing blue helmets with various logos on them come through a crudely drawn door.
Around the harp darps are various statements they are making as they move into the room. At the front left, below a harp darp wearing the Adobe logo, is the text “You can afford it, come on”. To the right of the Adobe harp darp is one wearing the Dropbox logo. Behind the Adobe harp darps is one wearing the Netflix logo, and behind the Dropbox harp darp is one wearing the Spotify logo. Between the front four harp darps is the text “Just $15 bro”. To the upper right of the Spotify harp darp is the text “Limited Ads dude”. Behind the Spotify harp darp is one wearing a Twitter (now X) Verified blue tick, with the text above its head reading “It’s less than a cup of coffee bro…come on”. To the right of the Twitter Verified harp darp is one with the Nintendo Switch Online logo. To the upper right of the Nintendo Switch Online harp darp is the text “It’s just a small monthly payment dude”, and to the bottom right of the same harp darp is the text “You use it all the time Anyway bro”. Behind and to the left of the Twitter Verified harp darp is one wearing an Amazon Prime logo, standing outside the door.
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Your point stands, but let me point out that when gmail started their “9GB free” thing way back when, that was an unfathomable amount of storage for some of us. And gmail’s not the only service that’s offered huge amounts of free storage over the years. So yeah, I think it’s probable that a bunch of us have been primed to expect free storage.
edit: Also given how cheap cloud storage is from ie MS Azure…
Depending on storage type you pay $10-$18/mo once you’re using a full TB. If you use less, you pay proportionally less. Dropbox’s 2TB for $10 is a comparatively better deal if you use it all, but if you use 1TB or less it’s not. Which, now that I’m looking at it, probably means their business model is counting on a lot of underutilized storage caps from their subscribers.
Nay i demand a decent minimum amount of free online storage. These jackasses have taken away SD cards from mobile for a reason. They overcharge a memory upgrade on laptops tablets and mobile phones on purpose. They choke companies into ditching local servers and moving to the cloud. Why? sUBsCriPtIOn BaSEd CLoud stORAgE. Shove it Microsoft Google and Amazon.
I think that Spotify (or any other music streaming service) are the only ones still worth it. I don’t have to sign up for Spotify and Tidal and YouTube Music since any of them has whatever I need.
If that were to change, then I’ll be subscription-free.
Also, I like paying for Spotify since it’s the only European big-tech.
If that were to change, then I’ll be subscription-free.
At this point you will also be music-free since you do not own any of it, and that is what keeps people locked into these services even as the companies jerk them around.
The real value in Spotify is the music discovery. That’s driven by data that very few are in a position to collect. Of all the big tech companies, Spotify is the only one I can think of that uses the data they collect from the users to give the users a uniquely better experience. Even YouTube is littered with promoted ads and videos. If you’re avoiding ads anyway, it’s a win win for the user to pay for Spotify premium.
Then you can do what you will with all the playlists you make.
I’m gradually getting to the point where I’ll drop Spotify. Shoving ads for podcasts in my face every time I launch the app was bad enough, but now their app has become such a bloated mess that it bugs out whenever my phone is switching between wifi and mobile data. I have more than 1k songs downloaded just so I don’t have to deal with that, and now I have to deal with it because it’s more important to them to show ads and promotions than it is for their app to do what it’s designed to do.
And before anyone says “tHoSe ArEn’T aDs,” showing me recommended artists and podcasts against my will is absolutely a form of advertising. Do you think they’re showing me new releases from Joe down the street? These are paid promotions, aka ads.
I stopped watching network television because of ads, then I stopped watching free streaming because of too many ads (Pluto TV, Crackle), I get a basic subscription to Paramount through Walmart and I stopped watching that because of the ads. I have an Amazon prime subscription because I get it for one half off but I rarely use prime video an if they start showing ads, I won’t use it at all.
Not sure if you mean finding more music or having people find music you create. If you intend for people to find your music you created on a private self hosted platform you obviously need to look elsewhere but if you want to find new music to listen to there are still options.
You can connect Tidal to your Plex and listen to any music on Tidal on Plex and get discovery/recommendations. You can also connect Plex to Last.fm and get recommendations that way. If you want to manually discover music you can use a site that does that like everynoise.com
Brothers, sisters, others, it’s time we return to the old ways. To the high seas. We steal from those who own, but do not pay to own, the content they distribute. We will share this media amongst ourselves until they learn that we were willing to pay with dollars, but not with time.
we shall pirate on the beaches, we shall pirate on the landing grounds, we shall pirate in the fields and in the streets, we shall pirate in the hills; we shall never surrender
I finally dropped Spotify, I still maintain a YouTube Premium subscription, only because I’m grandfathered into their old Google Music plan. I’m finally looking to setup my own Nextcloud and Jellyfin server on a NAS because Google cloud storage starts to get pricey when HDD are so cheap. I do still pay Means TV because if I’m still paying for a streaming service, at least it’s a co-op.
I have YT Premium because I watch 95% of my YouTube through Apple TV, which doesn’t support ad blockers. I discovered that I can “visit” Argentina and sub to YT Premium for about £3 a month. I’m happy enough with that.
Lmao literally the only “subscription” I have is my phone bill, which I pay yearly. Also maybe you’d consider my insurance a subscription? Sounds very dystopian.
Edit: is rent a subscription? Regularly refilled prescriptions? Where is the line? I have fallen into a quandry.
I wouldn’t use a pirate streaming site over torrenting even if I was getting paid to do so lol the releases generally have terrible bitrates and low picture quality, likely because they’re the smallest files the site uploaders could find. They’re convenient if you can’t afford a VPN and don’t care about file quality when it comes to movies and shows, but I prefer being able to select a high quality file with good encoding, quality compression (265, AV1), and known high quality uploaders, like UTR and QxR. That’s only possible through torrenting the file or getting it through Usenet.
Those Times where Warez-Streaming-Sites had low quality are long gone. While 4k=3840 releases are rare, we have mostly 1920 nowadays with some 1280 in-between, often Bluray- or Streaming-Rips without re-encoding, at least if the source was H264/H265. Older MPEG2/4 though is still often recoded. You can easily re-encode an old MPEG2-Bluray from 20Gig to H265 4Gig without visibly loss. With more modern Codecs the Data is usually “re-containered” which means the Content itself isn’t changed, only the Encryption and Container are changed.
Overall Streamingz-Sites are pretty good nowadays, Amazon and Netflix take up to one minute to switch to high Bitrate quality for me. With Warez-Sites you have to wait 3-5 seconds but then it immediately starts at Max Quality and NEVER at lower quality. And their Search actually works great and is well organized and everything reacts so much faster because they reduce the eye candy. They also often have bookmarks - which don’t work as good as commercial providers but good enough.
I can only have access to Amazon, Netflix, Joyn and Public Television Media Centres so for other providers your mileage may vary.
Meh. I still prefer Stremio and my custom configured Jackett setup for searching for torrents. Just has more features and more control. I’ve never encountered a pirate streaming site with even half the features Stremio has. I will grant you that anime streaming sites have gotten a lot better over the years, but I still don’t trust general pirate streaming sites. It’s great to hear they got better though. Easier acess to media is always a good thing.
Torrents of all kinds can be easily tracked and its users be sued because they do not only consume but also distribute.
One-Click-Hosters and Streamingz-Sites on the other side are hard to track and their users don’t distribute.
At least by German Law it is mostly “we only care about distribution, not consumption”. The later has an estimated damage of $1 per case, that is not even petty crime. Distribution on the other hand often is handled at $1000/case… I think there was not a single case of a Streamingz-User being prosecuted but already millions of Torrent-Users.
Well this is a non-issue if you live in a country that doesn’t prosecute piracy or if you’re willing to pay for a VPN. I’ve been torrenting for years, and the last time I was caught was before I started using a VPN. I haven’t had a single issue since I started using one. Like I said though, pirate streaming sites work as a great solution for people who might not be able to afford to pay for a VPN or just don’t want the added expense.
Pretty much everything on there is monitored by the rights holders and anything that’s not is loaded with malware. L337 or torrent leech is what you want these days, for the mainstream stuff. TL requires invites but they’re easy enough to get and it’s got pretty much all the mainstream TV, movies, and software. If you want more niche stuff you’d want to look around a bit more, though.
Indeed. Latinos and Eastern Europeans have a predilection towards disliking intellectual property laws. And I happen to be an Eastern European living in Latin America.
Well, Pirate Bay is essentially the defacto website someone thinks of when they hear “This person pirates content.” Because of this, game devs, Hollywood execs, etc end up putting out detectable torrents/illegitimate files onto this most popular pirating source.
Lets call this what it really is: asset stripping.
Taking the finances of the many, for very little service, only to make those elites in large corporations so much richer. These corporations should remember the history of Ratner’s
I don’t hate subscription based services if they’re priced fairly and make sense.
Paying monthly for a service that then starts giving you less, adds more premium plans, introduces ads, etc. is garbage.
Paying for a game, then having to pay a monthly fee to play (WoW, for example), is garbage.
Paying for software, but then having to pay monthly to use the software, is garbage.
Paying for software, but then having to pay monthly to be allowed to contact support (Blue Iris), is garbage.
But paying for things like Spotify, where you get access to pretty much all songs as they release, have no limit on how much you listen to, and it has a fair student pricing or family pricing, that’s fine. Way better than paying per song.
I mean shit, if I paid for every song I have in my library on Spotify, I’d owe $1430. My Spotify is $17 per month, spit between 4 people, so I pay $4.25. I can either pay for every song in my library and not add any more, or pay for Spotify for 28 years and continue growing my library…
The economics of the world are such that people need to be paid for the content they produce. Having a direct relationship between me as the consumer and them as the producer is the way we don’t get shit like all of the ad-based spyware that surrounds shit like Facebook. It won’t completely prevent it, but it gives a good business plan for it not to happen.
I’d vastly prefer something that didn’t require some megacorp as evil as Amazon. But… this could actually make as much sense as is possible with our current economic system.
WoW and other MMOs are not just games with slapped on subscription costs. It is a very specific subtype of games which have much higher maintenance cost than an arena shooter. There is a reason these games get shutdown when certain financial thresholds get passed beyond let’s do something more profitable.
I’d rather have access to pretty much every song on demand for $4 per month and not own it, than pay per song.
I pay $4.25 per month for Spotify. That’s $51 per year. I have access to pretty much every song, or I could buy 39 songs to own instead.
I save more than 39 songs per month. Financially it makes no sense to buy them. Especially if you consider I get bored of some songs, and never listen to them again.
The way I look at it, is I don’t pay to listen to the music, I pay for the convenience.
Most music I listen to is on YouTube, where if I wanted to, I could just download it and “own” the song for free. However, in the interest of saving time, letting Spotify create playlists based on what I listen to, I just pay a monthly fee. Not to mention that I can share my playlists on multiple devices, whereas if I download music, I can’t.
I also have a family plan with all spots filled up, so that’s 6 people listening to all their music for $20/mo CAD. Far superior to buying an album or individual songs.
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