The movie and TV industry have instead put great effort into building services that are significantly worse than piracy.
And nobody can understand why movie piracy is still rampant, while music piracy is receding.
Can you imagine a music industry where, in order to listen to new releases, you are required to go to "listening parlours", or wait for radio, CD, streaming release|?
They no longer listen to customer feedback. Their categorization and search get worse by the day. They refuse to add an option to disable the autoplay previews that no one likes.
That'd all be ok, albeit disappointing, if they were still charging $8 a month. But they keep raising prices like Comcast or AT&T each year while the quality declines or stagnates.
(1) Start as a service provider, brokering sales from legacy producers who don't yet have distribution through this new market, (2) pivot to original supply, as legacy producers recognize how much money stands to be made and stand up their own distribution channels, (3, optimistic case) become so large that producers are forced to renegotiate with you, from a weaker position, because they must have distribution on your platform.
I don't think they're going to corner the market like Amazon or Apple did, as they lack the moats (respectively a hyperscale logistics system and first party hardware).
I'm kind of surprised Netflix isn't cross-licensing their back catalog to alternate channels. E.g. trading rebroadcast rights to the first season of Stranger Things to Comcast or a cable network in exchange for {insert popular program}.
That feels the most like an analog to Amazon Marketplace (context: remember, there was once an Amazon without third-party sellers).
https://www.polygon.com/2019/1/17/18187400/netflix-vs-fortni...
They lost all the big catalogs and deals as Fox, Disney etc. ended their licensing deals. And even though they’ve pumped billions into original content, this can’t make up for the hundreds of titles they lost.
So, the new UI is meant to make you overlook all that and make you watch Netflix original content. To quote myself [1] their selection is ridiculously tragically bad.
https://mobile.twitter.com/dmitriid/status/11204104799549931...
I'm not sure how this is the Apple playbook, unless you count podcasts (which they've never had an option to charge for) as Apple original audio content, or the upcoming Apple TV+ as a 15 year gap between selling third party video content and providing their own.
And I cannot begin to fathom why.
Fortunately, there is flixable.com for Netflix browsing. But why doesn't Netflix itself do that? IDK.
You aren't wrong though.
It will only cost you a 35000 dollar setup fee and 500 dollar to watch a movie.
The movie industry goal is to improve box office, not your experience, but these two are linked.
Music - Tidal covers about >95% of my music consumption.
TV shows - I have netflix and and prime, these cover maybe 75% of my tv consumption.
Films - Going to the cinema covers 10-20% maybe? I go to the cinema about 5-10 times a year and I pirate the rest because I don't have a good enough service to get those from legally.
I disagree. As a listener, Bandcamp and Soundcloud fulfill my needs better. Artists are more willing to put their work on those services than they are with Spotify, and it's entirely understandable. With Bandcamp, there is a link to buy albums at their asking price while listening. Spotify listens will pay out fractions of a penny. The result is that other platforms will have new music that suits my tastes, and I will be lucky if rights holders will put the same content on Spotify within the next 5 years.
Now I'm stuck paying for all the music I've been paying for again. Or something else...
That's the beauty of the services: they have to compete with free and to do that they have to provide a superior enough experience to the user. If that ends, the music industry is the loser.
I don't like spotify and similar services, and try to buy my favorite music online if I can, but invariably am forced to torrents because it's hard to get where I am.
I'm amazed the music and movie business is finding it so hard to adapt.
It's also easier for me to move to different devices, because all I have to do is sign into Spotify. Manually transferring songs like I used to with an iPod is something I don't want to have to go back to.
> Manually transferring songs like I used to with an iPod is something I don't want to have to go back to.
A minor price to pay for not being tethered to an inferior proprietary music player.
Reporting listening statistics for royalty payouts.
Spotify started off great but is now a total ripoff to artists since it got in bed with the major labels, trading stock for a larger cut of ad and subscription revenue.
You aren't any better for using Spotify and not torrenting. Make sure to support your favorite artists when they perform near you, and buy merch. Support small-time and local artists. That is the best thing you can do for the music industry.
Example first pressings I have in flac: velvet underground, the doors, led zeppelin, etc
FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content.
You seem to have misunderstood FLAC with the sample rate / bit depth of a file. The vast majority of FLAC files are regular old 16 bit 44.1 kHz, and nobody is claiming that 24 bit 192 kHz (or whatever) files are better.
FLAC is a codec: simply a way to take all the audio on a CD and have it preserved indefinitely, without "generational" loss (where a mp3 is encoded from another mp3, and so on).
So a correctly encoded FLAC file will be using CD quality audio or better. (CD audio is transparent when correctly encoded in 100% of cases.) FLAC is just a way to reduce the file size of that raw CD data by about 50%.
Lossy codecs like mp3 and AAC (the codec usually found in the m4a container) are also tuned to compress music, but they do so by throwing away a some of the original information. When this is done correctly it should still be transparent to the original the vast majority of the time. No one, not even an "audiophile", can tell the difference under any listening conditions. For mp3 (depending on encoder), the bitrate that achieves transparency is about 256 kbits/sec, though there are so-called "killer samples" that can break certain encoders at that bitrate. AAC (again, depending on encoder) is transparent closer to 192 kbits/sec. The state of the art has advanced remarkably since either were released: Opus is transparent in the vast majority of cases all the way down to 128 kbits / sec, and still sounds great at bitrates below that.
The problem is that just seeing the file extension gives you no guarantees about what the bitrate is. A 128 kbits/sec mp3 is going to sound like mush on a good system. If you convert that mp3 to FLAC it's still going to sound like mush, because you're using a lossy source. But a FLAC made from a CD will sound much better, as will a 320 kbits/sec mp3.
So if all you care about is transparency, getting 320 kbits/sec mp3s or 128 kbits/sec Opus files is probably good enough for you. The issue with "generational loss" I was referring to is when a lossy file is used as a source for another lossy encode. This is kind of like saving a file as a jpeg twice: you always lose more than just saving it once, even if the "quality" setting in the encoder is the same. Plus if you convert an AAC file to mp3, there's an even worse problem, which is that the different codecs try to compress the file in slightly different ways, which can lead to unexpected interactions and sometimes end up sounding like crap.
The point of keeping around a FLAC file is that you have a permanent archive of what was on the CD, and you have a source that you can use to make future lossy encodes from without the generational loss problem. All my albums are ripped to FLAC, but from those FLAC files I encode Opus files that are small enough to take with me on my phone.
It’s just a codec. It makes it smaller.
Unless you mean “lossy” by “traditional”, in which case, yes, lossless codecs have a lot of benefit over lossy ones.
A perfect example is when sampling or beatmixing; if the final product will be played on youtube or streamed on digital radio or compressed lossily in any form, you will have incurred two lossy compression steps if your source material is lossy. This is akin to subsequent generations of dubbing analog media; the quality degrades quickly with each generation.
I have hundreds of albums bought and ripped to flac on my NAS server. They take about 300 GB out of the 40something terabytes available. I have real rarities stored in there and I pay about 1 euro a month for the cloud backup.
> FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content
Yes it does. It’s anywhere from 70-30% the size depending on genre. That’s a benefit.
> you might think that FLAC/lossless is audibly better.
No I think and expect it to sound audibly identical. That’s the whole point.
My own take for getting surprised is to check out (usually) European jazz radio stations on internet radio.
foobar2000 handles my multi-TB library just fine, with very fast searching and playlist creation capabilities.
AirSonic provides streaming on the go, with a "Random Album" list which is an amazing way to explore your library.
That’s funny. I have much less music locally and that’s why I like listening to it over streaming services.
The cloud may have terabytes and terabytes of all kinds of music, but 99.99% of that does nothing for me.
The music I have purchased and curated locally is my collection and I know I like everything there. It’s a guaranteed 100% match.
I use cloud streaming only to discover new acts and albums, and then it’s right back to Plex.
I’m not using local stuff for discovering new music. That’s what’s the internet is for.
I have mpd+emms set up with an always on emms playlist window and dedicated dired window for my music collection.
I can't say the same for my book collection though. I tried calibre but didn't like it. Been experimenting with some custom scripts that work but are in dire need of indexing and optimization.
When I was a teenager (20 years ago), this wasn't possible and we torrented whole albums like hell. Some people got in jail back then, or had to pay huge fines for "unrealized profits", which was absurd.
Blame your publishers and companies you sell your rights to: Warner Music, Sony etc. They demand up to 70% of revenue from “the likes of Spotify” in royalties.
Does that count as piracy?
Another angle that's nice about youtube are all the digitized LPs. An awful lot of music never made the jump to CD, I remember how huge the jazz album bins used to be at some record stores.
...and I've also noticed the content ID system still detects them, but they probably remain because the IP holders are content to monetise those videos and reap the profits rather than getting them taken down (and earning nothing.) That turns the question into "is adblocking piracy?" and that's a whole different can of worms...
It's been a godsend for me in locations with extremely slow or intermittent connections.
P2P
Spotify just makes it so easy– click on "offline download", boom, done.
this is not entirely true; musicians also earn a significant amount of money based on how many times their songs are played on streaming services like Spotify.
Hasan Minhaj had a bit about this in Patriot Act, explaining that this is the reason artists like Li'l Pump are releasing albums with dozens of two-minute songs—shorter tracks means more plays means more $$.
What this means, and what trips me out about using Spotify (or even YouTube), is that I literally can't listen to music on their platform without putting money in someone's pocket. Great for artists I love, sad for cultural curiosities I want to understand but decidedly don't want to support, like Li'l Pump or Chris Brown.
make 60k/year in concerts and you'll live without problems in a country like Italy.
It looks like a lot, but it means 150 shows/year at around 400 euros each + expenses (mainly gas, road tolls, some lunch on the road - sleeping, eating and drinking are provided by the promoter or the venue).
I've worked with bands that played more than 200 shows/year that earned around 5k + merchandise per show.
They payed me 100 bucks per gig, just to sell their merchandise.
Provided it becomes a real job and you have to work hard to keep it going, it's totally doable.
This is a funny topic for me, I've always been a super music fan, but never played any instrument.
I've been more a "roadie" than just a merchandiser, I mean that I was with them all the time, loading, unloading, driving and helping out.
Sometimes I've also acted as tour manager, but only in venues we already knew.
Most of the largest shows have been with an Italian band throughout Italy, production was in the medium range, going between a few hundreds to thousands of people (less than 5 thousands).
Many of the smaller ones were in Europe, with american bands, where it usually was in the hundreds in undeground clubs - there 's a large variety of them in Europe, you can find the youth center in Switzerland that has hotel's level accomodations and the squat in east Germany where you sleep on the floor in the cold. But it's a good network to get a lot of shows close to each other, so you don't have to drive much and everyone is kind.
We've also been playing to many festivals: from desert fest to duna jam, from freak valley to roadburn, from up in smoke to hellfest. It's another great way to make connections and meet the bands.
I'm especially fond of what's called stoner rock (I prefer the name desert rock though) and I've toured a lot with bands from the Rome based Heavy Psych Sounds label.
I've been doing it for about 5 years, then the main band I was following took a sabbatical and I went back into tech as a programmer (my day to day job since 1997)
It's been the best part of my life, and, as crazy it might sound, the time of my life when I saved the most: I didn't have to pay for food, drinks, traveling or going to concerts, which basically is where most of my finances went anyway...
I had to pay the mortgage on my house, but if I was renting, I could have saved on that as well.
Best and worst memory is opening to Eagles of Death Metal in Milan, where I've spent the night smoking pot with Dave Catching, founder of Rancho de La Luna and one of my heroes.
I've also shared the merch booth with Nic, their merchandiser, that few days later was tragically killed in the Bataclan massacre.
TL;DR: I got to do it as a job just by answering "yes" to "we need a driver for this one date, are you interested?". I've been reliable so they kept calling me and I ended up being part of the crew, without even noticing.
And a night with Dave Catching sounds rad. I don't know how that could be a worst memory.
Is your estimate of ~150 annual shows being enough for a comfortable lifestyle meant to generally apply to overseas shows for American bands, or do you think the payout is more or less on par with ~150 domestic shows?
Many bands I know come here touring for at least a month, and when they're away rent their apartments or rooms back home because life here in Europe is cheaper, especially when touring, especially south or east.
Some of them moved here, to Berlin or Barcelona, some even moved here in Italy, I know of a band that moved in Sicily, on the Ortigia peninsula in Syracuse.
Depending on the cachet, 150 shows are enough to make a living and generally an overseas band have that exotic vibe that brings more people to the shows.
I can't make a comparison with the same number of shows in US, I've never toured that much in the States, but according to what bands said to me, touring US is harder, you have to drive a lot more and accommodations are usually worse (no food or drinks, sleep on a floor or in the van, hundreds of miles before reaching the next city) while Europe is easier.
if you plan your tours carefully and make the right connection, there's a good number of clubs that can guarantee packed shows and/or just a place to play and sleep on slow work days.
For stoner Germany, Sweden and somewhat Switzerland (they offer more than the average, be aware there's still customs in and out) are the best places in continental Europe.
A good way to do it is contact an european band or label and ask for advices. There are services that rent you the van for cheap directly in the airport, a good place is Belgium because it's exactly in the middle of EU, or they can provide you a communication channel with venues and/or services that rent backlines and stuff.
Last, but not least: be very careful with the gear, there have been numerous cases of stolen backlines, it would completely ruin the hard work (and the fun) you were putting in the tour.
Spotify is different however in that the cut artists get out of their streaming revenue is very insignificant compared to the slice that their record labels and Spotify are getting. I think it's important to keep this in mind. Spotify is negative force in the industry.
> sad for cultural curiosities I want to understand but decidedly don't want to support, like Li'l Pump or Chris Brown.
I don't think you should be concerned over the fraction of a cent you helped generate for Lil Pump.
the (overwhelmingly) vast majority of artists on Spotify see pennies.
you can be certain that you're not supporting anyone that kinda needs the money.
That's not the case. Dead artists do concerts. Artists that never physically existed do concerts. You could have a Steven Hawking concert now and people would pay for the tickets if music was good.
Also could you give examples of popular disabled artists that can’t perform on stage?
Because I don’t think I or anyone I know could list a single example.
Maybe they weren't 'disabled' but they had their reasons for not wanting to tour.
Economies change. Everybody has to adapt and do work that people will pay for. In music, increasingly, that means performing live.
There might be other options too. Crowdfunding new albums, maybe. Merchandising. The more we accept the new reality, the more we'll figure out.
Also, this argument discounts second order effects. Who knows what new innovations might be brought on by the need to find an alternate revenue source.
All your examples are the top of the top - most artists can't afford to not tour.
Software developers seem to be the first to adapt: you can't pirate a SaaS or a cloud. One can try and copy it, but will be always behind the first moved and the original creator, because they always seem to have good ideas.
Equating IP with real estate is bad for the society: why would someone keep producing and keep performing if they made a hit with a song, or a movie, or a game?