When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
I mean, Spotify is a great service for the consumer. One reasonable monthly fee for most of the music in the world.
If a similar video streaming service existed for 40€/month, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat. Now I have a plethora of arr apps and a vpn, and Plex. But it’s a hassle sometimes.
We’re all aware of the issues it created for the artists, and I’d be willing to double the fee if that money directly went to the artists, but this is where the capitalist model fails, as that won’t maximize the profits for shareholders.
If we ever come up with a way to fix the underlying greed models that come with publicly traded companies, that would be great.
As it stands, it is what it is, but I’m glad we have this, instead of a “different Spotify per music publisher”.
What would be wrong with a model where artists had their own website where they could distribute their music? That’s what Faircamp does. Then people could actually download it, rather than use a companies crappy client with DRM.
I was referring to the sharding that happened with video streaming services. It used to be Netflix had mostly everything, in the start, similar to Spotify. Now there are services per publisher that contain their own catalogues.
Fuck. That.
So you’d rather a monopoly?
No, dude… Spotify doesn’t have exclusive streaming rights to its music
They were talking about how each publisher was making their own streaming service as if the solution would be to have them all under one roof aka a monopoly.
I’d pay 40€ a month for an officially licensed private torrent tracker. If they gave discounts based on the amount seeded I doubt they would even need the stupidly expensive infrastructure.
I don’t even have the arr stack because it’s cheaper, just because it’s more convenient and no one can take it away from me
Maybe it’s because my schema for torrents is dichotomous with licensed uses, but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around this.
Is the distinction you’re making here between your proposed ‘licensed private tracker’ and something like a subscription-based catalogue (à la Audible) simply the way it’s distributed (in this case a centralized vs peer-to-peer)?
I like the idea of distributed media networks, but I really doubt any copyright owner would go for a distribution network that they don’t have any level of control over. The idea of an ‘officially licensed private torrent tracker’ seems incompatible with how that industry works.
I’d happily pay for an unlicensed private torrent tracker, though.
Totally agree, they’ll never go for that. I meant licensed as in that the media is being legally distributed. But they wouldn’t go for it as it would mean that customers might have an amount of ownership.
The distinction is that the private tracker is legal to run, as you’d be paying the licence holder for the ability to torrent using their private tracker.
I like the Audible idea of “you have X amount of GB a month that you can download, and you can pay more for more GB”. It gives the customer a reason to keep paying, and therefore allow the business to exist.
Licence is probably the wrong word as I’m not anywhere near an expert on this
Plus ads.
I was perfectly happy with Napster, before it got blown up.
As it stands, I’ve been leaning on SoundCloud and Bandcamp when I’m hunting for something indie and pirating or going vinyl for anything mainstream.
Spotify’s model is doomed to fail over time. Far better to own the media than stream it.
Not sure about the ads? If you mean when the app notifies you about live gigs etc. then yeah, that’s shittification. Luckily it doesn’t happen on my desk or car, but I wish it didn’t sometimes appear on my phone. That’s the one thing that might push me to add music to my video streaming arr stack.
Certain content (podcasts, most notably) insert ads into the feed above and beyond what Spotify Premium ostensibly removes. There’s also Spotify’s persistent need to blow up your phone with notifications and bloat your in-app screen, but at least some of that you can silence manually.
My wife has Spotify and she’s noticed the increased pressure to be always-online, as well. We were on a flight, and she’s got her take-off chill music, when she discovered putting the phone in airplane mood before starting up the app caused a bunch of bugs in her selection screen. Which - in the middle of a take-off that she did not enjoy - fucking sucked.
The service is definitely getting worse over time. And when you can keep an enormous library of music locally, the service becomes harder and harder to justify imho.
I’m perfectly happen to send $30/mo to Patreon for a few of my favorite artists. $12/mo for Spotify just feels like money down a well.