Anybody is perfectly free to boycott any product. But piracy doesn’t feel right towards content creators. Heck, streaming services are dirty cheap these days and if you can’t pay 10€ or so per month, well, you’re cheap.
TBH, I’m sceptical about fairness to content creators. Spotify for example is paying exactly nothing to your favourite artists. They get around 2-3€ per 1000 streams, which means that you can listen to them quite a lot without them getting rich. Go to some concerts, they will get more money than from spotify
Spotify’s incentives also work to make new music worse. People now release “albums” with a large number of short, low-quality tracks (because each stream above the length threshold pays the same), with only one or two songs that are standouts (to gain entry into Spotify playlists which are the major discovery mechanism). It’s also been proven that Spotify artificially increases the field of your competition by contracting out lowish-quality original compositions in some cases, for which they get to keep all the royalties.
This was already the case, well before digital music streaming: go look at music albums from the 90s and before that, and they’re overwhelmingly 2 or 3 good tracks and the rest filler.
Only a few of the greatest artists would mainly escape this trend and often only in a few of their albums, and there are plenty of one-hit-wonders who only ever produced one successful album with only one popular track in it and the rest pretty much filler.
It’s not by chance that even in the music disc days, there was the LP (i.e. an album) and the Single that only had a couple of the best tracks.
You’re right, the tendency for catchy singles did exist already. But still, I’d argue it used to make more sense to put work in a 30-/45-minute album worth listening to than it does now.
Heck, streaming services are dirty cheap these days and if you can’t pay 10€ or so per month, well, you’re cheap.
Yeah, it’s not about the money. The amount I spent on my personal media server could sign me up for almost every streaming services in existance … for a decade or so.
But piracy doesn’t feel right towards content creators
I agree … when it’s like a indie creator with a few thousand youtube followers or something. I like patreon for that (and spending way too much on that, too).
But if the creators are like hollywood millionaires or studios run by massive corporations? Well, fuck’em! Hell, I wish piracy was actually stealing so I could actually financially hurt them.
Yes. If it were just that, I’d be fine with it. But on top of paying them, every streaming service has their own app, website, whatever structure and I lose the priviledge of having my own digital library with my own search function integrated into my home automation and if we see that as a luxury, alright, then they’re giving me 720p maximum because my computer doesn’t match whatever they want me to buy and use for consuming their offers.
Piracy is a convenience problem, not a money problem.
Netflix removed Star Trek Discovery from one season to the next. Paramount wanted to have all Star Trek on their streaming service. Sure, I could have just switched to Paramount but just for that one series? Nah, just pirated it.
What makes you think that you are entitled to all that for free? Want to own stuff? Then buy physical media and there is also Bandcamp for music. Don’t want any of this? Then don’t listen or watch.
We are all playing a board game where the rules say billionaires win every time. You either keep pretending that our society is just and keeping to the rules the capitalist class wrote is good for society, or you can also realize that everyone does what they can get away with and the “lost profits” of Netflix et al. are just as much collateral damage as homeless people we refuse to house because REIT line go up.
Netflix enshittified their service over time for Linux users. So they reduced their service while increasing prices and thus I enshittified my payments by stopping them.
Anybody is perfectly free to boycott any product. But piracy doesn’t feel right towards content creators. Heck, streaming services are dirty cheap these days and if you can’t pay 10€ or so per month, well, you’re cheap.
TBH, I’m sceptical about fairness to content creators. Spotify for example is paying exactly nothing to your favourite artists. They get around 2-3€ per 1000 streams, which means that you can listen to them quite a lot without them getting rich. Go to some concerts, they will get more money than from spotify
Spotify’s incentives also work to make new music worse. People now release “albums” with a large number of short, low-quality tracks (because each stream above the length threshold pays the same), with only one or two songs that are standouts (to gain entry into Spotify playlists which are the major discovery mechanism). It’s also been proven that Spotify artificially increases the field of your competition by contracting out lowish-quality original compositions in some cases, for which they get to keep all the royalties.
This was already the case, well before digital music streaming: go look at music albums from the 90s and before that, and they’re overwhelmingly 2 or 3 good tracks and the rest filler.
Only a few of the greatest artists would mainly escape this trend and often only in a few of their albums, and there are plenty of one-hit-wonders who only ever produced one successful album with only one popular track in it and the rest pretty much filler.
It’s not by chance that even in the music disc days, there was the LP (i.e. an album) and the Single that only had a couple of the best tracks.
You’re right, the tendency for catchy singles did exist already. But still, I’d argue it used to make more sense to put work in a 30-/45-minute album worth listening to than it does now.
Anywho… *proceeds to yell at clouds*
Yeah, they are quite shitty. OTOH if you pirate music then artists get 0.
Yeah, it’s not about the money. The amount I spent on my personal media server could sign me up for almost every streaming services in existance … for a decade or so.
I agree … when it’s like a indie creator with a few thousand youtube followers or something. I like patreon for that (and spending way too much on that, too).
But if the creators are like hollywood millionaires or studios run by massive corporations? Well, fuck’em! Hell, I wish piracy was actually stealing so I could actually financially hurt them.
Yes. If it were just that, I’d be fine with it. But on top of paying them, every streaming service has their own app, website, whatever structure and I lose the priviledge of having my own digital library with my own search function integrated into my home automation and if we see that as a luxury, alright, then they’re giving me 720p maximum because my computer doesn’t match whatever they want me to buy and use for consuming their offers.
Piracy is a convenience problem, not a money problem.
Netflix removed Star Trek Discovery from one season to the next. Paramount wanted to have all Star Trek on their streaming service. Sure, I could have just switched to Paramount but just for that one series? Nah, just pirated it.
What makes you think that you are entitled to all that for free? Want to own stuff? Then buy physical media and there is also Bandcamp for music. Don’t want any of this? Then don’t listen or watch.
We are all playing a board game where the rules say billionaires win every time. You either keep pretending that our society is just and keeping to the rules the capitalist class wrote is good for society, or you can also realize that everyone does what they can get away with and the “lost profits” of Netflix et al. are just as much collateral damage as homeless people we refuse to house because REIT line go up.
Netflix enshittified their service over time for Linux users. So they reduced their service while increasing prices and thus I enshittified my payments by stopping them.
Nothing wrong with not paying a service you don’t want.