You look for stuff you already know and then browse the users library, if they have stuff you already like then anything you don’t recognize is probably also to your taste, especially if they’re sharing a smaller collection.

Perhaps I’m lucky that there’s not much I don’t like because it’s a similar strategy I used to use for traditional media, buy something I like and get something out of the bargain bin I’ve never heard of and 9/10 it was pure gold.

I honestly can’t be mad about it. I know quite a few corporations likely used the guise of inflation to profiteer, but significant inflation did still happen. A $1 increase in this economic situation, with having never raised the price before, is reasonable. The inflation comment suggests $12 or even $13 could be reasonable. The gains made over the years in workers pay is really small compared to inflation, but I think it’s actually on par with this.

Probably the same assholes that think Netflix no longer allowing password sharing is an overreach.

Wait - what are they doing?

“If you raise the price of the hotdog i will fucking kill you”

Ads on podcasts, even for premium members

Ads on podcasts, even for premium members

Fixed costs isn’t the cost of having a single server with the storage. I’m thinking everything they need to have built up with the intent of having between N1 and N2 MAU, in order to make that viable.

It’s the cost of developing the software stack, of hiring the lawyers and accountants that (1) acquire the music rights and (2) handle the music payouts, it’s the lawyers that handle the different legal requirements across every major global economy, it’s the servers located in all of those countries with as many sub-national locations as necessary, it’s the IT staff that manage that server uptime, it’s the software developers that maintain that system and improve upon it so rivals don’t jump too far ahead… Etc.

Building a streaming platform that expects to have multiple billions of dollars in revenue across hundreds of millions of users is going to have enormous fixed costs that cannot be trivially scaled down if user counts are lower. If they plan around a much lower user count they can scale it down at that planning phase, but not after the fact (at least not easily).

I agree with you, but this site is full of people who hate the idea of companies having to make money and just steal shit all the time. It’s a lame attitude to have I think, they believe they are entitled to others work because they don’t like the distribution model.

If i was in a righteous mood, i would say :

1 - Paying for consuming media older than 30 years is a perversion of the intellectual property idea, of supporting artists for a short window of time by artificial restriction of the right to culture and knowledge, and then to release the works to the public domain for the enjoyment of society. That the capitalists extended said window to be the death of the autour + 70 years, and then invented the idea of owning the art-invention-etc made by worker-artists is the real robbery of the situation. The current phase of studios trying to leverage AI tools (and AI tools that are essentially industrial scale pirates AND plagiarists) to make even more exploitation of artists is not surprising to me.
I forgot to add: the original north american idea was 14 years + 14 years, if the artist made a request for extension to get the 2nd period. Imagine if we had 14 years copyright now, everything made 14 years ago would be released and available to watch or even to make derivative works…

2 - I am not north american, i am third worlder (Brazil). So, since i have the money and time to spend, i prefer to spend money on domestic artists and domestic works to benefit my nation, which is a lot poorer than western artists and populations, and with much less famous cultural works. Instead of giving (more) money to Disney, i can go on music shows or theater here, or sign up one of the local streamers, and pirate the foreigner’s content i want. Brazilian artists, that really need the money and attention, i try to pay whenever possible (if it is even available). For films made by disney (and equivalents) … they will make enough money from cinema release here and from their foreign rich country, no need to give then a monthly transfer on top. The book Open Veins of Latin America is something of a reference in this type of reasoning.

Some of us have very good reasons for pirating, I was paying for every service under the sun in the UK last year and I dropped them all simply because the moment I went on holiday practically none of them worked. At that point, I realised that they just weren’t worth it and I could build something out and self-host a far better service.

So I spent something like 2 grand doing that knowing at least I’ll never have that issue again, Piracy is always a service issue first and foremost and most of these services are crap. Netflix still at least has a reasonable interface and a good experience across every device but Prime video is atrocious, P+ is likewise terrible and don’t ever get me started on NowTV.

Easier to just use torrents.

There’s this thing called a radio…