4 ms·

Why is it unreasonable? You are, after all, using the product those outlets provide.

by techsupporter 9y ago

sxates 9y ago
Imagine if you had to buy a whole album every time you wanted to hear a song.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  Before you ever get to hear the song.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  You used to. People did. Now most people stream on Spotify for free, and the hardcore listeners buy albums, and practically nobody buys singles.
  - sxates 9y ago
    We've always had free streaming in the form of radio.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      The point is that you didn't get to pick what you wanted to listen to. It's fundamentally different. If you liked a song enough to want to listen to it on demand, you had to buy the album.
  - Aloha 9y ago
    That made sense with the distribution medium of the time - much as a newspaper subscription made sense for a dead-tree medium of distribution - we've not been there for a long time.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      Perhaps. Though you'd think there's been more than enough research to show that people don't buy individual articles. People don't even really buy individual movies any more, in my experience. Anyway, Blendle exists now, so we'll see in a couple of years whether this actually does become the standard way of reading the news. I somehow doubt it.
- smileysteve 9y ago
  But it's not that. With publishers, you get access to daily or weekly content, a whole collection of it, for a month. It's like Netflix if they had a "curated" collection and a lot of originals. So it's basically exactly like Netflix or HBO Go.
  - sxates 9y ago
    Except there are hundreds of them, not just a handful of consolidated sources. What we need is Netflix for Newspapers - that'd be great!
    - smileysteve 9y ago
      AP Articles represent the quality of hundreds of sources :-)
Aloha 9y ago
As the other commented mentioned - why should I have to buy a whole album to listen to a song? I neither have time or money to consume but a small fraction of the fine high quality content from those sources, paying 10-15 bucks a month or more to each of them doesn't make much sense to me - I'd love to give them something - just not what they want me to pay, so instead I end up paying nothing in most cases.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  News publishers should likely form an association like ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC for music publishers, that police venues for public performance and sell blanket mechanical licenses for all possible cover performances of any music by any of their members. If an individual pays the journalism association, they can read any article written by any member of it. If they don't pay, they can't read any "premium" journalism content by members of that association. This would, naturally, take away the power for individual news organizations to price their own content, but it would provide a great incentive for people to actually pay something. I'm not going to bother with WSJ if I have to pay WSJ to read WSJ articles, and separately pay WP to read WP articles, and separately pay ChiTrib and IndyStar and Info-Ledger and Bugle-Tooter and Post-Intelligencer and Mercantile-Onion and Times-Dispatch and Dispatch-Times and every other publisher of ephemeral content on the network. But if I can pay one time to one company that gives me a VIP pass for 90% of all the news sites I visit, that's a really easy sell. The problem--like with NetFlix losing huge piles of content to Disney rolling its own vidstream service--is fragmentation. If I pay $10/mo to NetFlix now, I'm not going to pay $10/mo to NetFlix and $10/mo to Disney/ABC in the future. I'm not even going to pay $10/mo total divided between them. I'll pay $0/mo, and do something else with my time. Even if the money cost is the same, the business relationship cost is at least doubled, and possibly even squared. And that is a significant factor even if the money cost was zero. If I'm discovering content, I can only discover from one silo at a time. If I'm searching for content, I may have to search many different services before finding what I want. With respect to buying whole albums just for one song, at least back then I could go to a physical location that had music from all the publishers, all in one place. You didn't have a separate record store for each distributor, or worse, a different store for each publisher.

Why is it unreasonable? You are, after all, using the product those outlets provide.

sxates 9y ago

Imagine if you had to buy a whole album every time you wanted to hear a song.

jasonkostempski 9y ago
Before you ever get to hear the song.
vertex-four 9y ago
You used to. People did. Now most people stream on Spotify for free, and the hardcore listeners buy albums, and practically nobody buys singles.
- sxates 9y ago
  We've always had free streaming in the form of radio.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    The point is that you didn't get to pick what you wanted to listen to. It's fundamentally different. If you liked a song enough to want to listen to it on demand, you had to buy the album.
- Aloha 9y ago
  That made sense with the distribution medium of the time - much as a newspaper subscription made sense for a dead-tree medium of distribution - we've not been there for a long time.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Perhaps. Though you'd think there's been more than enough research to show that people don't buy individual articles. People don't even really buy individual movies any more, in my experience. Anyway, Blendle exists now, so we'll see in a couple of years whether this actually does become the standard way of reading the news. I somehow doubt it.
smileysteve 9y ago
But it's not that. With publishers, you get access to daily or weekly content, a whole collection of it, for a month. It's like Netflix if they had a "curated" collection and a lot of originals. So it's basically exactly like Netflix or HBO Go.
- sxates 9y ago
  Except there are hundreds of them, not just a handful of consolidated sources. What we need is Netflix for Newspapers - that'd be great!
  - smileysteve 9y ago
    AP Articles represent the quality of hundreds of sources :-)

Aloha 9y ago

As the other commented mentioned - why should I have to buy a whole album to listen to a song? I neither have time or money to consume but a small fraction of the fine high quality content from those sources, paying 10-15 bucks a month or more to each of them doesn't make much sense to me - I'd love to give them something - just not what they want me to pay, so instead I end up paying nothing in most cases.

logfromblammo 9y ago
News publishers should likely form an association like ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC for music publishers, that police venues for public performance and sell blanket mechanical licenses for all possible cover performances of any music by any of their members. If an individual pays the journalism association, they can read any article written by any member of it. If they don't pay, they can't read any "premium" journalism content by members of that association. This would, naturally, take away the power for individual news organizations to price their own content, but it would provide a great incentive for people to actually pay something. I'm not going to bother with WSJ if I have to pay WSJ to read WSJ articles, and separately pay WP to read WP articles, and separately pay ChiTrib and IndyStar and Info-Ledger and Bugle-Tooter and Post-Intelligencer and Mercantile-Onion and Times-Dispatch and Dispatch-Times and every other publisher of ephemeral content on the network. But if I can pay one time to one company that gives me a VIP pass for 90% of all the news sites I visit, that's a really easy sell. The problem--like with NetFlix losing huge piles of content to Disney rolling its own vidstream service--is fragmentation. If I pay $10/mo to NetFlix now, I'm not going to pay $10/mo to NetFlix and $10/mo to Disney/ABC in the future. I'm not even going to pay $10/mo total divided between them. I'll pay $0/mo, and do something else with my time. Even if the money cost is the same, the business relationship cost is at least doubled, and possibly even squared. And that is a significant factor even if the money cost was zero. If I'm discovering content, I can only discover from one silo at a time. If I'm searching for content, I may have to search many different services before finding what I want. With respect to buying whole albums just for one song, at least back then I could go to a physical location that had music from all the publishers, all in one place. You didn't have a separate record store for each distributor, or worse, a different store for each publisher.