It's not because I don't want to pay for the content, I'd happily pay 2-3x under the right circumstances. It's because no one wants to take my money and provide the content I want without bundling it with drm, ads, dark patterns, insane region segmentation, and manipulative cross-sell tactics.

Whatever arguments were made about piracy detracting from sales are laughable now. The copyright and ad lobbies are detracting from those sales, piracy is just a symptom of the cancer that they are.

Sonarr + Couchpotato + Plex + Subsonic is somehow a more consumer-friendly experience than their 'legitimate' counterparts. The fact that the premium subscription cost for those services is more than netflix+spotify, and yet people are willing to pay that much for their piracy, that should be pretty telling to any industry analyst.

Can't help you with movies/Netflix, but in the case of Spotify, you could go back to buying mp3's. Google Play, Amazon, iTunes (aac format), etc will all sell you DRM Free tracks at $1.30 a piece, and the ad-free songs become yours forever to listen to however you wish.

Spotify always seems less useful compared to winamp if you knew what music you liked or like to download everything from one band who's best days are behind them. A hassle for new stuff but if you want the all of the 'yes' albums the rare shows, interviews spotify just doesn't cut it.

Assuming you have Netflix and Prime Video, these days I'm finding more and more occasions when the selection in the UK is bigger (!).

I load up my holds list online on the weekend and pick up a dozen or so CDs one day a week on the way home from work.

Edit: Since some will invariably point out that you can't hear flacs, here's a better argument. Even if you prefer lossy music, there are and will be better codecs than mp3. So the choice of encoding should be up to you so that you can choose a better codec in the future if you wish. And mp3 wasn't even free until last year. So until 2018, it was illegal to play mp3s on a free system.

But music? There may be corner cases but pretty much any of the big streaming services plus judicious a la carte purchases have you pretty well covered. Personally I do like owning music but then I started from a pretty large collection of physical media.

If there's a specific unreleased track you want, fine, pirate that. I don't think there's anything wrong with pirating content that's not available for sale (as long as you buy it if/when it does become available for sale). However, the existence of some unreleased tracks do not give you license to pirate tracks which are released.

Outside of specific, exceptional circumstances, I have zero sympathy for anyone pirating music in 2018. Music is finally being distributed in the DRM Free, affordable, and unencumbered formats consumers have been asking for.

A good example is Morphine's The Night. We're not talking about a bootleg record, it's a proper studio album owned by UMG. Yet it's not available on Spotify, Google Music or Amazon Music. It's on iTunes, but that requires installing a native app, which doesn't run on any of my devices, including the most popular OS in the world (Android). Alternatively I can buy a CD, which will cost me something like $50 with shipping, and rip it myself - and that's only because I still happen to own a desktop with a CD drive.

All so that the artists get about $1 from my $10.

Or I can download a torrent and give those $10 to Vapors of Morphine on their Bandcamp page, which is much easier for me and will net them about $8 instead.

So fuck the leeches, I'll keep pirating.

https://www.amazon.com/Night-Morphine/dp/B000046PUL

Having easy-accessible piracy channels now works against that goal by incentivizing content providers to invest in more stringent DRM schemes. DRM can rarely prevent piracy completely, of course, but it can make piracy more difficult and less accessible.

Or maybe not, but it's a feeling.

As for iTunes, don’t they sell in high bitrate AAC? It is very hard to hear a difference in the vast majority of music between a high bitrate AAC and an uncompressed file.

???

I pay $14.99 a mo and my wife and I enjoy as much music as we can stomach. It's the one subscription I never even think about. Their service never goes down and they are constantly trying to improve the product.

> Sonarr + Couchpotato + Plex + Subsonic is somehow a more consumer-friendly experience than their 'legitimate' counterparts.

???

If you have the time to configure all of that stuff (and support it, and find pirated content) you need to seriously up your billable rate and reconsider the value of your time.

Then again if you just enjoy doing it yourself and running your own gear, that is fine too, but admit it. I don't think this has anything to do with the market being hostile.

Wish they had a more fully-featured experience for streaming music on PC. Downloading to play in foobar is a bit of a faff sometimes!

It definitely helps that BC is focused on independent artists and doesn't seem interested in pushing grand visions of a global musical monoculture in the way Spotify does (those pretentious Year in Music retrospectives, Drake, "chill beats playlist", Lana del Rey etc).

Old-school sites like last.fm used user-submitted tags to link my listening history to new artists I'd probably enjoy. You don't need any fancy machine learning for this kind of basic pattern recognition. Spotify could obviously do this, but like Netflix, Amazon etc, they choose to push artists that make them the most money.

https://cryochamber.bandcamp.com/

Looking at my current most-played list, I'd suggest:

https://starcadian.bandcamp.com/album/saturdaze

https://future80s.bandcamp.com/album/trans-am

https://nightvision2.bandcamp.com/album/runaway !!

https://neondroid.bandcamp.com/album/no-more-sunset-2017-ep

You can use Bandcamp Downloader [https://github.com/Otiel/BandcampDownloader] to download the artist's music – including any or all albums and any of the songs – just by entering the addresses of the pages.

Might make getting the audio easier, considering you've already paid.

I also like that this fits in with their general marketing of lossless files - sure, you can download the 128kbps mp3s. Go ahead. They're inferior - just previews.

https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/360007902173-I-h...

I'm in the same boat(no pun intended), and also still pay for the subscriptions. I thought that more streaming services and more maturity(time passed) meant this situation would be improving - not degrading.

This is less than ideal, but it works for now.

I guess Vinyl is the only way to go for true security-minded individuals.

Turns out Spotify invalidated her as part of my family plan and asked me to add her again. Cool.... I go to the config to add her and Spotify asks for her address and does not let me add her when putting her/my address... I don't remember what address did I enter when I opened spotify more than 5 years ago, and the stupid thing does not let you see your address (like, 1 field in a database, how hard is that?)

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/How-can-I-check-my...

Needless to say, I cancelled Spotify Family premium and went to Google Play Family plan. Great deal if you tell me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19109437

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118498

That felt pretty hostile when it happened to me.

Feels great flying the black flag again with Plex.

weird, I just upp-ed the screen limit after 6 years because there are so many awesome new things that my wife and I want to watch independently.

I keep reading this and wonder how much TV watching do people do daily? Netflix already has more content than I will ever get to with just the back catalog of TV shows and originals. It does not even count movies.

For movies, criterion collection is coming out with a streaming service, if that's your thing. I don't have netflix but I will have that.

If you can buy them in a place with good credit card rewards percentage on the gift card it's even lower.

I'm not sure if they'd satisfy these requirements, but I generally open paid Hulu more than I do Netflix. Google Play Music seems to cover everything Spotify does and there is no free option (so there are never ads), but it's Google, so it could go the way of Reader at any point.

Well, it was nice knowing you Spotify.

I mean, they're pushing things to your device at your request, because you logged on to use their free service. If you don't want them to push ads to your device, they were kind enough to offer you a paid option where they won't do that.

But to see these opportunities, the first step is to not have a hostile attitude towards your users.

Fuck you, Pay me

Sadly, you don't have that anymore with today's economy-of-scale effects.

Spotify doesn't have any kind of lock on music. The Apple fans are all using Apple Music, after all, and there's lot of other choices out there. Ditching Spotify isn't going to affect your life or digital device using in any significant way.

I heard about Spotify through a musically-minded, but not technical, friend. I joined because of their insistence that it was a good service 3+ years ago.

Today, they complain about the desktop client and ads. I no longer use Spotify.

I'd challenge this because they can convert to paid users or advertise the service via word of mouth, or probably provide other value as well (user data, listening habits, etc.).

However, even if these users have zero value to Spotify, then why terminate them? Spotify is getting some negative press over it, so it seems like a net loss for them...

When I go to a restaurant and eat without paying, why do they kick me out?

If you buy into the system you are more dependant on it than just going another route and you end up not giving a damn about Spotify

This is why I started blocking ads at the network level last year, after resisting blocking them at all for so long before that. A number of popular sites (imgur.com being the worst offender, but certainly not the only one) hosting adverts that attempted drive-by downloads, tried to access cameras or microphones (luckily caught by permissions blocks elsewhere), played obnoxious loud audio, played high-res bandwidth chewing video, opened pop-ups or pop-unders, and so forth.

Serve the adverts from your own domains and agree to take responsibility for any damage done by code/other served from your domains, and we can talk. Otherwise: no ads. Ban me from your site or application for that if you wish.

On a data connection redirected me to my ISP's game shop that apparently lets me buy crappy games for I don't know what with one click via phone bill.

Multiple redirects to a website that claims my phone is infected while maxing out the CPU and triggering permanent vibration.

Not that I have ever used Spotify, but that would be how I would defend it. If I did, I would just move on since my account would soon be suspended.

So how does Spotify defend running potentially malicious ads from 3rd party providers on end-user systems? Do they even vet those ads? Are they even aware of what code will be running on users computers that they are serving via the ad frameworks?

We are talking about people who use ad-blockers to get a “premium” experience while using free, unpaid accounts.

Basically leeches undermining everyone else.

I see no issue with Spotify terminating these accounts. Even as someone using an ad-blocker. Because I pay for the freaking service I use.

However, they do seem to include ads in their podcasts for all users. So it's not quite that simple.

I wonder if the ad industry is onboard with HTTPS yet? In 2013 when I was last looking at ads as an attack vector, none did, and many executed JS, or gave privileged access to system APIs on device via JS, which meant that it was fairly trivial to intercept ad delivery, return malicious JS, open a "reverse JS shell" and poke about the filesystem in the app, open new screens, etc, all remotely.

I reported this as a vulnerability in several apps, telling them that HTTPS was an important aspect of preventing this, and was told that ad networks were against HTTPS and therefore they had to find alternative mitigations.

Especially when piracy is so much easier than getting your account suspended for using an adblocker.

Setting aside the possibility of malware for a second, would you have taken spotify/pandora with ads back then?