What I would like is a rent-on-demand method. Xbox almost gets this right: they have plenty of titles you can rent for up to 24 hours. You typically pay between 3 - 6 dollars per film. More recent films are more expensive. However, I would like to see the cost go down, especially for older titles. Basically match any Redbox prices (1-2 dollars), and provide a way for me to stream it on-demand.
Have you tried Youtube? They have a pretty extensive catalog of rent-on-demand movies, and I rarely find a mainstream movie that I want to watch, that isn't in their catalog. Most of them range between $2.99 / $5.99 or so, with really recent releases going higher, and the rare oddball title that's $14.99 or something (presumably because that's what the rights-holder demanded?)
That was what fueled their move towards producing original content -- they knew they wouldn't be able to license third party content for much longer, and they needed to have something people would want to watch when that day came. They've explicitly said they see their future as being the next HBO, where what draws subscribers is access to Netflix-original content you can't get anywhere else rather than access to a deep catalog of content from lots of different sources.
> Basically match any Redbox prices (1-2 dollars)
Redbox has the same advantage that Netflix had back when they were shipping discs by mail, namely that discs are a physical artifact and thus subject to the first sale doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine), which says that the seller of a physical good can't put artificial restrictions on what the buyer of that artifact does with it after they buy it. As long as copyright holders sell movies and such on discs priced for everyday consumers, services like Redbox can also buy those discs at the same low price and then rent them out to people, and the copyright holders can't impose a post-sale restriction to stop them. They sold the disc, once they took the money they lost the right to say what it could be used for.
Stream the same movie instead of delivering it on disc, though, and now since there's no transfer of ownership of a physical artifact, the first sale doctrine no longer applies. Anyone who wants to stream that movie has to negotiate separate streaming rights with the copyright holder; the copyright holder is free to demand however much it wants to as part of that negotiation; and if that price is too rich, the would-be streamer doesn't have the option to just buy a bunch of licenses on the consumer market the way they would with discs. Their only options are to pay what the copyright holder demands, or not carry the title. So
All of which means that streaming services will always be at a severe disadvantage price-wise to services that rent out physical media -- even before you start factoring in the cost of all the infrastructure needed to stream video reliably to a global audience.
FWIW, Netflix has had a scattered selection of The Dark Knight and Lord of the Rings off-and-on recently. I guess that might be your point, though…
Or aren't interested in supporting closed corporations that benefit financially more than the artists who produced the music in the first place. It's a predatory system trying to get grandfathered in from the (g)olden music industry days, and to be fair involves bigger fish than streaming services (labels, promoters, etc.).
I'd provide a counter argument putting blame on artists: those who aren't selling and promoting themselves via a personal website or websites like Bandcamp probably aren't that interested in monetizing their music career.
As someone still paying monthly subscriptions to streaming services, I've recently begun to purchase more DRM-free music in lossless format. I get the best possible quality of audio, directly support the artist (or more directly than via streaming), and I get to keep the music indefinitely, as long as I can manage the storage requirements. It's not cheap nor easy, but I believe it's the fair approach for consuming music, and look forward to the day I disable my streaming subscriptions.
This is why I love Bandcamp. Lossless format for my good stereo at home, mp3's for my car, and streaming when I'm at work.
There is a whole class of people who are content listening to whatever is on the radio or the same 20 year old CD's they've had forever without ever seeking new music or even knowing what's playing. That's really what I meant by people without paid subscriptions not caring.
I prefer the subscription model. I rarely get hooked on an album, but when I do, I'll listen to it on repeat for 1- a few months - and then I'll might not ever listen to it much again. These albums might be the only ones that make sense for me to buy (and even though, maybe not - I might hate it in 3 months - but let's consider the expense like a circus ticket or something, pay to experience pleasure).
On the other hand, a bunch of the stuff I hear on Spotify, I never seek again, it's just background noise. Sometimes this turns into a relationship and they win a fan, sometimes they don't.
The best way to support artists is by attending shows.
I have been hooked on Mac Miller's album Swimming for the past few weeks. Sadly, he passed, but he's the first artist I've ordered merch for, maybe ever, because I liked the album so much. Highly recommended. Start on track one and play through.
Sorry I just don't buy into the spotify/applemusic/etc life. I adore music, but my first step is usually supporting the artist directly via bandcamp when possible. Luckily a huge amount of artists I follow have bandcamp pages. It's not as direct as going to a show and buying merch/albums there, but I don't get a lot of shows near me for the genre's I prefer.
Or we run our own media streaming setup rather than pay Spotify $10/month. Spotify gives the illusion of supporting artists but the artists you listen to will never see a significant amount of money from your subscription fee.
I've downloaded thousands of albums over the years and have my own music library. Why should I pay Spotify for doing the same thing? This is literally how they seeded their library when they started out.
I have since mainly moved from torrenting to buying vinyl and using Bandcamp like others here have mentioned. I still see artists tour on occasion, but I'm not convinced that touring is sustainable for musicians, so I'd rather buy the album.
It's sad to me that so many have bought the lie that Spotify et al have pushed. They are no different from the music labels.
DIY 'til I die.
I don't know what your impression of Spotify is, but it seems quite different than mine. When I think Spotify, I think Discover Weekly, awesome machine learning that finds artists similar to whatever I was listening to every time I listen to an album / artist all the way through, often finding me new favorites, well made apps that integrate nicely between my iPhone / Mac desktop app - I can easily resume something on a different player. This seems like it's getting smarter. I don't really use it the way I used to use Foobar / Winamp / iTunes - but I probably abuse it. I create playlists for whatever I'm listening to lately, and just access those. I don't want to scroll 2000 artists in my library.
Downsides I've experienced - not many: - quality not quite as good as Apple Music or Tidal ( and definitely not as good as FLAC, lol ). This isn't really a problem for me unless I A/B something. Sometimes the library is missing something. These songs are probably not available from competitors either. - Lyrics view? WTH guys seriously, this was good at first and now it only occasionally shows "Behind the music with Genius'... assuming this is licensing problems but if you can work out streaming rights, can't you work out lyric sheet rights? - That might actually be all of them.
Buying vinyl is cool but I'll never listen to it. Inconvenient. It's a cool souvenir.
I used to have a big FLAC library. Somewhere along the road, it was lost, along with many other digital heirlooms.
This is absurd from my perspective; to go from the wealth of music created through history and countries available on what.cd such as the bootleg recordings of live music in a small Cairo bar to the limited and commercialized selection of what's on Spotify (and I do have experience with it), along with the fact you no longer "own" (in an informal sense) the music.
Music on the periphery, older releases and things people may not want to listen to are my lifeblood. I couldn't imagine being only able to access Spotify. It works for you and that's good - but for me (and I imagine quite a few other music enthusiasts) it's a totally different situation. Often if it's not on Soulseek or a torrent tracker then the only way for me to obtain it is through buying a physical copy, maybe from an online collector's marketplace like Discogs.
I might throw in an endorsement of the very new things one can find on Bandcamp too - I've profited greatly from that variety.
I am a (hobbyist) musician and producer and my focuses have definitely narrowed inward the past several years. I wouldn't consider myself someone who listens to a lot of new music all the time and a bunch of unknown stuff. (but) I listen to more than most people - last.fm puts me at about 75-78% on number of artists, tracks, and albums listened to. Usually I jam an artist for a few months and learn all of their discography and when I am burnt out I move on. Sometimes I hit a dead patch and don't find a new artist that I love for a while.
The last albums (artists) I fell in love with were (mentioned in earlier comment) Mac Miller - Swimming, Caroline Rose - LONER, Kanye West - Life of Pablo. But really, I fell in love with these artists, and I like their earlier works as much as their more recent work, even when its much different.
I love Spotify too! But it is a perfect example of how copyright law gatekeeps the creative media we can consume, for reasons purely inherent to the system and not attributable to any individual's malice. Nobody set out to create an ubiquitous streaming service that's missing music people could love, it's simply impossible to create something else legally.
Ugh, now that I am actually making music I wish I had access to what.cd. When I was using it all I really wanted was the best FLAC / best master of a nice Vinyl I could find.
I live in one of the poorer countries. I know not a single person with a paid subscription of any kind.
qBittorrent with an RSS feed is miles ahead of any paid offer anyway.
I'm sorry :/
So if everyone decided to torrent, there won't be a market.
Very very rarely does a movie not make money. Even flops make money years after release. The latest avengers movie cost 356m to make, including everyone's salary on the film. It made the studios 2.63 billion. There is no investment in the world that can give you that kind of return. Was that 2.3b in profit split among the cast and crew? Absolutely not. It was feasted upon by the executives of walt disney, those poor deserving souls.
Honestly I couldn't care less if Hollywood goes away with it's predictable formulaic cookie cutter focus-group movies.
It would be nice to see more movies where a director has an actual artistic vision and sees it through.
You don't need a billion dollars to make a movie with a good story, developed characters and good acting.
Look, if the companies are willing to look into a minimum wage and median salary when crafting prices for different countries, we might be easily convinced.
Do you know how much stuff you have available in Netflix? Now imagine having a choice between pirating and paying the same price as you do in a developed country for like 30% of the US catalogue. All that while earning much, much less.
Most people working a full time job barely have free time.
At the same time you talk about pirating so you feel entitled to have the fruit of other people's labour whilst saying it has no value. Gleeful in your hypocrisy.
Why are you on this website to discuss technology? Most things made are pointless rubbish going off your definition.
What do you do for a living that in your opinion is actually worth money?
Compare with video where the market is fragmenting beyond repair and I get asked to pirate things for family and friends several times a week. In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too.
I hope more of these near-zero margin goods will go the cheap subscription route in the future. It makes this a much simpler time for consumers. Right now, I don't know what service even has a given TV show so it's easier to just click the button in Sonarr and watch it show up on my NAS a few minutes later.
Haven't they, though? In mobile, free-to-play model has solved most of the friction. For PC/console, Steam and Origin are doing a good job too. Most games on Steam cost less than $50, and that's weeks if not many months of entertainment.
Not really, this model is pretty awful as it creates motivations for developers to make the game repetitive or overly difficult in order to convince people to pay for stuff. Just look at the recent mobile Lemmings game, they lock you out of the game with a timer, offering only temporary timer bypasses in the store. A few developers sell a simple "get out of bullshit and ads pass" which does solve it though.
Overall though in the mobile world this hasn't been an issue as the expectation of prices for paid games is far lower.
> Most games on Steam cost less than $50
AAA titles are still $60 and in recent years often include "season passes" and similar, doubling their costs.
> that's weeks if not many months of entertainment.
I get over 50 hours out of probably 1/20 games.
So overall, I'd say far from solved still. Origin has attempted a subscription model but it's expensive and offers only trials of recent releases and significantly older titles. Humble Bundle actually has a decent subscription service going on, but it's not on the sort of "all access" model you get with music or movies.
Perhaps streaming game services will change this, but I do worry that they're a move in the wrong direction in other ways.
Things youtube don't have (I am french and I know that a lot of french punk/rock/metal I like is not easily found) Spotify is unlikely to have either.
Opus is transparent at that rate. Heck it's virtually transparent at 96 kbps, and does a great job at 64 kbps.
audio only DASH audio 53k , opus @ 50k, 1.01MiB
audio only DASH audio 69k , opus @ 70k, 1.34MiB
audio only DASH audio 130k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.2@128k, 2.63MiB
audio only DASH audio 136k , vorbis@128k, 2.59MiB
audio only DASH audio 140k , opus @160k, 2.69MiB
Seems pretty decent to me.
Newpipe also has the ability to download music for offline listening as well, that's a pretty good backup plan
.. or find that the endless-firehose model doesn't suit them? I honestly just prefer to buy one album (either CD or digital download) or so per month. The affordances of that encourage me to choose carefully and listen with attention rather than vaguely skim. I'd rather get to know a few things well than lots superficially. It's a bit like web-skimming vs reading books. Of course you can read long form on the web, just as you can get to know bodies of music well on Spotify et al, but it's going against the grain.
[Edit: in fact on reflection, my view is almost the opposite to yours: streaming subscriptions suit a listening habit not that interested in music per se, that desires ongoing background novelty]
With video, its awful. Networks and production companies are all to eager to cancel licenses and pull their content off of a service. The golden goose is that every network and production has their own service that they milk customers for $9.99 a month for (like Disney's B.S.). The end result is instead of you paying $100 a month for cable, you are paying $100 a month for 10 different services to get the same coverage. Back to piracy it is.
I'm very interested in music but I won't pay for low-quality streaming and music I've paid for that could disappear at any time or be geoblocked.
If it's not DRM-free FLAC that I can easily convert to MP3 for the car/portable player, or whatever format I may choose in the future, then I'm not paying for it.
Just the lock-in currently enjoyed by the companies that own the MPAA and RIAA. If all the work is done on a digital platform and can be published to a dozen websites with a few clicks, their traditional distribution arrangements hold less value.
I say own even though legally that’s not accurate. The studios effectively control MPAA/RIAA talking points. Those two groups exist to make lobbying for studio interests more economical. Again, the elite get what the labor class does not: unions.
I digress.
I grew up torrenting and was a proud member of what.cd when that tracker was still alive.
These days I listen to nearly all of my music on paid Spotify subscriptions. The number of people who have access to either Spotify, Amazon Prime, or Apple Music subscriptions must be huge. Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.
Video is a different beast, but I do like Netflix. Torrents live on for new releases and less available content, though.