Music Streaming Service Exclusives Make Pirating Tempting Again (theverge.com) 207
The advent of online music streaming service has made it easier for millions of people worldwide to listen to all of their favorite songs, and convinced plenty to pay for music. But with the space of music streaming service getting increasingly crowded and artists beginning to do exclusive with select platforms, it has again become inconvenient for people to get everything they want with one subscription. The Verge's Ashley Carman writes that this is pushing many people to resort to piracy. Carman writes: Rampant piracy could make a comeback, solely because streaming service exclusives, and complete artist opt-outs, make it impossible to get all music in one place. Last week, Drake dropped two new singles off his upcoming album Views from the 6. The tracks are currently only available on Apple Music. Last month, Kanye West released his newest album The Life of Pablo on Tidal only. It came to Spotify this month after an estimated 500,000 people had already torrented it. Big Sean and Jhen's Aiko released their collaboration album TWENTY88 on only Tidal at first. Beyonce and Nicki Minaj released a Tidal-only music video for Feeling Myself. More than a million people signed up for Tidal over the course of a day just to get Kanye's new album, though it's assumed that most won't stick around. At what cost to listeners are these exclusives being made and where does it leave fans? If users wanted to subscribe to only one service, it would come out to approximately $120 per year. Two services will cost $240, and three services, say, Apple Music, Tidal, and Spotify, will cost $360, which will be a substantial cost to casual listeners.
Might? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Might? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pirating stopped being especially tempting when the music industry realised that it ought to sell people what people wanted to buy, for a price they were prepared to pay and allow them to play their music whenever and whereever they liked without anything abusive.
Basically the various music stores, once they dropped DRM, did this. Hear a track, like it, buy it and play it back on anything, anywhere at any time. And the streaming internet radio only helped, since now there were nice options to listen to stuff more or less wherever you wanted.
But now, with exclusives, they're making it more awkward for people to get it through legitimate channels, so people go to the one channel which gives them the flexibility they want: piracy.
Here's the thing, most people aren't freeloading asshats. Most people are happy to pay a reasonable price for something they like, as long as they get something good in return. The "problem" with piracy is not that it was cheaper[*], the problem was it offered (and in the case of video still does) a *better* product.
You can play a pirated media file on any device. You never get unskippable ads with pirated media. With pirated media you don't have to connect your device to the internet because you tried to play the wrong kind of file. With pirated media, there are no DRM servers to be switched off rendering your collection worthless. And so on.
[*] Some people are freeloading asshats and will never pay anything. But you can't get money out of those people.
Re:Might? (Score:5, Interesting)
> Some people are freeloading asshats and will never pay anything. But you can't get money out of those people.
I would take some exception to this and say that some of those people are broke kids who have little or no money but scads of time on their hands that they use to track down things they want. Then those kids grow up as fans of the artists, get an income and shift to paying customers because they no longer have the time and energy to search things down like they used to. So you can get money out of them with time.
Personally I really like streaming services like Spotify and Netflix, but I'm starting to think that maybe having local copies of some things is a good thing as one of the problems with streaming services is the ephemeral nature of availability. For example I queued up Fringe a while back to watch when I got through some of my other backlog, and when I go to watch it, suddenly it's not part of the Netflix catalog for my country any longer (!). Or I made a playlist on Spotify for work and sometime in the last month or so a half dozen songs just vanished from it and only appear in the playlist greyed out if I activate the "show content no longer available" option.
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I would take some exception to this and say that some of those people are...
Yeah good point. It's hard to feel much of anything if a kid with no money pirates something. It's not sane to mark that up as a lost sale. I think rephrashing, that while people are in the pirating mode, you're not going to get more money out of them.
They can of course change with time but that's a long term thing. There's nothing you can do to your services to make a kid have more money to spend on them and less time to hunt down
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Connection outages can also be an issue, especially when you're on the road. I uploaded my music collection to Google Play a while back (and had it uploaded to iTunes Match before that), but when I had a road trip last weekend, I had my phone download a bunch of pl
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When Steam got its shit together, I mostly stopped pirating games. It was easier to just pay and download than to have to deal with a crack, possible virus infection, bugs that come from the crack (or not being able to update), lost save games, and all that shit.
When Grooveshark came out, I stopped pirating music. It was any song I wanted for a monthly fee. It's far easier to just type in a song, and hit play than it was to go hunting on Gnutella or in torrents for the song I was looking for.
I still pirate
Shooting themselves in the foot. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the UK, music publishers got a ruling that ripping CDs is illegal. What is the likely outcome of that?
If I can't legally buy the CD, rip it and listen to the music on my devices, then I might as well fire up a torrent app and skip the whole "buy the CD" part.
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In the UK, music publishers got a ruling that ripping CDs is illegal. What is the likely outcome of that?
Oh shit, really? I did my whole collection. That's like 3400 songs off ~300 albums. Am I fucked? I hear sirens, they'll never take me alive and all that.
In all seriousness though I got to a point in my life, kinda mid university, that I just got bored of new music. None of the new bands really interested me and most of the bands I do like, their latest cds were shit. I have literally no desire for any music streaming service as I already have all the music I want/need. All I really wanted back then was a
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In all seriousness though I got to a point in my life, kinda mid university, that I just got bored of new music. None of the new bands really interested me and most of the bands I do like, their latest cds were shit.
What year was that?
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In the UK ripping CD is illegal because there is no "fair use" exception in UK copyright law, so any rip of a CD is by default an unauthorised copy and thus illegal.
The government after a consultation decided this was silly, everyone was ripping CD's to MP3 and nobody had ever been prosecuted for doing so by a copyright holder.
Where it all went unstuck revolves around the method they used to make a change to the law. They used something called a Statutory Instrument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This is
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Don't worry, the confusion will get worse if the US gets Donald Trump for president while the EU has Donald Tusk for chairman.
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I understand that many Slashdot users outside the United States of America (USA) haven't been following politics in the USA. So I'll spell it out:
In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (GB), ripping CDs is illegal.
There exist other countries where ripping CDs is legal, such as the USA.
Residents of GB who want to rip CDs need to leave Britain in favor of one of those countries.
Entering a country requires permission from that country, granted by the country's immigration department.
The of
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So don't listen to pop music. After about 20 years of not listening to any new music, Pandora has found lots of new music for me: it's just not pop music: my tastes are rather less mainstream.
Re:Might? (Score:5, Interesting)
Piracy stopped being tempting for me when my income became sufficient to allow subscribing to a music streaming service, buying a couple (okay, maybe 5) games a month, subscribing to Netflix from my country and subscribing to some SaaS offers (e.g. Adobe products) whenever needed.
Since then, I bought all the software I needed and I only visited torrent websites to download exactly 3 games, the reason being that watching "Let's play"s and trailers and screenshots as well as reading opinions came out inconclusive. With no demos available, it was the only way to make sure my money wasn't wasted. Turned out 2 of 3 games were actually shit, so it was a good choice. The third I bought after finding out I liked it.
Ten years ago I was pirating literally everything. Today I am pirating nothing - actually I am encouraging others to "buy that shit" instead of pirating it.
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To each his own. I'm thinking that my spent money allow content makers to produce even better content in the future.
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I can't imagine what would ever compel me to stop other than the threat of jail time.
Probably an honest review of the value of your time will compel you.
If it takes me an hour to "do some pirating," then that pirating better save me more than just a few bucks.
For music its still probably in your interest to pirate...you can quickly get tons of music that you want.
For videos I bet you are beyond the tipping point due to how long it takes to find a *good* rip of a specific movie (yes, the blockbusters will be easily findable, but try to find a good rip of... say... "Better Off Dead"...
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http://btdigg.org/search?info_hash=&q=better+off+dead [btdigg.org]
That took maybe 10 seconds, and it looks like the first page of results has everything from a crappy SD Xvid AVI on up to an un-recompressed Blu-ray rip, with recompressed 720p and 1080p options in between.
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Seems like you haven't pirated movies in a few years. The Pirate bay has a reputation system, movies marked with VIP or Trusted always work and are easy to find.
Nobody said anything about "working" you dumbshit.
Wondering why I am being rude? here is why:
You dishonest fuck, you made sure not to link to an actual search on that site, because if you had done so then everyone would have seen that there are zero seeders, and zero leachers, making it in fact not available. That makes you a lying fuck.
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You could not evaluate the game by watching it on twitch.tv before buying/pirating?
Re:Might? (Score:4, Informative)
Not really.
I'm talking about Firewatch, Tharsis and Adr1ft. They're the kind of games you really need to play yourself to realize they're good for you or not.
On a more general note, all decision-heavy games mandate playing before buying. A demo would suffice. If you passively watch someone else make decisions to which you might disagree, you're following their path but you can't tell if the game's something you would enjoy for more than 15 minutes.
OK, Firewatch is a walking simulator but it has absolutely zero replayability, so after playing it for 10 minutes I uninstalled it, deleted the torrent and watched someone else play it.
Sure, I could have gone with the Steam Refund way, but as of now it's tedious and awkward. I really dislike when they need 5 seconds to take your money but 3 days to give them back.
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It's not just about the game visuals. It is about the game play, mechanics and key mappings.
For example, if I cannot remap all of the keys in the game, I will not play it. I don't care how good the graphics are.
As a matter of fact, graphics account for about 10% of the "is the game fun?" equation..
Re:Might? (Score:5, Insightful)
It became inconvenient when services offered more comfort and better quality. The payment was offset by the convenience and the trust that you were getting the real deal, not some crappy rip. Yes, the biggest reason people pirated was because the music was unavailable.
If the nominal fee does not bring the wanted convenience, then I can see why people will start looking to BitTorrent, and it really is a case of the artists leaving money on the table that their fans would be more than happy to give them.
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It stopped being tempting when I found Live365, sadly now defunct. It took a while, searching the various stations, but I eventually settled on a list of about 15 "favourites". Occasionally I might look for something different, but it worked well for me, and I was happy to pay subscription for a number of years. In fact, I would've been happy to pay more - they charged about USD$75/year, and I would have been happy to double that, it was worth that much to me. Free of ads, and supporting artists.
Then the co
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This has been bothering me for a while, but why do people talk about Spotify like it solves a problem? It might be the genre of music I like, but when I look at what Spotify offers, I don't see how it's superior to Google Play Music (where I can upload 50,000 hourlong tracks and listen on 10 authorized devices, where Spotify only allows 3333 tracks and 3 devices) and see a streaming catalog that with poorly cataloged , mislabeled or missing content.
I like classical music, something that no streaming service
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It doesn't solve your problem, but it did mostly solve mine. I pretty much only listen to music while I'm driving, which comes out to a couple of hours a day. There's genres and artists that I like but they don't have, but they have enough that I stopped bothering with itunes. Uploading what I have and what I get in the future is more effort (especially when including the effort of getting stuff in the future) than I want to go to for just a couple of hours.
Your mileage may vary :)
Re:Might? (Score:4, Insightful)
This has been bothering me for a while, but why do people talk about Spotify like it solves a problem? It might be the genre of music I like, but when I look at what Spotify offers, I don't see how it's superior to Google Play Music (where I can upload 50,000 hourlong tracks and listen on 10 authorized devices, where Spotify only allows 3333 tracks and 3 devices) and see a streaming catalog that with poorly cataloged , mislabeled or missing content.
I like classical music, something that no streaming service handles well, but Google Music is free if you're just uploading stuff you already have. What's Spotify doing to make itself better than that?
I don't think people are referring to spotify specifically. It's just becoming the go to word for music streaming service, like google is for search engines, netflix for vid streaming, hoover for vacuum cleaners etc etc
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I don't think people are referring to spotify specifically. It's just becoming the go to word for music streaming service, like google is for search engines, netflix for vid streaming, hoover for vacuum cleaners etc etc
Indeed. I'm the OP who mentioned Spotify above here, and in discussions like this I mean it exactly like you say. They were the first to succeed in modernizing how music is offered, which was very badly needed. Yes, there were attempts at streaming before (I even worked for one), but the Spotify success formula was the combination of good UX, good (not perfect) music selection and good cross-device functionality, with both a free model and a reasonably priced option. The free option also very important to S
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Also, to the poster complaining about streaming services not handling classical music well. It is not the streaming services, it is the publishers of your music who are still being the pricks all of the music publishers were some years ago.
Unless you have some evidence to support that, I don't believe that is an accurate statement. My theory is that the schemas in use to underlie music database services are not built to properly accommodate classical music and that developers, while perhaps aware of the iss
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not really the best parallel. Perhaps more like "it's hard to find a car with all the features I want. I'll build my own and not bother to get it inspected or registered."
Re:Might? (Score:4, Insightful)
not really the best parallel. Perhaps more like "it's hard to find a car with all the features I want. I'll build my own and not bother to get it inspected or registered."
Nah that'd be closer to I cant get the music I want so I'll write my own.
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how about "I'll build my own and not pay the patent owners"? (I'm thinking of car ~= playlist/service, feature ~= song)
False Equivalence (Score:5, Insightful)
Setting aside the debated-to-death difference between stealing and copyright infringement, your argument is based on another false equivalence;
I have a large choice of stores from which to purchase physical items. I may not be able to afford all the items that I want, but at the very least I do not have to pay $7.50/month in order to access WalMart, another $8.00/month in order to access Bed Bath & Beyond, and yet another $5.00/month to access my farmer's market - when I might only be interested in a few items from Bed Bath & Beyond that WalMart doesn't offer because WalMart doesn't like those things, and that one thing from the farmer's market because the vendor doesn't like WalMart. I can go to each one and pay piecemeal.
While understanding that streaming services have effectively brought the cost of music down to unprecedented levels, those services do have an upfront cost - and when you've got artists doing exclusives to services - where you cannot purchase this music piecemeal anymore - you're not at all being equivalent to stores.
Also, shoplifting isn't the same as copyright infringement. Thank you.
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"While understanding that streaming services have effectively brought the cost of music down to unprecedented levels"
Maybe, but I've also spent more in my first few months of Spotify than I had on recorded media in the last 15 years or more.
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Your argument is bollocks. Complete bollocks. You don't pay a monthly fee to those places because that's not their business model. Those places DO have exclusivity contracts - and if you want to buy something that ONLY Wal-Mart sells, then you're forced to either:
1) Pay WalMart's quoted price; 2) Do without it; 3) Steal it from WalMart;
Unfortunately you're still wrong. Yes, WalMart/Target/etc do have exclusive contracts - but they're not really that exclusive. It may be for one particular line of Levi Jeans; but you can find a near identical pair at another store.
Only the first two of these are *ethical* solutions to your dilemma. Furthermore, there ARE stores that charge monthly or yearly fees - Amazon Prime, BJ's Wholesale, Sam's Clubs, and others charge monthly fees for the "privilege" of shopping there - and if you want BJ's brand stuff, you're going to have to shop at BJ's, and pay their membership fees.
Again, another false comparison. BJ's, Sam's, etc have a verify of memberships, and they'll even let you come in on a guest membership, but you pay a little more. (We did a guest membership at BJ's and you pay 5% more than members, at least at that time.) Typically though members
Re:Might? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not a valid comparison.
The appeal of streaming services is that distribution is simplified to the point that you get everything under one roof. In order for shoplifting to be a valid comparison, you'd have to be able to shoplift just anything you could possibly desire from just one store, which you obviously can't do. Under a proper tracker (say what.cd in this case) you really do get everything from just one place.
This, by the way, is why a lot of people in other countries like to VPN to get US based Netflix instead of having to subscribe to multiple services in their own country to get the same content, which is still paying for (and not pirating) their content.
The fact that you have a job (or even no job at all) doesn't come into play.
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This, by the way, is why a lot of people in other countries like to VPN to get US based Netflix instead of having to subscribe to multiple services...
The first thing I thought of when reading this article was Netflix, and how it doesn't have everything, so we're also subscribing to Amazon Prime (mostly for the shipping, but also we've got access to movies) and Hulu Plus, and an additional Starz membership ... and we still don't have everything, or know where to find what. I have to ask my four-year-old which video service has the show she wants to watch.
The idea of inflicting the same issue on myself for music is unappealing, to say the least. If I like
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I have netflix, which I use on occasion, and Amazon Prime, which I only use for shipping and find borderline worthless for video streaming. Why? Because virtually all of the good stuff they have is pay per screw. For everything else, there's SickRage, CouchPotato, and Plex. I'll very likely pick up HBO while Game of Thrones is on (I say while, because I'm jobless until early May.)
Re:Might? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nothing like shoplifting. Music is given away for free all the time, on YouTube and Vimeo, on the radio and the TV. Downloading a copy doesn't deprive anyone of anything, except the existential concept of a potential lost sale.
Watching a music video and then changing the channel when the ads come on isn't stealing. Humming a tune you heard isn't theft. Downloading a digital copy is at worst copyright infringement. It's definitely not theft, and it's not even that hard to morally justify as at the prices being offered most of these kids weren't going to pay anyway, so not even a potential sale was lost.
Public performance (Score:2)
Humming a tune you heard isn't theft.
You are correct that doing so in public is not theft but copyright infringement. The owner of copyright in a musical work has the exclusive right to perform it publicly.
Re:Public performance (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Public performance (Score:4, Informative)
Cover bands are allowed to exist because of music publishing companies like ASCAP or BMI, to whom said cover bands pay a fee for the right to perform a song. There's a pretty standard fee schedule and the paperwork is relatively easy, so it's often cheaper to hire a cover band to perform some song rather than licensing a pre-existing recording by the original artist(s).
And even that seven notes is a risk; muscians have been successfully sued for incorporating a sound-alike riff from someone else's song, even if not sampled.
How to avoid accidental infringement as composer? (Score:2)
And even that seven notes is a risk; muscians have been successfully sued for incorporating a sound-alike riff from someone else's song, even if not sampled.
So what steps should a songwriter take to avoid accidentally "incorporating a sound-alike riff from someone else's song"?
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As for the seven notes, I guess whoever came up with the 2 - 4 - 6 - 4 progression should be raking it in right now, no?
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One last example before i go. Taylor swift is worth between 200 & 240 million dollars with an approx income of 80 million a year. Should i feel guilty about pirating her music thus depriving her of a few cents because she took her music off free to listen streaming services in favor of making even more money?
No, but you *should* feel guilty for willingly listening to her "music" in the first place.
I predict... (Score:2)
that Pirate Bay-like streaming services will arise, and will pwn all the legal streaming services that are being hobbled by legislation and fragmented by self-important artists.
Maybe they will even accept payment for the service of aggregating content from existing legal streaming services, for as long as said legal services last. Heck, there might even be a legal aggregator in our future - call it MetaStream.
It's still early times for Butter (Score:2)
Isn't that the Butter project?
Currently, installing it requires installing git and Node.js first, and I imagine that the majority of home users of Windows or OS X aren't comfortable enough with the command line to do that. This is especially true on Windows, which (as far as I can tell) lacks a counterpart to sudo to run a single command with both command-line arguments and elevated privileges in the same Command Prompt window. One has to instead start an elevated Command Prompt window, which is like logging in as root.
Besides, let me k
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Actually, at least in the US, IP addresses are *not* considered proof of identity, although that doesn't keep the enforcers from using that information any way they can.
And the telemetry data is a stretch as well. Even if they could subpoena it, that data isn't telling MS what songs you are playing, at most it is telling them what you have installed and maybe what files there are. MS gains no benefit from acting as a collector for content enforcers. They're trying to get ad revenue.
Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
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500K people torrented Kanye? What the fuck is this world coming to.
Counter-culture is strong with Kanye. He's a dork as a person but his music isn't nearly as bad as everyone pretends it is. It's just popular to hate on him.
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Or go find some independent artists and listen to some truly talented musicians.
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My first thought was "Only 500k? I thought he was popular?". Popular anime series get like 100K+ downloads per episode (they are released in CR, so they are free after few days) and anime is a niche.
Piracy and greed (Score:3)
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Now the music industry is trying to extract more money from its listeners via exclusive and expensive contracts. That increase in music industry greed is triggering an increase in piracy because the content looks over-priced.
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Or they [sic] greed of their listeners...
Yes, there will always be some piracy, I don't deny that. However...
.
When the media industry has put reasonable pricing on content, the amount of piracy of that content has dropped significantly. Most people are honest and want to pay for product.
Piracy appears to flourish when content is not available legally, or when available content is priced unreasonably high.
It really is up to the media industry to find the right price for the content, a price that buyers are willing to pay.
It really is up to
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It's the rest of us who are greedy.
I post this every time (Score:4, Interesting)
I post this every time the subject of music comes up. If you are an avid collector of music, forget about downloads and streaming (unless it's truly free of course). Instead, keep a running list of music you're interested in, and every so often, visit an online used cd store like secondspin.com [secondspin.com] (not affiliated) and order a handful of used cds to add to your collection. Limit your purchases to about $5 or $6 per album. When they arrive, record them to flac format and store the discs away. Now you have a master archive which you can convert to any lossy format at any time, while leaving the masters untouched. Chown the archive to root to ensure that it can't be touched by your rogue music player.
I have been doing this for almost 15 years, and have amassed a collection of hundreds of albums, and yet I still have a "wanted cds" list over 300 artists long. All of this is 100% legal, and you get the real deal (the original cd album), not some re-sampled mp3. Furthermore, you completely side-step the crooked music industry. (When I really want to support an artist, I buy tickets to the show.)
The only pitfall is that you won't find much new music at $5/cd. But that's OK, once you realize that the amount of new music coming out that's worth keeping is only a fraction of a percent.
Not all artists even release CDs (Score:4, Insightful)
every so often, visit an online used cd store like secondspin.com
Until a recording artist decides to stop releasing music on CDs, such as Kanye West. Or unless a recording artist never starts selling CDs in the first place and stays digital-only because "major labels are for chumps".
Conclusion for internet commerce is... (Score:2)
Price ain't the problem (Score:2)
$360 per year comes out to 30-40 CDs back from the dark ages of music - Purely in terms of cost, a pittance, really.
The bigger issue here, and the reason people never stopped pirating music - control. I have absolutely zero faith in any streaming service that music by my favorite new artist today will continue to exist in their catalog a year, ten years, forty years from now.
I w
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I will still buy physical discs as an "archival copy", when available; but when publishers screw us all (artists included) with these service-exclusive deals, it leaves only one rational option.
Not listening to that artist?
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"Purely in terms of cost, a pittance, really."
You sir, completely underestimate my cheapness. $360 a year is about 3x what I spend on music a year. I spend a decent amount of effort constantly shaving down costs, especially anything that is recurring. I have the cell bill down to $35 a month for 2 phones, and I buy those phones outright. Insurance gets re-quoted about every 2 years, and I have moved companies several times. Recurring charges are corrosive to your bank account. You quickly forget them,
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I'd also argue that "casual listeners" don't really care.
I used to subscribe to HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, The Movie Channel, Starz, Encore, and Epix. Which meant wherever a particular movie ended up, I could watch it. Yeah, it cost a lot of money, but it was worth it to me. I want to be able to watch certain movies multiple times and pick up all the nuances.
I'm not what I would consider a "casual movie watcher."
So,yes, if I absolutely positively have to listen to the latest and greatest from a particular m
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As a casual listener I just gave up having time to even find new music. I basically go to youtube and type in some category of music, sometimes changing it based on auto complete (oh, what is this), and let 'up next' take me where ever the hell it wants to go.
The labels get paid anyway (Score:2)
The ridiculous thing here is the labels get paid ANYWAY when you stream the music, regardless of whether it's on Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon, etc... It's in the contract.
What point is there to have an exclusive? They should be trying to get the music on as many services as possible, so the stream count is as high as possible (across all services) since they are paid by the stream.
When the artist owns a stake in a service (Score:4, Insightful)
What point is there to have an exclusive? They should be trying to get the music on as many services as possible
To drive subscriptions to the service in which the artist owns a financial stake. It's the same reason that Nintendo releases the vast majority of its games only on Nintendo consoles.
Re:The labels get paid anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
The ridiculous thing here is the labels get paid ANYWAY when you stream the music, regardless of whether it's on Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon, etc... It's in the contract.
What point is there to have an exclusive? They should be trying to get the music on as many services as possible, so the stream count is as high as possible (across all services) since they are paid by the stream.
The various different services are in heated competition. They are all offering mostly the same thing to people who mostly want the same product. Exclusivity is a negotiation point. In order for the artist to accept such a clause, they must have gotten something of equal value in return. Maybe that "something of equal value" was cash money up front, maybe it was higher rates, maybe it was satisfaction in helping a friend's company, maybe it was something else. But there are lots of reasons why an artist would accept exclusivity. These people are business folk. It isn't always about getting as many people as possible to hear their music.
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And don't forget the streaming services are a business too. They're constantly trying to push the prices of their "suppliers" in an oligarchy-like fashion. Not the superstars that could take millions of "beliebers" with them to a different service but the bread-and-butter artists that need to be where their market is because they're just one among several competing artists. The streaming companies know people are slow to change, so short term it's the artist taking the biggest hit.
And if people pirate becau
Ambiguous jargon (Score:4, Informative)
It took me a second reading to realize that this didn't mean "Drake removed two tracks from his new album, and the only place where tracks 9 and 10 can still be found is Apple Music."
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Okay, so can you explain it to everyone else? Cuz I am still confused.
'dropping a single' means 'releasing a single' (Score:2)
'dropping a single' means 'releasing a single'
much like 'dropping a deuce' means... you know.
and in many cases, the content of the former is the same as the content of the latter
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thanks
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aha!
VPN: $5 - $10 / month, or less (Score:2)
It's just music (Score:2)
Amazon Prime keeps dropping songs and artists (Score:2)
I like Amazon Prime but they keep dropping songs and artists. Each month more and more songs in my playlist get "greyed out" until I elect to purchase them.
At least for Amazon Prime Music, sometimes it feels like it's a bait-and-switch scheme.
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Prime is rotating music and videos in and out all the time.
It isn't intended to be a static set of N titles that are Prime in perpetuity.
Kanye West? (Score:3)
I can't think of a better possible use of the phrase "And nothing of value was lost".
Wait it out (Score:2)
De nada. (Score:2)
Oh well. (Score:2)
This doesn't effect me at fortunately.
I used to torrent music religiously, but now that I'm older and have a stable income, I try to support the bands I like.
Besides, these asshats that put their music only on specific channels don't make what I'd call music anyway.
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Well, not Kodi exactly. Kodi is just a presentation front-end for media playback. Since it's roughly as dubious that you have legally obtained content to play with Kodi (maybe video disc ripping is legal in your location, or you're one of the small number of people recording unencrpyted OTA TV signals) as it is that you're using torrents or NNTP for legal content, this might be a distinction without a difference, but in any case what you probably mean is "Kodi with the Fusion Addons installer and Genesis/Ic
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Hmmm... greed... some would call it "optimizing or maximizing their income".
Mostly their business managers
Re:Screw the greedy artists (Score:4, Interesting)
some would call "the primary goal is 'optimizing or maximizing their income'" a good definition of greed. Your mileage may vary.
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Yeah, mostly their business managers. Piracy is often a case of the artist overshooting the sweet spot on the bell curve and leaving too many customers without legitimate access.
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And 10 years ago people said the same thing.
As an old guy I admit this does not affect me I find a lot of the music those artists perform to not match my taste in music.
It is like Prince not allowing his music videos on YouTube. I would watch them and he would get ad money. Now he gets nothing. If he offered streaming versions I would probably listen to them but now I just rip my old CDs and put them in the cloud.
Re:Crappy Music (Score:5, Interesting)
"I do not care, I only listen to the good stuff which is usually at least ten years old but more often older."
You're falling prey to Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap". It's just that with the old stuff, the crap has been rightfully forgotten. There's lots of good new music, you just need to find a good way to filter out the crap.
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Laziness and sloth have their advantages.
I really like discovering a new-to-me band, only to find out they have a half dozen album I can pick through and get 15-20 good tracks. I find it maddening when someone like Lorde comes along, and there are only about 3-4 songs that are worth grabbing, hardly seems worth waiting for more.
I really enjoy when I discover some group where I enjoy almost all their stuff and can load up. I ended up buying over a 100 tracks from Flogging Molly when I stumbled onto them a
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There's also this psychological tendency to discover a band and find that while you like everything in their current discography, all of their new music that comes out afterward just doesn't seem as good to you. So to get the most enjoyment, it only makes sense to discover bands after they've got a pretty hefty catalog, because once you do you're tarnishing their future releases.
Well, it's a crackpot theory, but I've heard too many people say it to dismiss it entirely.
Re: Crappy Music (Score:2)
>>"I do not care, I only listen to the good stuff which is usually at least ten years old but more often older."
>There's lots of good new music, you just need to find a good way to filter out the crap.
I think the GP has found his method.
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Sorry, no. From what I see, the music industry (in America at least) has fundamentally changed a lot over the last couple of decades in how they do business and find and promote musicians. Also, genres of music change over time. If you really like Big Band music or rockabilly or Motown or '80s hair metal, for instance, there isn't exactly a lot of that being made these days.
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Like how cellphone companies still have exclusivity deals.
Nokia doesn't like to sell cellphones so they just take the bribes At&t gives them so they can greatly limit the market they sell to.
Lumia 1020 on Verizon? Almost 3 years later? Nope still exclusive.
Water cooler exclusion (Score:2)
All these network exclusives which are not re-licensed and distributed make me pretend the product doesn't exist.
Until your co-workers start discussing details of the new releases, thereby making you feel left out.
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So... fuck albums.
I admit, an album can be a beautifully crafted work of art through proper song selection and a general mood that one wishes to convey.
Unfortunately, most albums are compilations of one or two singles, one, maybe two, non-singles that are decent and the rest is 10-12 tracks of shit. On some of the worst albums that actually sell, there is only the one hit single. And sometimes that filler shit is some random person talking or the sound of pigs fucking just so the album can sound edgy and
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I would have to agree for the services that are set up to extract more money. And these exclusives are more of the same exclusionary rent seeking that I thought that we'd gotten beyond already. Looks like we only convinced their music business overlords, but not the artists that have their own labels and followings.
In the end, I guess I don't care. If Beyonce, Jay-Z, and Kanye want to extract even more money out of their audience, go for it. That's just one more reason they aren't on my playlist to begi
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I think you are right for some people, but these are people who have less means who simply wouldn't be able to justify that expense to begin with. They will always be with us.
However, there are people who can budget for streaming, and I can tell you, piracy is free and a lot more convenient than it used to be, but it's still more work that I'd like to put into getting tracks. A streaming service with a reasonable cost and a wide selection means that someone like me can justify spending some money on the