Ubisoft should get more comfortable with losing any significance they had in the industry. Compared to others in the rest of the industry they are small potatoes. They definitely don’t hold enough power to force a subscription service on to the market. Their market cap is less then $3 billion even Zynga is worth more.
It doesn't make a difference. He still wants you to get comfortable with that. It doesn't matter how he dresses up his sentences his thought process is the same, thats how he got to CEO.
The point of the dishonest article is to make you believe the CEO feels entitled to gamers becoming OK with subscription models. What he actually feels is a hope that subscription models will take off. It's rage-bait. Did it work?
...you believe the CEO feels entitled to gamers becoming OK with subscription models. What he actually feels is a hope that subscription models will take off
That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
People keep pointing this out like it's some kind of misinformation.
The Ubisoft executive is saying gamers need to get comfortable not owning their games before subscription services will take off.
The Ubisoft executive would also very much like subscription services to take off.
QED the Ubisoft executive is saying "I'd really like gamers to get used to idea of not owning their games so our subscription service can take off".
It comes back to the same thing: Ubisoft is saying aloud what they want the future of gaming to be.
And please don't tell me you're giving them the benefit of the doubt, here.
The problem is people apparently haven't figured out yet how to read what the CEO of a for-profit company means when they say shit publicly about their services. Learn to read between the lines.
There's a mile of difference between saying "consumers need to get comfortable not owning their games" and "we want consumers to get comfortable not owning their games (but using subscription services instead)".
The former statement is extremely arrogant. The latter is just obvious. And it's reasonable even if you or I personally don't want to get our games on a subscription model - millions of people get their music through Spotify and it suits them just fine even though other people don't want that. So it's a way of straw-manning the people pushing subscriptions so you can hate them.
Ubisoft should get comfortable with the idea of going out of business. I refuse to buy anything of theirs or interact with their shit launcher. Bad practices and bad products combined mean bankruptcy and i hope it happens soon so decent companies can get ahold of their IPs and make some good games out of them because Ubisoft is clearly not interested in doing so
The saying comes from an opinion piece that was sponsored by the WEF.
You can read more about it on the Wikipedia page.
The article presented a future where the climate problem was fixed because the entire economy was based on services instead of the production of goods.
It certainly has some elements that could work, but also has relied heavily on the neoliberal “the market will fix it” mentality.
Are streaming services that different from cable TV? You're paying for access to new content. If you want specific content to own, don't they all let you buy them? I know I was able to buy GoT discs when I wasn't willing to pay for an HBO subscription. Has that changed?
yup, the very popular stuff you can usually (but not always) buy on disk. the less popular stuff you can sometimes (but not often) buy on disk if the creator really pushes for it
Difference is that most games made anymore are online access dependent even if they aren’t dedicated multiplayer only games. What happens when subscriptions get so low that upkeep is unprofitable? You lose access to a game that you’ve paid a lot of money for, for no good reason as online isn’t necessary but the studios rarely patch it out at game sunset
3 of those are services. Most subscription shit we see these days are products that they want us to treat like services even though there is no on going consumption. All of these software subscription services are just grifts.
Furthermore, Costco employees will never push you to get the executive membership, if your previous year did not have enough spending on it to at least pay back the difference.
We actually had the Costco customer service Tell us to cancel our executive membership, because we didn't earn enough over the year
That's kind of what we were thinking, too, which is why we went with it. We are a family of six, which means that we're always going to buy big quantities of stuff somewhere; might as well be at Costco.
As everyone else here, I think piracy is illegal and immoral. We should accept that we don't own our services and software and we should never doubt that corporations have our best interest in mind.
Therefore you should never have a Plex server, never use protonmail, never use AdGuard Home, never use AdGuard DNS for private DNS.
Also you should never use Firefox with UBlock origin sponsorblock and consent o magic.
Lastly you should never ever use re-vanced and x-manager, and God forbid don't use a VPN
a subscription to a service X is O(n), where n is for how long you keep that service.
instead purchasing the content provided by X individually, is O(m), where m is how much content you buy.
if in one subscription term, you would spend more purchasing individual content than one subscription fee to X, it is financially more efficient to use X.
however, this assumes you will only consume a piece of content once, and dont care about having a physical/true copy of it.
a O(1) scenario would be like a lifetime subscription to X.
ps: i am fully on the side of owning media, and i have no idea if this comment is actually true, it just sounds smart :-)
who is downvoting this? 😂 maybe they live in a poor country, or maybe they're making an obscure joke. Why would people go past this comment and be like "nope, fuck this person"
You're paying for the content in the case of the newspapers. It is a similar cost to print on newsprint as to run a website. It saves them no money. Most of what you are paying for is for the journalism, writing, editing, etc. Content costs money.
Exactly. The reason I cancel my subscriptions is because there’s been a nosedive in content that I enjoy, which has tipped the scales to it costing more than it’s worth to me.
I’ve moved to a Plex setup, but even then I don’t watch many shows at all. The ones I do watch are all on different platforms though, so it would be X many subscriptions just to watch the few shows I like.
Many people have no idea of the infrastructure and costs needed to run many of these servers that provide services to people.
I disagree with things like Adobe basically using it for DRM but have no issue for services that are literally serving millions of people and providing something worthwhile that the majority of the population would otherwise not know how to do on their own.
There is some nuance to it, like offering a service and then slowly creeping costs up or adding an advertisement tier and dropping everyone to that etc is crap. But in general, if they are providing a decent service then I don't really have a problem with it.
I agree that ongoing infrastructure costs money, but several years of that should be included in the original estimate and pricing for the sale of the product. Plan for the sale price being cost to make+5 years of estimated maintenance for base product+profit margin. Then extend maintenance with each DLC if any. If no dlc then offer subscription to pay for servers and other infrastructure, if subscriptions fail to cover that then sunset the product but open source the server infrastructure so the community can pay to run it if desired.
I hate people defending subscriptions. They are not required for anything other than insurance or something you guaranteed will keep, like phone contracts. If they need more money for content, release content packs and dlc. Online should not cost, especially if someone like Nintendo is using peer2peer or will shut down the online servers anyways at some point.
Paying with your money and your data is more likely. The issue is not subscriptions imo either. It is getting sucked into megacorp schemes that will destroy competition with cheap prices and then enshittify and or raise prises once there is no alternative. Oh, and influence legislators to make competition illegal (youtube got big on copyright infringement).
Therefore I reduce megacorp stuff. I shop local, watch my dvds and started buying music again.
They can fuck off. So can everyone who has this neat reason why resistance to megacorps is futile.
Sure, I too would prefer to pay with money instead of data. But that's a false dichotomy. Many of the services that require subscription also collect your data. Whereas offline local solutions do not collect your data. There are things were you pay with money and data, there are things where you pay with just money, or just data, and there are things where you don't pay at all. So it isn't really a 'both sides' issue.
Thats true, and as it is, its impossible to be completely rid of data harvesting services. I made the switch to proton to get out of googles mail, drive and photo solutions, the have a vpn included aswell. but yeah, I would never trust Google, Microsoft, meta or any of those to not collect data, no matter what they promise.
Subscription based service makes data harvesting much easier. Spotify can force you to connect to their server even if you downloaded your song, in the name of "verifying your subscription".
Buy the songs, buy the movie, take them offline.
That being said there are good subscription based service, like home assistant cloud, where all your communications are always E2E encrypted and cannot be seen by their server. Their subscription model is justified, as they rent their servers.
I also don't mind a subscription, if its reasonably priced and it's easy to cancel. But you could also have one time payment and all the content plus online. Elden Ring has that for example.
You shouldn't have to pay to use someone else's computer? Also there's more software than just games in the world, I don't see how loot boxes would work for google drive.
There would be SUCH a revolt from authors if publishers tried to do something to legislate libraries away that I doubt any new books would be released for decades.
Who's talking about imprisonment? I'm talking about another writer's strike, leaving publishers with nothing to publish for months or years. With their margins already razor-thin, they have to know that they'd just be done if they tried any funny business.
I love the two sides of
"It's about the price of a cup of coffee" like they're not referring to a 30oz premium milkshake with a shot of espresso, not a regular black coffee.
Then the
"Your generation can't afford anything because of your coffee addiction!"
Like companies aren't just monetizing every single last thing and telling us "you'll own nothing and you'll LIKE IT!"
Dropbox, Spotify, and a VPN are worth it: fight me.
Sure, Spotify doesn't pay artists enough and I miss having Neil Young available for streaming, but what are the other options that work well in the car? I'm not going to go back to using discs or plugging in MP3 players to the aux port, and I don't mind paying the bands directly for merch/albums if I'm really a fan. Considering I mostly listen to vinyl at home, I'm not paying Spotify for music; I'm paying Spotify for the convenience of being able to not listen to terrestrial radio and to be able to listen to what I like in the car or at work without the need for Youtube.
And my personal Dropbox account that I also use for work is well worth 15$/mo for 2TB of storage. It's saved me so much grief to be able to back up phone photos, access my work files from any computer, keep records of my personal documents, etc., and the software is both more cost effective and better designed than Google Drive or OneDrive. PDF's of my RPG books/characters/maps? Dropbox. Grocery list text file? Dropbox. Place to stash tabs/sheet music that is easily kept organized without the need for a physical copy? Dropbox. Phone number of that parent who saw my partner's car get tagged in the parking lot at school? Wait, I think I have her phone number in an spreadsheet from when I coached her daughter in tee-ball...gimme a sec...yep, it's in my Dropbox. In a side note, Dropbox may have turned me into a digital hoarder.
But the rest of this subscription-based garbage can get bent.
I recently switched from Spotify to Deezer. They offer high fidelity audio streaming which is a very noticable difference. Also, they're a bit cheaper, and you can easily move all your songs/saved playlists to Deezer
You need to be a certain kind of person to perceive audio quality difference. One, you need to be able to detect the difference. Two, you need to be able to appreciate the difference. And Three, which everyone seems to ignore, you need to have bought a sufficiently expensive device that can make the difference.
In short, if you have an $18 desktop speaker, get the FLAC outta here.
Not really. It's noticeable over Bluetooth as well, if your device supports codecs with a high enough bitrate. Obviously Bluetooth is still lossy, but listening experience is way better. The headphones I'm wearing now use aptxHD, with a bitrate of 576kbps. Spotify only offers AAC, with a bitrate of 256kbps.
As far as who can appreciate the difference, I guess? But you don't need to be a concert pianist to appreciate audio. That said, I play many instruments, so maybe I'm biased.
I'm not going to argue conjecture. I have over $10,000 in audio equipment and like I already said I play many instruments, so you're not even picking someone good to make generalizations about. Bluetooth codecs are always going to be subpar, but they're probably how most people listen to streaming services most of the time. Anything that is streaming from a PC except Bluetooth is a notable difference.
I just checked the headphones I'm wearing again, they're actually using aptx lossless with a bitrate of 1200kbps. The point is that Deezer offers the same services for less money and higher quality audio streaming.
Apparently, when Spotify does roll out hifi, it will probably be a higher paid tier. Until then, for me, Deezer is the far superior service.
It is a little pricey, but when I tried hosting my own server, it was way too much hassle (for me). Frankly, I don't mind paying Dropbox because they make the experience so fool-proof and borderline invisible.
Dropbox runs in the background and just acts like just a local folder in your Documents folder (or wherever you put it). When you save anything there, it's automatically backed up online in real-time and added to any other computers you use that have Dropbox installed. If you have too much online for some of your devices, it will use a a "shadow file" that is just a link to the online file so it takes up zero space on your other local devices while acting just like the file is already local (in terms of being able to right-click, access properties, open it from other programs, etc.). Plus, it has built in functionality for sharing files or entire folders by giving you a quick download link with just two clicks, which is great for sharing files that are too large to send via email.
Could I get all that functionality cheaper? Almost certainly. Could I find something cheaper that is also just as user-friendly? I'm open to it, but I haven't found anything yet that is close to competitive.
Have you checked out OneDrive (Microsoft)? It's what I use for school. I don't store pictures or anything, strictly school documents and random odds and ends.
I have a OneDrive account through my work, so I've used it a bit, but it doesn't seem like it handles downloads and uploads as quickly, nor keeping the right files local intuitively the way Dropbox does.
Plus, it's almost as expensive as Dropbox per TB with a personal plan, and Microsoft doesn't need any more of my money or information.
Pandora is cheaper than Spotify and arguably better at picking new and random content based on your input. But it won't play specific songs that you request like Spotify does. And Pandora works via Bluetooth, car apps, etc.
I used Pandora a ton a decade ago when there weren't really any mainstream streaming services to compete with. But as someone who listens to albums and makes my own playlists, Pandora won't cut it for me. I'm enough of a music snob that when I say I want to listen to The Stones, I want to listen to Let It Bleed front to back.
For some applications, Pandora is great, but it's not what I need.
I loved and used Pandora for a long time. It was really good at recommending songs. I quit when they started playing ads in my feed despite paying for an ad free experience. These were like voice ads for concerts or similar from artists. I contacted customer support and the response was basically “we don’t think those are ads, they are ‘special
messages’ from the artists so they aren’t going to stop.”
The problem is that I mostly use music streaming as background at work. Having a 30 second clip of some guy’s voice saying “Hey I’m Bobby from the Bobbles and we are excited to be touring in your area next month! Come check out our show for a Bobbling-Good-Time!” is very disruptive in the same way an ad for anything else is. They were clear that they weren’t going to stop so I walked away.
I can't speak to that as I don't use any of the recommended playlists. It's pretty easy to avoid artists you don't like if you make your own playlists or pick your own music
Agreed Spotify is totally worth it. I use it a lot to go on like rabbit-hole deep dives into some artist or genre or something, I use it a lot for stuff I will listen once and never again. That would be completely impossible if I was buying individual songs or albums or whatever. Paying for a nearly infinite database of music I can peruse at will following whatever random interests I have that day, that is absolutely worth the subscription fee.
It also has an absolutely terrible algorithm for recommending music in my experience. I’ve tried Apple Music several times over the past few years as I’m heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. My experience never changes. I put in a random artist like Green Day or Hans Zimmer or Gregory Alan Isakov and within 4-5 songs the station is playing hip hop or rap. No matter what genre I start with the stream always turns into hip hop or rap and it’s mostly nobody artists that aren’t good. I have some songs in those genres in my library but the majority are not. (Also if I’m starting a station with an orchestral film score it stands to reason I probably want to hear more film scores not rap.)
All I can say is I’m glad I haven’t had the same experience. Not huge into rap or hip-hop and have never had them come up. It seems pretty good at recommending new songs to me. Not sure if it uses my current library or my searches but I’ve been happy with it.
Tfw I paid for a subscription to access my textbook this semester.
Granted, it's not just a textbook. My Spanish classes use VHL Central, which includes a textbook with videos, audio files, virtually endless practice assignments, and pretty much all of our assignments and course material.
It's a really great tool, I guess I just wish I could keep access to it after I graduated. (I think you can purchase a textbook, but definitely not the full program.) Ah, well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That kind of model is unfortunately common for university courses. I had it for my language courses, and a couple of the core maths courses.
The online platform justifies a subscription by providing additional resources, homework grading, etc. Fair enough, honestly, if they want to charge you $15 or something reasonable. But when textbook access gets rolled into the bundle, it tends to inflate the subscription cost and also have the convenient-for-the-publisher side effect of temporary access to the text. Lose-lose, from a student perspective.
I had a course that required we buy a license to Pearson's service in order to submit homework. $100+ to view a pdf for a semester and submit homework through a buggy form interface. I still hold a grudge against everyone in the department for that decision.
With that model the company can afford to offer far more content than with a pay-once model. With a pay-once model they only generate enough income to be able to offer a book, and maybe a smattering of supplementary material. Go subscription-based however, revenue increases, so output increases and now they can afford to create and maintain a whole lot more while keeping the price affordable to those who need it during the period that they need it.
It's a similar principle to renting vs buying. If they were to offer all of those materials as a one-off purchase at a price that would allow their business to be sustainable, it would cost more than most are able to afford.
If we go back to one-off purchases, we go back to getting less for life as opposed to a lot for a limited period of time. It's a trade off, and clearly one that most people are willing to make.
People get so angry (OP) about the way things are just because they're unhappy in general and looking for something to blame. Not all companies are fair with their subscription models, but most are. Not every company cares about their customers, but most do. Some companies are run by sociopaths, but most are run by normal, nice people.
The only sub I use is Spotify. I share it across my friends and family and like their vast catalog. They also don't charge for their API so I can integrate it with Home Assistant.
My friends and family agree downloading songs manually sucks.
Piracy is a service issue. I have no problems with subscriptions as long as the price and service outpace piracy.
If the price gets to a point it doesn't make sense, I go back to piracy.
just installed two 18TB drives, currently working on mirroring and swapping over to new drive sets. It's a pain because i have limited sata, and need to do hotswaps unless i want to take EVERYTHING down.
It's worth it though, wouldn't catch me saying otherwise.
Know me IRL. One of these days i do intend on properly preserving a lot of the content i host somewhere, that's going to be an ordeal though. Most of it is YT content currently, considering it's mostly what i consume that shouldn't be a huge shocker.
Really though, if anything, just start your own archive and keep building it. Tailor it to your personal tastes and worry about it from there.
This is gong to sound nuts, but subscriptions aren't a problem for me, auto renewals are. I like to be in control of my finances, so whenever I sign up for something I pick a term I can live with, 1,3, 6 or 12 months, I pay, and I immediately go to the account management screen and cancel.
I don't care if it's inconvenient to have to think about it every so often, but I'm in control of the spending and to me that's what matters.
Is paying via credit card with auto renewals the only payment method companies provide you?
That's pretty bad, I'd say.
Because, considering what you are having to do RN, it means that they can simply change a policy and next time you pay, you might find out the "account management screen and cancel" becomes unavailable.
There has to be a way to pay without having to give your credit card details...
e.g. The payment gateway sends a request to your bank; your bank asks you for confirmation for one time payment; you confirm payment; the bank sends acceptance to request; payment gateway captures it and gives you your bill.
See, game pass I’m cool with because it’s an up-front transparent deal that you are buying time to access this library, and the library also changes. There is no pretense of “buying a copy” or whatever.
It’s nice for modern games anyway. For classic stuff that I want to have access to forever, I alreadty have access to that stuff forever. It might stink for the kids who are playing their “classics” right now, though.
My YouTube algorithm is just terrible. It will circle back the same 5-10 videos I have watched or liked some years ago, sprinkle in some rightwing political bullshit, or show only very tangentially related results.
Recent example: an underground artist popped into my head I used to listen to during my school days, and I wanted to go through their album for nostalgia.
Entering the artist and album name gives me two tracks from that album, a handful of other artists who have at some point collaborated, and the aforementioned unrelated or political results. Clicking through some of the videos always cycles back to the same few suggestions.
I even tried this on incognito mode to see if my login bricked the algorithm, but it was equally shitty. Apparently google can’t even get their own content indexed properly, not to mention actual web search.
On mobile i've got an app that lets me play youtube videos with the screen locked so i use that as well.
It's a bit annoying cause the app does have ads as well, but only when you open it. If you put a video on and close it (leaving it playing on the background), there's no ads
bandcamp is pretty great. Granted, they are still a for-profit company; a popular community based solution would be nice. But they do let you download lossless file to self-host or just listen on device.
The only complain is the lack of classical music (not modern/contemporary classical) on there. But I would imagine most classical music is public domain by now. I just don't know where to find them...
Spotify makes sense to have based on pure convenience. NSO is alright, but if you already emulate, there's not much point in NSO due to Switch online multiplayer being ass. Paying for Adobe is amateur hour. Dropbox? Don't make me laugh. Twitter blue is just sad.
if you want to support your favorite artist go to their concert, buy their album/merch.
I personally don't care about any of that, personally I just want convenient music in one place, if there wasn't spotify, there would just be some pirated service where artists would earn nothing. or Radio where there is no exposure for lesser artists.
so really I am not sure what kind of better solution you could come up with.
I think Strato HiDrive offers a better price per gigabyte AAAND you can add support for SMB and FTP clients at low additional costs. Barely any cloud storage provider offers this one.
Netflix and Spotify actually makes sense to be subscription based. Amazon depends on how often you do shopping through them since it's actually free (if you don't include the fees) to function. I definitely wouldn't pay for Dropbox but cloud storage and sync pretty much has to be a monthly subscription. If you are going to be against something at least be against to the parts that makes sense to be against of.
Yes, and life still works fine without them..nobody is forcing you to subscribe to Netflix. Keep paying your monthly cable subscription like the old days.
I ain't got no cable, last time we had cable i watched for 2 weeks and after that everything was just repeating what i had already seen in those 2 weeks and loads of nonsense shows.
I prefer doing things, like learning new skills or doing something active.
Honestly, if the service respects my privacy and isn't littered with ads, I don't mind paying at all. Like I wouldn't mind paying a monthly fee for services provided by Proton, for example, for email, online storage, vpn, etc. I think it's fair. There's a lot of infrastructure behind it and employees. Things don't just run by themselves for free.
But when I pay for a subscription and they publish ads as well for extra income, not only does it make my experience unpleasant, but it's incredibly greedy. And when I get charged for a service that exploits all my private data to create a user profile that can be sold and used to push targeted ads and other fake information with the goal of changing my opinion on important democratic topics, then that's when I start completely avoiding that service altogether.
I honestly just don't use these services, and never recommend them, entirely because they are subscription-based.
As a model, it is largely focused on trapping the user who forgets to cancel. Many also use sneaky ways to avoid a user cancelling in time, and give no warnings.
If a subscription would be as good as just having the file or software offline… I might even pay for it. Yes I mean including DRM-Free backups like www.gog.com
The only thing I pay for is Crunchyroll. As for me it's worth it as I get tons of stuff the watch for £5 a month and it's also pretty easy to rip anything exclusive. And then I don't feel like I'm giving nothing back to Japan when I pirate anything they don't have I want.
I also pay for a VPS, but I'd say that's renting more then it is a subscription.
I expect to use the product or functionality provided by x on a regular basis
The use of x has no added utility
The functionality and/or feature set (e.g. content) of x may degrade significantly without warning and/or recourse
Unavailability of x is likely to render it completely useless
If most of these conditions can be regularly sufficiently true, then searching an alternative that incorporates proper ownership is a good course of action.
The songs you listen to when you are listening on random are often ads. Record companies will do "pay for placement" deals to get songs and artists they promote out there.
They used to call it payola when it was on the radio and it was illegal.
My very hyperbolic point was that most of us don’t subscribe to just one service. Pretty easy to subscribe to multiple of these and others like cloud backup services, car navigation, and other media like maybe even a news service. That’s a lot of subscriptions, and companies are trying to find even more ways to make us pay subscriptions. Everything from having to pay subscriptions to have parts of your car work to computer games. My point was a sarcastic take on how much we are being forced to subscribe to if we want to participate in what constitutes “normal” things these days.
Perhaps it 'tis a silly thing. But I just want to thank whoever did the art work for drawing the stick figure guy with the shotgun as being left handed and holding a left hand shotgun.
My mental status thanks you and as another member of the Bar Sinister, I also thank you.
Funnily enough I used this gun as an asset in a scratch game. I think it's more likely they found a picture of a gun from that angle and decided to draw the person like that afterwards, I'm not a gun owner though so I don't really know what I'm talking about😜.
Fuck Amazon but it is not like the others in the meme
Amazon lets you acquire physical items, of insane variety, delivered to your door, often for a price lower than you can find it in physical stores. Often delivered same day and almost certainly same week.
That's an insane value compared to something like a game company that's like "teehee you can pretend to own this until we get bored of hosting it and then poof fuck you!"
I did the math for me and even with the Amazon credit card the service wasn't worth the price. It's free shipping over ~$25(?) dollars anyway. "Prime shipping" hasn't meant anything significant since at least 2020. It's often the same as non-prime, maybe a day earlier.
If you care about the shows that maybe changes, but they have about 5 and anytime you search for something it's a tossup whether it will be included with your subscription or only available for buy/rent or on some other platform. It's even more fun when there's 'copy' of a movie included with Prime, and another available for buy/rent and and buy/rent version is at the top of the search results and the one you already paid for access to you have to scroll to see.
Amazon is probably the worst of all of these. The only reason prime exists is to lock you into their store for all your purchases, when shipping orders should be a discrete charge for each shipment. At least the rest of these (except for Adobe and Nintendo, who suck about as hard) give you access to their infrastructure that lets you access the entirety of the product they offer instantly, whenever you have an internet connection.
No. You get to buy a shovel with faster delivery. You get the shovel, forever. Nintendo let's you "buy" a game they could sunset at any moment. You possess nothing.
Unfortunately, there isn’t really an exit plan. Buying the music outright is not worth it because of how many different artists I listen to so I will probably always be paying for Apple Music or Tidal.
It’s only 4 dollars more a month and I will have a real job to pay for it.
They aren't comparable. Autodesk is a business product, not for consumers. The product makes you money and the price for it is a business expense and tax deductible. While subscriptions to Spotify, Netflix, etc. aren't.
No, it's more comparable. AutoDesk, same as Photoshop. You used to be able to purchase it outright (at great expense, sure). Now that's not even an option, you have to subscribe monthly.
There was never a non-subscription version of Spotify.
"You will own nothing and you will be happy" - Some rich fuck
Ubisoft Says Gamers Should Get More Comfortable Not Owning Their Games
Ubisoft should get more comfortable with losing any significance they had in the industry. Compared to others in the rest of the industry they are small potatoes. They definitely don’t hold enough power to force a subscription service on to the market. Their market cap is less then $3 billion even Zynga is worth more.
Misinformation. An article not as blatantly trying to manipulate people: https://www.ign.com/articles/ubisoft-exec-says-gamers-need-to-get-comfortable-not-owning-their-games-for-subscriptions-to-take-off?utm_source=twit
Its wild the difference 5 words make for a headline
It doesn't make a difference. He still wants you to get comfortable with that. It doesn't matter how he dresses up his sentences his thought process is the same, thats how he got to CEO.
But he's not CEO. He's the director of subscriptions at ubi, so of course he's going to push this line of thinking; his job depends on it!
The good news is that Ubisoft's stock fell ~10% once this soundbite took off, so hopefully other publishers read the room
The point of the dishonest article is to make you believe the CEO feels entitled to gamers becoming OK with subscription models. What he actually feels is a hope that subscription models will take off. It's rage-bait. Did it work?
That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
As I said, I didn't read that one, but I feel like it did do something to you so probably yes.
People keep pointing this out like it's some kind of misinformation.
The Ubisoft executive is saying gamers need to get comfortable not owning their games before subscription services will take off.
The Ubisoft executive would also very much like subscription services to take off.
QED the Ubisoft executive is saying "I'd really like gamers to get used to idea of not owning their games so our subscription service can take off".
It comes back to the same thing: Ubisoft is saying aloud what they want the future of gaming to be.
And please don't tell me you're giving them the benefit of the doubt, here.
The problem is people apparently haven't figured out yet how to read what the CEO of a for-profit company means when they say shit publicly about their services. Learn to read between the lines.
There's a mile of difference between saying "consumers need to get comfortable not owning their games" and "we want consumers to get comfortable not owning their games (but using subscription services instead)".
The former statement is extremely arrogant. The latter is just obvious. And it's reasonable even if you or I personally don't want to get our games on a subscription model - millions of people get their music through Spotify and it suits them just fine even though other people don't want that. So it's a way of straw-manning the people pushing subscriptions so you can hate them.
Thanks, I just linked the first article I found assuming it would be enough to get the point across, did it say something incorrect?
Ubisoft should get comfortable with the idea of going out of business. I refuse to buy anything of theirs or interact with their shit launcher. Bad practices and bad products combined mean bankruptcy and i hope it happens soon so decent companies can get ahold of their IPs and make some good games out of them because Ubisoft is clearly not interested in doing so
So you only buy a license? Like on Steam, Epic, and all the others? Shocking.
I think modern gamers are comfortable with this, they just haven't realised it yet.
Or they buy on gog. Then they really have ownership.
Oh they expanded that? I remember when it was just "You will own nothing".
The saying comes from an opinion piece that was sponsored by the WEF. You can read more about it on the Wikipedia page. The article presented a future where the climate problem was fixed because the entire economy was based on services instead of the production of goods. It certainly has some elements that could work, but also has relied heavily on the neoliberal “the market will fix it” mentality.
Are streaming services that different from cable TV? You're paying for access to new content. If you want specific content to own, don't they all let you buy them? I know I was able to buy GoT discs when I wasn't willing to pay for an HBO subscription. Has that changed?
yup, the very popular stuff you can usually (but not always) buy on disk. the less popular stuff you can sometimes (but not often) buy on disk if the creator really pushes for it
Difference is that most games made anymore are online access dependent even if they aren’t dedicated multiplayer only games. What happens when subscriptions get so low that upkeep is unprofitable? You lose access to a game that you’ve paid a lot of money for, for no good reason as online isn’t necessary but the studios rarely patch it out at game sunset
The HP guy said it out loud about their printers
3 of those are services. Most subscription shit we see these days are products that they want us to treat like services even though there is no on going consumption. All of these software subscription services are just grifts.
The only thing he listed that isn't a service is his Costco membership.
Just got my Executive Membership rebate. It more than paid for the membership. We're basically shopping at Costco for free.
Furthermore, Costco employees will never push you to get the executive membership, if your previous year did not have enough spending on it to at least pay back the difference.
We actually had the Costco customer service Tell us to cancel our executive membership, because we didn't earn enough over the year
If somebody doesn't shop at Costco enough to justify the executive membership, I'm not sure the regular membership would be justified either.
That's kind of what we were thinking, too, which is why we went with it. We are a family of six, which means that we're always going to buy big quantities of stuff somewhere; might as well be at Costco.
But you could get so many hotdogs!!??!!
Actually I understand you can get the Hot Dogs without the membership. Which also blows my mind. Thry should just compete with Weinerschnitzel.
Sorry but I fucking lost it at it your justification for Warcraft. And that's from somebody who's been playing it on and off since mid-lich King
I'll pay you 3 quid a month for read access to your server.
Ha just kidding, fuck subscriptions
I use jellyfin without paying for a domain…?
As everyone else here, I think piracy is illegal and immoral. We should accept that we don't own our services and software and we should never doubt that corporations have our best interest in mind.
Therefore you should never have a Plex server, never use protonmail, never use AdGuard Home, never use AdGuard DNS for private DNS.
Also you should never use Firefox with UBlock origin sponsorblock and consent o magic.
Lastly you should never ever use re-vanced and x-manager, and God forbid don't use a VPN
Edit: syntax
What is ad guard him?
AdGuard Home, it's a DNS level ad blocker similar to PiHole
Excuse me, but it's "they/them".
Subscriptions are O(n)
One time purchases are O(1)
You want O(1)..
a subscription to a service
XisO(n), wherenis for how long you keep that service.instead purchasing the content provided by
Xindividually, isO(m), wheremis how much content you buy.if in one subscription term, you would spend more purchasing individual content than one subscription fee to
X, it is financially more efficient to useX.however, this assumes you will only consume a piece of content once, and dont care about having a physical/true copy of it.
a
O(1)scenario would be like a lifetime subscription toX.ps: i am fully on the side of owning media, and i have no idea if this comment is actually true, it just sounds smart :-)
🤕
Yeah but isn't Netflix like $24/mo for the modern tier?
I've totally lost track, tbh.
Cup of coffee here is $0.1203668386
who is downvoting this? 😂 maybe they live in a poor country, or maybe they're making an obscure joke. Why would people go past this comment and be like "nope, fuck this person"
Maybe they just love Starbucks and don't like that I quoted the "street" price instead of the Starbucks price.
-- Which still comes out to be $8.4 for 2.
Well nintendo switch online is like $3.99 for a month or $20.00 for a year.
I get that services need to pay for staff/servers/production, so I'm fine with small monthly fees. I'd much rather pay than sit through ads.
Once a subscription creeps over six or seven bucks a month I'm gonna reevaluate it and start cutting.
It really annoys me that newspapers charge the same for digital and paper subscriptions.
You're paying for the content in the case of the newspapers. It is a similar cost to print on newsprint as to run a website. It saves them no money. Most of what you are paying for is for the journalism, writing, editing, etc. Content costs money.
That definitely depends on which news outlet we're talking about.
Exactly. The reason I cancel my subscriptions is because there’s been a nosedive in content that I enjoy, which has tipped the scales to it costing more than it’s worth to me.
I’ve moved to a Plex setup, but even then I don’t watch many shows at all. The ones I do watch are all on different platforms though, so it would be X many subscriptions just to watch the few shows I like.
That's counterintuitive, do you have a source for that?
EDIT: googling around, I don't see any obvious answers.
This is the point here.
Many people have no idea of the infrastructure and costs needed to run many of these servers that provide services to people.
I disagree with things like Adobe basically using it for DRM but have no issue for services that are literally serving millions of people and providing something worthwhile that the majority of the population would otherwise not know how to do on their own.
There is some nuance to it, like offering a service and then slowly creeping costs up or adding an advertisement tier and dropping everyone to that etc is crap. But in general, if they are providing a decent service then I don't really have a problem with it.
I agree that ongoing infrastructure costs money, but several years of that should be included in the original estimate and pricing for the sale of the product. Plan for the sale price being cost to make+5 years of estimated maintenance for base product+profit margin. Then extend maintenance with each DLC if any. If no dlc then offer subscription to pay for servers and other infrastructure, if subscriptions fail to cover that then sunset the product but open source the server infrastructure so the community can pay to run it if desired.
I hate people defending subscriptions. They are not required for anything other than insurance or something you guaranteed will keep, like phone contracts. If they need more money for content, release content packs and dlc. Online should not cost, especially if someone like Nintendo is using peer2peer or will shut down the online servers anyways at some point.
I prefer paying for services with my money insead of with my data, but I can see both sides.🤷
Paying with your money and your data is more likely. The issue is not subscriptions imo either. It is getting sucked into megacorp schemes that will destroy competition with cheap prices and then enshittify and or raise prises once there is no alternative. Oh, and influence legislators to make competition illegal (youtube got big on copyright infringement).
Therefore I reduce megacorp stuff. I shop local, watch my dvds and started buying music again.
They can fuck off. So can everyone who has this neat reason why resistance to megacorps is futile.
Sure, I too would prefer to pay with money instead of data. But that's a false dichotomy. Many of the services that require subscription also collect your data. Whereas offline local solutions do not collect your data. There are things were you pay with money and data, there are things where you pay with just money, or just data, and there are things where you don't pay at all. So it isn't really a 'both sides' issue.
Thats true, and as it is, its impossible to be completely rid of data harvesting services. I made the switch to proton to get out of googles mail, drive and photo solutions, the have a vpn included aswell. but yeah, I would never trust Google, Microsoft, meta or any of those to not collect data, no matter what they promise.
Subscription based service makes data harvesting much easier. Spotify can force you to connect to their server even if you downloaded your song, in the name of "verifying your subscription".
Buy the songs, buy the movie, take them offline.
That being said there are good subscription based service, like home assistant cloud, where all your communications are always E2E encrypted and cannot be seen by their server. Their subscription model is justified, as they rent their servers.
I'm pretty sure you're paying with both as it is
I prefer not paying
Online servers cost money.
Id rather an online game charge me a monthly subscription and give me access to all content rather than ftp with half the content in the cash shop.
I also don't mind a subscription, if its reasonably priced and it's easy to cancel. But you could also have one time payment and all the content plus online. Elden Ring has that for example.
You shouldn't have to pay to use someone else's computer? Also there's more software than just games in the world, I don't see how loot boxes would work for google drive.
mullvad dropped port forwarding a few months ago. AirVpn on the other side...
I agree with that. I was just clarifying that Mullvad no longer offers port forwarding.
Well somebody needs an open port, otherwise you ain't downloading anything.
Cups of coffee money is what donations for FOSS devs is for.
Yo ho/All hands/Hoist the colors high
"Yo ho, fiddle-dee dee, a [REDACTED_DUE_TO_LEMMY.WORLD_POLICY]'s life for me!"
but also
"Having fun isn't hard if you have a library card!"
I've been checking out so many good shows and movies from my local public library
The library feels like it should be illegal somehow. It's SO GOOD.
I'm shocked they're still legal.
Give them time
There would be SUCH a revolt from authors if publishers tried to do something to legislate libraries away that I doubt any new books would be released for decades.
Oh no. Everyone knows The Party fears a revolt of academics and intellectuals more than anything. My man, they're always the first ones to go.
"You can judge the degree of civilization by looking at who is imprisoned" / Dostojevskij
Who's talking about imprisonment? I'm talking about another writer's strike, leaving publishers with nothing to publish for months or years. With their margins already razor-thin, they have to know that they'd just be done if they tried any funny business.
I love the two sides of "It's about the price of a cup of coffee" like they're not referring to a 30oz premium milkshake with a shot of espresso, not a regular black coffee.
Then the
"Your generation can't afford anything because of your coffee addiction!"
Like companies aren't just monetizing every single last thing and telling us "you'll own nothing and you'll LIKE IT!"
Also the price of a coffee has gone up considerably in the last couple years
Dropbox, Spotify, and a VPN are worth it: fight me.
Sure, Spotify doesn't pay artists enough and I miss having Neil Young available for streaming, but what are the other options that work well in the car? I'm not going to go back to using discs or plugging in MP3 players to the aux port, and I don't mind paying the bands directly for merch/albums if I'm really a fan. Considering I mostly listen to vinyl at home, I'm not paying Spotify for music; I'm paying Spotify for the convenience of being able to not listen to terrestrial radio and to be able to listen to what I like in the car or at work without the need for Youtube.
And my personal Dropbox account that I also use for work is well worth 15$/mo for 2TB of storage. It's saved me so much grief to be able to back up phone photos, access my work files from any computer, keep records of my personal documents, etc., and the software is both more cost effective and better designed than Google Drive or OneDrive. PDF's of my RPG books/characters/maps? Dropbox. Grocery list text file? Dropbox. Place to stash tabs/sheet music that is easily kept organized without the need for a physical copy? Dropbox. Phone number of that parent who saw my partner's car get tagged in the parking lot at school? Wait, I think I have her phone number in an spreadsheet from when I coached her daughter in tee-ball...gimme a sec...yep, it's in my Dropbox. In a side note, Dropbox may have turned me into a digital hoarder.
But the rest of this subscription-based garbage can get bent.
I recently switched from Spotify to Deezer. They offer high fidelity audio streaming which is a very noticable difference. Also, they're a bit cheaper, and you can easily move all your songs/saved playlists to Deezer
You need to be a certain kind of person to perceive audio quality difference. One, you need to be able to detect the difference. Two, you need to be able to appreciate the difference. And Three, which everyone seems to ignore, you need to have bought a sufficiently expensive device that can make the difference.
In short, if you have an $18 desktop speaker, get the FLAC outta here.
Not really. It's noticeable over Bluetooth as well, if your device supports codecs with a high enough bitrate. Obviously Bluetooth is still lossy, but listening experience is way better. The headphones I'm wearing now use aptxHD, with a bitrate of 576kbps. Spotify only offers AAC, with a bitrate of 256kbps.
As far as who can appreciate the difference, I guess? But you don't need to be a concert pianist to appreciate audio. That said, I play many instruments, so maybe I'm biased.
Do a blind test between 256kbps and 576kbps. I dare you.
I'm not going to argue conjecture. I have over $10,000 in audio equipment and like I already said I play many instruments, so you're not even picking someone good to make generalizations about. Bluetooth codecs are always going to be subpar, but they're probably how most people listen to streaming services most of the time. Anything that is streaming from a PC except Bluetooth is a notable difference.
I just checked the headphones I'm wearing again, they're actually using aptx lossless with a bitrate of 1200kbps. The point is that Deezer offers the same services for less money and higher quality audio streaming.
Apparently, when Spotify does roll out hifi, it will probably be a higher paid tier. Until then, for me, Deezer is the far superior service.
That's a good tip; I hadn't heard of that one yet. Is their library as comprehensive as Spotify?
It's almost identical.
I transferred about 10,000 songs and about 30 weren't found
Deezer should spread out their services to more countries.
Plex +arrs takes care of all my music streaming wants
Plex tanked right as I was watching a movie last week. It's an alternative, but not reliable.
What about Jellyfin?
If it's your Plex that tanked, sounds like a you problem.
I run both it and Jellyfin on the same machine and have no issues with either.
It was Plex on a TV. And it wasn't my TV. So it's not consistent.
Spotify is the only subscription I have. Don't listen to music a lot, but it's cheap and easy. For VPN, I rolled my own on a Digital Ocean VPS.
that sounds like a subscription with extra steps lol
I pay for Nord. But that's because I game and value it.
$15/mo for 2 TB seems quite expensive tbh. My Nextcloud server with 1 TiB of storage costs €5 a month.
It is a little pricey, but when I tried hosting my own server, it was way too much hassle (for me). Frankly, I don't mind paying Dropbox because they make the experience so fool-proof and borderline invisible.
Dropbox runs in the background and just acts like just a local folder in your Documents folder (or wherever you put it). When you save anything there, it's automatically backed up online in real-time and added to any other computers you use that have Dropbox installed. If you have too much online for some of your devices, it will use a a "shadow file" that is just a link to the online file so it takes up zero space on your other local devices while acting just like the file is already local (in terms of being able to right-click, access properties, open it from other programs, etc.). Plus, it has built in functionality for sharing files or entire folders by giving you a quick download link with just two clicks, which is great for sharing files that are too large to send via email.
Could I get all that functionality cheaper? Almost certainly. Could I find something cheaper that is also just as user-friendly? I'm open to it, but I haven't found anything yet that is close to competitive.
Have you checked out OneDrive (Microsoft)? It's what I use for school. I don't store pictures or anything, strictly school documents and random odds and ends.
I have a OneDrive account through my work, so I've used it a bit, but it doesn't seem like it handles downloads and uploads as quickly, nor keeping the right files local intuitively the way Dropbox does.
Plus, it's almost as expensive as Dropbox per TB with a personal plan, and Microsoft doesn't need any more of my money or information.
Where do you host said server, a VPS?
Managed instance at Hetzner
Pandora is cheaper than Spotify and arguably better at picking new and random content based on your input. But it won't play specific songs that you request like Spotify does. And Pandora works via Bluetooth, car apps, etc.
I used Pandora a ton a decade ago when there weren't really any mainstream streaming services to compete with. But as someone who listens to albums and makes my own playlists, Pandora won't cut it for me. I'm enough of a music snob that when I say I want to listen to The Stones, I want to listen to Let It Bleed front to back.
For some applications, Pandora is great, but it's not what I need.
I loved and used Pandora for a long time. It was really good at recommending songs. I quit when they started playing ads in my feed despite paying for an ad free experience. These were like voice ads for concerts or similar from artists. I contacted customer support and the response was basically “we don’t think those are ads, they are ‘special messages’ from the artists so they aren’t going to stop.”
The problem is that I mostly use music streaming as background at work. Having a 30 second clip of some guy’s voice saying “Hey I’m Bobby from the Bobbles and we are excited to be touring in your area next month! Come check out our show for a Bobbling-Good-Time!” is very disruptive in the same way an ad for anything else is. They were clear that they weren’t going to stop so I walked away.
I pay for YouTube and have for years. Worth it and cheaper than cable.
I can't speak to that as I don't use any of the recommended playlists. It's pretty easy to avoid artists you don't like if you make your own playlists or pick your own music
Fair. I just browse through the "Fans Also Listen To" sections and read a lot of independent music journalism
Agreed Spotify is totally worth it. I use it a lot to go on like rabbit-hole deep dives into some artist or genre or something, I use it a lot for stuff I will listen once and never again. That would be completely impossible if I was buying individual songs or albums or whatever. Paying for a nearly infinite database of music I can peruse at will following whatever random interests I have that day, that is absolutely worth the subscription fee.
Apple Music pays out 2-3X more than Spotify to artists if that is something you are concerned about.
It also has an absolutely terrible algorithm for recommending music in my experience. I’ve tried Apple Music several times over the past few years as I’m heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. My experience never changes. I put in a random artist like Green Day or Hans Zimmer or Gregory Alan Isakov and within 4-5 songs the station is playing hip hop or rap. No matter what genre I start with the stream always turns into hip hop or rap and it’s mostly nobody artists that aren’t good. I have some songs in those genres in my library but the majority are not. (Also if I’m starting a station with an orchestral film score it stands to reason I probably want to hear more film scores not rap.)
All I can say is I’m glad I haven’t had the same experience. Not huge into rap or hip-hop and have never had them come up. It seems pretty good at recommending new songs to me. Not sure if it uses my current library or my searches but I’ve been happy with it.
it also has loseless quality but the format is not flac but their own codec, so i don't know whether we can call them truly lossless.
I only play music in my car that is on my phone. I can fit my entire music library on my phone.
Tfw I paid for a subscription to access my textbook this semester.
Granted, it's not just a textbook. My Spanish classes use VHL Central, which includes a textbook with videos, audio files, virtually endless practice assignments, and pretty much all of our assignments and course material.
It's a really great tool, I guess I just wish I could keep access to it after I graduated. (I think you can purchase a textbook, but definitely not the full program.) Ah, well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That kind of model is unfortunately common for university courses. I had it for my language courses, and a couple of the core maths courses.
The online platform justifies a subscription by providing additional resources, homework grading, etc. Fair enough, honestly, if they want to charge you $15 or something reasonable. But when textbook access gets rolled into the bundle, it tends to inflate the subscription cost and also have the convenient-for-the-publisher side effect of temporary access to the text. Lose-lose, from a student perspective.
I had a course that required we buy a license to Pearson's service in order to submit homework. $100+ to view a pdf for a semester and submit homework through a buggy form interface. I still hold a grudge against everyone in the department for that decision.
With that model the company can afford to offer far more content than with a pay-once model. With a pay-once model they only generate enough income to be able to offer a book, and maybe a smattering of supplementary material. Go subscription-based however, revenue increases, so output increases and now they can afford to create and maintain a whole lot more while keeping the price affordable to those who need it during the period that they need it.
It's a similar principle to renting vs buying. If they were to offer all of those materials as a one-off purchase at a price that would allow their business to be sustainable, it would cost more than most are able to afford.
If we go back to one-off purchases, we go back to getting less for life as opposed to a lot for a limited period of time. It's a trade off, and clearly one that most people are willing to make.
People get so angry (OP) about the way things are just because they're unhappy in general and looking for something to blame. Not all companies are fair with their subscription models, but most are. Not every company cares about their customers, but most do. Some companies are run by sociopaths, but most are run by normal, nice people.
The only sub I use is Spotify. I share it across my friends and family and like their vast catalog. They also don't charge for their API so I can integrate it with Home Assistant.
My friends and family agree downloading songs manually sucks.
Piracy is a service issue. I have no problems with subscriptions as long as the price and service outpace piracy.
If the price gets to a point it doesn't make sense, I go back to piracy.
Laughs in having my own Jellyfin media server and ad blockers for YouTube as well as using my server for file backups as well
laughs in 7 TB of media actively archived
just installed two 18TB drives, currently working on mirroring and swapping over to new drive sets. It's a pain because i have limited sata, and need to do hotswaps unless i want to take EVERYTHING down.
It's worth it though, wouldn't catch me saying otherwise.
How... Uh... Would one get some of your media files...? Do we do like in the old days and do USB drop off sites mixed with geocaching?
Know me IRL. One of these days i do intend on properly preserving a lot of the content i host somewhere, that's going to be an ordeal though. Most of it is YT content currently, considering it's mostly what i consume that shouldn't be a huge shocker.
Really though, if anything, just start your own archive and keep building it. Tailor it to your personal tastes and worry about it from there.
I don’t mind Xbox Game Pass when there’s a deal on it for $1 but I make sure not to auto renew
This is gong to sound nuts, but subscriptions aren't a problem for me, auto renewals are. I like to be in control of my finances, so whenever I sign up for something I pick a term I can live with, 1,3, 6 or 12 months, I pay, and I immediately go to the account management screen and cancel.
I don't care if it's inconvenient to have to think about it every so often, but I'm in control of the spending and to me that's what matters.
Is paying via credit card with auto renewals the only payment method companies provide you? That's pretty bad, I'd say.
Because, considering what you are having to do RN, it means that they can simply change a policy and next time you pay, you might find out the "account management screen and cancel" becomes unavailable.
There has to be a way to pay without having to give your credit card details... e.g. The payment gateway sends a request to your bank; your bank asks you for confirmation for one time payment; you confirm payment; the bank sends acceptance to request; payment gateway captures it and gives you your bill.
I only buy it with redemption codes, so it can't auto-renew.
See, game pass I’m cool with because it’s an up-front transparent deal that you are buying time to access this library, and the library also changes. There is no pretense of “buying a copy” or whatever.
It’s nice for modern games anyway. For classic stuff that I want to have access to forever, I alreadty have access to that stuff forever. It might stink for the kids who are playing their “classics” right now, though.
I've been free for so long I forget what it's like
What do you use for music?
"open directory" searches
(+"index of" +filename +(mp3|ogg|flac|aac|m4a))
yt-dlp
xdcc
VLC
Youtube + ublock
My YouTube algorithm is just terrible. It will circle back the same 5-10 videos I have watched or liked some years ago, sprinkle in some rightwing political bullshit, or show only very tangentially related results.
Recent example: an underground artist popped into my head I used to listen to during my school days, and I wanted to go through their album for nostalgia.
Entering the artist and album name gives me two tracks from that album, a handful of other artists who have at some point collaborated, and the aforementioned unrelated or political results. Clicking through some of the videos always cycles back to the same few suggestions.
I even tried this on incognito mode to see if my login bricked the algorithm, but it was equally shitty. Apparently google can’t even get their own content indexed properly, not to mention actual web search.
The trick for me is to search playlists. But it might be a region issue depending on where you live
On mobile i've got an app that lets me play youtube videos with the screen locked so i use that as well.
It's a bit annoying cause the app does have ads as well, but only when you open it. If you put a video on and close it (leaving it playing on the background), there's no ads
Oh, I've been using Newpipe to do this. Zero ads, free and open source too. Interface is a little rough, but you'll get the hang of it quick.
Oh nice. I'll check it out, thanks!
Ahh soulseek. That takes me back
Soulseek is good
bandcamp is pretty great. Granted, they are still a for-profit company; a popular community based solution would be nice. But they do let you download lossless file to self-host or just listen on device.
The only complain is the lack of classical music (not modern/contemporary classical) on there. But I would imagine most classical music is public domain by now. I just don't know where to find them...
Edit: found it: https://www.classiccat.net/ or internet archive has a huge collection of classical music.
archive.org actually has quite a decent clearweb variety. The usual suspects have everything else.
yt-dlp to download, Strawberry and JetAudio as music players, and Kid3qt for batch renames/metadata management
And they wonder why tides of the high seas is on the rise again.
Spotify makes sense to have based on pure convenience. NSO is alright, but if you already emulate, there's not much point in NSO due to Switch online multiplayer being ass. Paying for Adobe is amateur hour. Dropbox? Don't make me laugh. Twitter blue is just sad.
It feels wrong paying for Spotify knowing the artists get jack shit. Why bother
if you want to support your favorite artist go to their concert, buy their album/merch.
I personally don't care about any of that, personally I just want convenient music in one place, if there wasn't spotify, there would just be some pirated service where artists would earn nothing. or Radio where there is no exposure for lesser artists.
so really I am not sure what kind of better solution you could come up with.
Join the dark side and buy music outright. Much better for the artists.
Or do both. Cost of Spotify is the cost of one album a month.
Exactly. One album a month and BAM you own 120 albums after a decade, and a huge collection when you're old
I think Strato HiDrive offers a better price per gigabyte AAAND you can add support for SMB and FTP clients at low additional costs. Barely any cloud storage provider offers this one.
twitter is the most embarrassing one on here by a thousand miles
Especially considering most Twitter bluechecks today are bot accounts doing chatgpt responses
pats SSD full of MP3s
FLAC! Long live songs you can actually own! Long live open source audio format!
That's why bandcamp is one of the few places I'll willingly spend money on digital media. DRM-free downloading in flac format? Yes please.
Netflix and Spotify actually makes sense to be subscription based. Amazon depends on how often you do shopping through them since it's actually free (if you don't include the fees) to function. I definitely wouldn't pay for Dropbox but cloud storage and sync pretty much has to be a monthly subscription. If you are going to be against something at least be against to the parts that makes sense to be against of.
Life worked perfectly fine before Netflix and Spotify, everything was also fine before cloud everything.
They can suck on my left nut.
Yes, and life still works fine without them..nobody is forcing you to subscribe to Netflix. Keep paying your monthly cable subscription like the old days.
I ain't got no cable, last time we had cable i watched for 2 weeks and after that everything was just repeating what i had already seen in those 2 weeks and loads of nonsense shows.
I prefer doing things, like learning new skills or doing something active.
Honestly, if the service respects my privacy and isn't littered with ads, I don't mind paying at all. Like I wouldn't mind paying a monthly fee for services provided by Proton, for example, for email, online storage, vpn, etc. I think it's fair. There's a lot of infrastructure behind it and employees. Things don't just run by themselves for free.
But when I pay for a subscription and they publish ads as well for extra income, not only does it make my experience unpleasant, but it's incredibly greedy. And when I get charged for a service that exploits all my private data to create a user profile that can be sold and used to push targeted ads and other fake information with the goal of changing my opinion on important democratic topics, then that's when I start completely avoiding that service altogether.
I honestly just don't use these services, and never recommend them, entirely because they are subscription-based.
As a model, it is largely focused on trapping the user who forgets to cancel. Many also use sneaky ways to avoid a user cancelling in time, and give no warnings.
If a subscription would be as good as just having the file or software offline… I might even pay for it. Yes I mean including DRM-Free backups like www.gog.com
Humble Bundle does that. Their subscription comes with a collection of DRM free games you can just download and keep forever even if you cancel it.
The only thing I pay for is Crunchyroll. As for me it's worth it as I get tons of stuff the watch for £5 a month and it's also pretty easy to rip anything exclusive. And then I don't feel like I'm giving nothing back to Japan when I pirate anything they don't have I want.
I also pay for a VPS, but I'd say that's renting more then it is a subscription.
I like to apply some business logic to it.
If most of these conditions can be regularly sufficiently true, then searching an alternative that incorporates proper ownership is a good course of action.
Yes, a cup of coffee every 5 minutes
Wait... "limited ads"? Are there still some ads with Spotify Premium?
No, some podcasts still have sponsors embedded in the content but that's not Spotify themselves.
I have not seen any.
The songs you listen to when you are listening on random are often ads. Record companies will do "pay for placement" deals to get songs and artists they promote out there.
They used to call it payola when it was on the radio and it was illegal.
I only have Netflix, and it's included with my t mobile.
I guess I also have amazon prime, but I just use it for the free shipping and it gets used a lot with the family.
Fuckers wearing $2000 suits out here panhandling
I’m not drinking 6 specialty cups of coffee every day.
Sounds like someone didn't have their morning coffee today
(It's per month but woteva)
My very hyperbolic point was that most of us don’t subscribe to just one service. Pretty easy to subscribe to multiple of these and others like cloud backup services, car navigation, and other media like maybe even a news service. That’s a lot of subscriptions, and companies are trying to find even more ways to make us pay subscriptions. Everything from having to pay subscriptions to have parts of your car work to computer games. My point was a sarcastic take on how much we are being forced to subscribe to if we want to participate in what constitutes “normal” things these days.
Edit: appropriately just dropped into my feed: https://lemmy.world/post/11140824 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/13005167
No I can't afford it, stop saying that.
Perhaps it 'tis a silly thing. But I just want to thank whoever did the art work for drawing the stick figure guy with the shotgun as being left handed and holding a left hand shotgun.
My mental status thanks you and as another member of the Bar Sinister, I also thank you.
Funnily enough I used this gun as an asset in a scratch game. I think it's more likely they found a picture of a gun from that angle and decided to draw the person like that afterwards, I'm not a gun owner though so I don't really know what I'm talking about😜.
good thing i dont drink coffee
Fuck Amazon but it is not like the others in the meme
Amazon lets you acquire physical items, of insane variety, delivered to your door, often for a price lower than you can find it in physical stores. Often delivered same day and almost certainly same week.
That's an insane value compared to something like a game company that's like "teehee you can pretend to own this until we get bored of hosting it and then poof fuck you!"
I did the math for me and even with the Amazon credit card the service wasn't worth the price. It's free shipping over ~$25(?) dollars anyway. "Prime shipping" hasn't meant anything significant since at least 2020. It's often the same as non-prime, maybe a day earlier.
If you care about the shows that maybe changes, but they have about 5 and anytime you search for something it's a tossup whether it will be included with your subscription or only available for buy/rent or on some other platform. It's even more fun when there's 'copy' of a movie included with Prime, and another available for buy/rent and and buy/rent version is at the top of the search results and the one you already paid for access to you have to scroll to see.
Prime Video is changing at the end of this month. Ads or you can pay $3/mo.
I'm actually just canceling instead.
At least in my area prime shipping is insanely fast, but yes. My point was you get a physical item from Amazon where as the others are purely digital
Amazon is probably the worst of all of these. The only reason prime exists is to lock you into their store for all your purchases, when shipping orders should be a discrete charge for each shipment. At least the rest of these (except for Adobe and Nintendo, who suck about as hard) give you access to their infrastructure that lets you access the entirety of the product they offer instantly, whenever you have an internet connection.
No. You get to buy a shovel with faster delivery. You get the shovel, forever. Nintendo let's you "buy" a game they could sunset at any moment. You possess nothing.
Truenas scale to host:
Jellyfin (alternative to movie/tv streaming services)
Navidrome (alternative to Apple Music/spotify)
Obsidian
The “-arr” services
Tailscale (to access these services outside of my house)
How else are you going to get underwear?
I pay for Apple Music Student ($6), a VPN ($2), and extra iCloud storage ($1). 100% worth it in my opinion.
So long as you have an exit plan.
The student price is a deliberate ploy to get reliant customers then jack the price up. (Not just Apple, but definitely Apple.)
Unfortunately, there isn’t really an exit plan. Buying the music outright is not worth it because of how many different artists I listen to so I will probably always be paying for Apple Music or Tidal.
It’s only 4 dollars more a month and I will have a real job to pay for it.
Life as a service
Subscription is taxes
Fuck Dropbox for making extra space subscription-based
You guys are complaining about a subscription to apple and amazon ? go look how much a subscription to an Autodesk product costs ?
They aren't comparable. Autodesk is a business product, not for consumers. The product makes you money and the price for it is a business expense and tax deductible. While subscriptions to Spotify, Netflix, etc. aren't.
No, it's more comparable. AutoDesk, same as Photoshop. You used to be able to purchase it outright (at great expense, sure). Now that's not even an option, you have to subscribe monthly.
There was never a non-subscription version of Spotify.