7 ms·

> We saw the same with the printing press: the Powers That Be first banned it, then tried to control it, and eventually had to relent. All of those phases have

> We saw the same with the printing press: the Powers That Be first banned it, then tried to control it, and eventually had to relent. All of those phases have already happened - banning (RIAA lawsuits), control (iTunes), relent (Spotify). We've reached the endgame - it's streaming. If you want to store and maintain a personal 128GB collection of MP3 files with incomplete titles and data, that's your prerogative, but you're going to be in a tiny minority.

general8bitso 8y ago
Must be nice to have a high bandwidth connection with 5 nines uptime, no risk of your account being revoked, or the content licenses abrogated or expired. It is of the utmost importance to inculcate the newest generation of media consumers that renting is preferred to ownership.
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
  I slogged through keeping a local archive of my carefully-ripped audio collection on a hardware RAID-5 storage server for decades. When I finally gave up in favor of Google Play (and subsequently Apple Music), it was liberating. At the end of the day, the "content" we're talking about here is purely entertainment. You can live without it. And even if the hammer falls, and the copyright holders go backwards, things like Napster and Limewire and eDonkey will rise again. At 10 years old, I never understood the line in SW EPIV, where Leia says, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." (Seriously, the line haunted me for years.) But it's a perfect allegory for this situation. Of course, I'm still waiting for the blowback against Facebook, so...
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > At the end of the day, the "content" we're talking about here is purely entertainment. You can live without it. You can live without a lot of things, including drinkable tap water and flushable toilets, however that is not necessarily a reasonable standard to judge things by. I use music not just to 'entertain' myself, but to focus as well. Besides, why is entertainment and relaxation always treated as somehow secondary/not necessary? I realize many people find purpose in being work bees, but some strive for a healthy work-life balance.
    - sacado2 8y ago
      > Besides, why is entertainment and relaxation always treated as somehow secondary/not necessary? I realize many people find purpose in being work bees, but some strive for a healthy work-life balance. It's not that it's unnecessary, but it's easier to replace. I have my nephew at home for a week, and his mother didn't let him take his console with him. Uh oh. No entertainment then? Well, guess what, we played good old board and card games. OTOH, not having tap water or flushable toilets would have been a much bigger PITA for him. (For both of us, to be honest).
      - general8bitso 8y ago
        Don’t take him camping. ;)
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    > I slogged through keeping a local archive of my carefully-ripped audio collection on a hardware RAID-5 storage server for decades. When I finally gave up in favor of Google Play (and subsequently Apple Music), it was liberating. That was my (similar - I never went to RAID 5) experience as well. I moved it all up into Google Play and haven't looked back. No more worries about a hard drive taking down my collection (in hindsight RAID 5 may have helped), no more duplicate copies or tracks that were badly ripped so they skipped, no more worrying about keeping a pile of CD's "just in case", just the music I wanted to listen to when I wanted to listen to it.
    - javajosh 8y ago
      What do you mean "moved it all up into Google Play"? Are they hosting mp3s now?
      - ablation 8y ago
        Yes, and for some time: https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/1075570?hl=en-GB https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/1075570?hl...
      - general8bitso 8y ago
        Do you remember mp3.com’s Beam It service? http://www.freedomworks.org/content/case-missing-copyright-law http://www.freedomworks.org/content/case-missing-copyright-l... How times have changed.
      - jmchuster 8y ago
        When Google Play came out, that was all that they started with, and once enough people started using it, they started selling music on it as well. I initially started using it as a way to easily sync music onto my phone, since it has a LRU of all your played songs, as well as any albums you mark explicitly for download.
  - atomical 8y ago
    I had the same experience. It is very liberating. Piracy is increasing again because media companies are trying to silo their titles. Consumers want a diverse source of entertainment every month, but can't afford to buy the titles or subscribe to all streaming services. A Netflix subscription can be 1-3x the price of a popular TV series bought directly. I would argue that Netflix has devalued media in general.
  - licebmi__at__ 8y ago
    I had the exact same experience, but then about 2 weeks ago, one of my favourite albums got deleted of All Music. So I had to search the disc, rip it, and then upload it to my account, which works for now but certainly put a dent in the experience. Let's see how it plays out on the future.
    - leviathant 8y ago
      >Let's see how it plays out on the future. Exactly as you'd expect. Aphex Twin had a CD that included the video on the data portion of the CD (I think it was Windowlicker, circa 1999) - but you had to unlock the video online. After a couple of years, the server shut down, and you no longer had access to the video. Of course, someone released a crack, and eventually the advent of YouTube negated that particular problem. I still keep local copies of my music. Part of this is because I have a not insignificant amount of music that I listen to that is not and might never be part of a subscription service. Part of it is because I've experienced early attempts at controlling access to music and video that I purchased, and saw how that failed, and I don't plan on risking that loss again.
    - TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
      Me too. My favorite band has 3 albums that aren't in print any more, and which aren't available anywhere. Like, you can't even get the CD's from Amazon. I've ripped them and put them in my library. But the freedom of finding NEW stuff, when you have access to (just about) EVERYTHING... THAT has been the real eye-opener for me. I've discovered a lot of acts that I would never have otherwise heard of.
  - shermanyo 8y ago
    I had the realization that I may lose some specific music one day, but I'll always have access to new music
- norealidea 8y ago
  Digital "ownership" is just as temporary, and when "buying" digital products online (or, technically, even physical copies of media), you're only paying for a license that can be revoked at any point. Just because they don't hunt you down doesn't mean you properly own something. There's a reason SaaS took off, just like media streaming took off. Convenience is higher on the list of priorities than ownership. If they take my stuff away, I'll just switch to media that isn't barred from public use.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > If they take my stuff away, I'll just switch to media that isn't barred from public use. That's if you treat your media/services as substitutable goods. I don't understand this view. For me, the vast majority of books, songs, movies and games I peruse are not substitutable. SaaS services maybe - but then, they do their damnest to be not substitutable - that's called "having a competitive advantage". So when a company decides to stop serving some media I used (or paid for directly), I see something of value being lost.
    - general8bitso 8y ago
      Exactly this.
  - UncleMeat 8y ago
    If my concern is losing access to my music, a hard disk failure is more likely than getting banned from Spotify.
- TheLoneAdmin 8y ago
  There's 100 million paying Spotify subscribers that don't meet your "requirements". Ease of convenience trumps free (stealing).
  - general8bitso 8y ago
    These are not mutually exclusive.
  - a_tractor 8y ago
    >100 million paying subscribers Out of 7+ Billion...
- alexashka 8y ago
  Ownership, funny. You mean how you own your electricity, clean water, shelter and food? You're in complete control, nobody can come and take any of those away at any point in time right? The solution to dumb infrastructure decisions, is better infrastructure decisions via communication and thought, not trying to hang on to your tiny scrap of stuff via guns, files on a computer or building a bunker.
kalleboo 8y ago
> We've reached the endgame - it's streaming The last line from the article hit it home - "I mean, where else are you going to get a copy of The Mr. Belvedere Show theme song?". Today, you don't need P2P for that, YouTube has it. Along with the video.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  For now. Check again in a year, there's a good chance it won't be there anymore.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    I support decentralization and do agree with you in principal (and I youtube-dl any video I care about), but in practice I've actually seen the breadth of content expand. You can even find clips of The Simpsons on there now. (of course there are the high-profile examples of political content being taken down)
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      I do not disagree. I've seen both, really - on the one hand, I find recently uploaded clips of old things; on the other hand, I recently scrolled through my "likes" list on YouTube, and something like 1/4 of it points to removed videos.
      - kalleboo 8y ago
        Same here. While it's not a system I'd like to trust the future to, I see it continuing to pass the "I mean, where else are you going to get a copy of The Mr. Belvedere Show theme song?" test for the foreseeable future.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    In which case, running youtube-dl when you discover something you want to keep around for good is going to be a better solution than Napster.
perakojotgenije 8y ago
XKCD - Steal This Comic https://xkcd.com/488/ https://xkcd.com/488/
ArtWomb 8y ago
>>> We've reached the endgame - it's streaming Good analysis. Implicit in this, is that the same fault that ultimately drew users from Napster, the lack of end user anonymity, is inherent in modern services. There is a broader ethical issue at play as well. Can you fund and develop technology that is in the present moment operating in a legal grey area. Betting that in some possible future, culture and the laws will change?
AsyncAwait 8y ago
> If you want to store and maintain a personal 128GB collection of MP3 files. Actually, it annoys me how it's widely accepted that MP3 is an acceptable format to pay the same price for as CDs, while you could rip lossless FLACs from CDs. Either MP3s should be cheaper, or switching to FLAC should be an option, (like Bandcamp does it).
- nolok 8y ago
  That's because nobody knows what FLAC is. Why does nobody knows what FLAC is ? Because 192kbps MP3 quality is acceptable enough to most. If people don't have a problem, they don't expect a fix. I'm not saying you're technically or auditively wrong, I'm saying that's not how the market has ever worked.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    There are places that provide the option, such as Bandcamp, 7digital, HDTracks etc. so it doesn't seem to be a completely deserted market. What I don't understand about iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play and many others is that they're likely getting the tracks lossless anyway, they're then taking than and downsampling it to their common MP3 encoder settings for all tracks. It seems to me it would be trivial to add a 'FORMAT:' option, (that defaults to MP3), but allows for FLAC for these who know what it is. Am aware there are specialist lossless streaming services, but I just don't understand the block of making this an option everywhere, including the iTunes Store, which has a massive catalog and Spotify, where the curated playlists etc. are.
    - Erwin 8y ago
      Tidal offers exactly this, see e.g. https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000397069-TIDAL-MASTERS https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000397069-TID... and Tidal HIFI. If there's sufficient market interest in this (Tidal HIFI is twice the cost of normal Tidal) then the enthusiasts will rally around the service. It doesn't look like the market cares that much, and I couldn't really hear a significant difference between's Spotify 320k stream and Tidal's masters (using HD800S + Mojo Chord as DAC).
LandR 8y ago
I'd much rather have my own mp3 collection, and do, of thousands of tracks. All legally purchased, I don't steal music. I don't want to rely on a song being on a particular streaming service.
api 8y ago
I don't disagree with you, but the two are not mutually exclusive. I tend to use streaming for some music but when I really love something I like to have it. It's also not that hard to organize music files and 128gb of storage is peanuts. (Am I the only one who doesn't hate iTunes? It's not a bad organizer.)
black_puppydog 8y ago
The "endgame" would have to include something that Napster had, and spotify etc don't: guaranteed, unlimited, non-regulated access to everything from everywhere, any time. I recognize that is the ideal spotify is striving for, and they're on the right trajectory. But they rest within the boundaries set by (inter)national copyright law, and that just goes counter to some of those features. In that sense, we may be in an endgame-like situation, but I don't see this game being over before copyright is severely reformed or just outright destroyed by technological means.
raxxorrax 8y ago
Audiogalaxy (RIP) is still superior to any currently available streaming service and had a vastly more diverse palette on content.
- grendelt 8y ago
  That and Scour were where I found the really good, obscure (or properly titled) tracks. I used them to locate some of the biggest FTP archives of MP3s I liked, then I'd just grab as many as I could (while uploading other obscure tracks from other sources to keep my ratio up).
godzillabrennus 8y ago
I pay Apple $35 a year for iTunes Match. That puts my "ripped" music into their cloud. Years later they introduced streaming and I got hooked on an Apple Music Subscription. The biggest issue I have these days is that Apple's smart home stuff is overpriced so now I also pay for an Amazon music subscription to us with the Echo hardware. That all said I am so uninspired by the Apple hardware offerings these days. The high end Macbook Pro 10 years ago was around $3K and these days its over $7k. 10 years ago it had an expansion slot (ExpressCard) and now it doesn't even have magsafe.
- eclipxe 8y ago
  Apple Music works on Echo hardware as of December 2018
Semaphor 8y ago
For me the endgame is Bandcamp. The music I want, in the format I want (and often even for the price I want) and I can stream it as much as I want before I buy it. Though I realize that doesn't work for people into main stream music.
ip26 8y ago
You could actually go even further and draw more parallels between newspapers and streaming (especially podcasts). Yeah, you could store huge archives of old newspapers that are difficult to organize and look after. But it was fundamentally ephemeral, printed on cheap paper and all. And, that nature lent itself to a business model that lasted many decades. (Newspaper companies would have had a hard time surviving, after all, if you just kept reading the same twenty papers from your bookshelf)
toyg 8y ago
You’ve missed my point. Those are technical trivialities specific to music, which were being slowly solved through services like Musicbrainz. My point was more general: in the future, everyone will eventually be free to share any data with anyone. It’s just too easy not to happen, and too hard to police indefinitely. Exactly like printing books - even easier, in fact!

general8bitso 8y ago

Must be nice to have a high bandwidth connection with 5 nines uptime, no risk of your account being revoked, or the content licenses abrogated or expired. It is of the utmost importance to inculcate the newest generation of media consumers that renting is preferred to ownership.

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
I slogged through keeping a local archive of my carefully-ripped audio collection on a hardware RAID-5 storage server for decades. When I finally gave up in favor of Google Play (and subsequently Apple Music), it was liberating. At the end of the day, the "content" we're talking about here is purely entertainment. You can live without it. And even if the hammer falls, and the copyright holders go backwards, things like Napster and Limewire and eDonkey will rise again. At 10 years old, I never understood the line in SW EPIV, where Leia says, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." (Seriously, the line haunted me for years.) But it's a perfect allegory for this situation. Of course, I'm still waiting for the blowback against Facebook, so...
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > At the end of the day, the "content" we're talking about here is purely entertainment. You can live without it. You can live without a lot of things, including drinkable tap water and flushable toilets, however that is not necessarily a reasonable standard to judge things by. I use music not just to 'entertain' myself, but to focus as well. Besides, why is entertainment and relaxation always treated as somehow secondary/not necessary? I realize many people find purpose in being work bees, but some strive for a healthy work-life balance.
  - sacado2 8y ago
    > Besides, why is entertainment and relaxation always treated as somehow secondary/not necessary? I realize many people find purpose in being work bees, but some strive for a healthy work-life balance. It's not that it's unnecessary, but it's easier to replace. I have my nephew at home for a week, and his mother didn't let him take his console with him. Uh oh. No entertainment then? Well, guess what, we played good old board and card games. OTOH, not having tap water or flushable toilets would have been a much bigger PITA for him. (For both of us, to be honest).
    - general8bitso 8y ago
      Don’t take him camping. ;)
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  > I slogged through keeping a local archive of my carefully-ripped audio collection on a hardware RAID-5 storage server for decades. When I finally gave up in favor of Google Play (and subsequently Apple Music), it was liberating. That was my (similar - I never went to RAID 5) experience as well. I moved it all up into Google Play and haven't looked back. No more worries about a hard drive taking down my collection (in hindsight RAID 5 may have helped), no more duplicate copies or tracks that were badly ripped so they skipped, no more worrying about keeping a pile of CD's "just in case", just the music I wanted to listen to when I wanted to listen to it.
  - javajosh 8y ago
    What do you mean "moved it all up into Google Play"? Are they hosting mp3s now?
    - ablation 8y ago
      Yes, and for some time: https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/1075570?hl=en-GB https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/1075570?hl...
    - general8bitso 8y ago
      Do you remember mp3.com’s Beam It service? http://www.freedomworks.org/content/case-missing-copyright-law http://www.freedomworks.org/content/case-missing-copyright-l... How times have changed.
    - jmchuster 8y ago
      When Google Play came out, that was all that they started with, and once enough people started using it, they started selling music on it as well. I initially started using it as a way to easily sync music onto my phone, since it has a LRU of all your played songs, as well as any albums you mark explicitly for download.
- atomical 8y ago
  I had the same experience. It is very liberating. Piracy is increasing again because media companies are trying to silo their titles. Consumers want a diverse source of entertainment every month, but can't afford to buy the titles or subscribe to all streaming services. A Netflix subscription can be 1-3x the price of a popular TV series bought directly. I would argue that Netflix has devalued media in general.
- licebmi__at__ 8y ago
  I had the exact same experience, but then about 2 weeks ago, one of my favourite albums got deleted of All Music. So I had to search the disc, rip it, and then upload it to my account, which works for now but certainly put a dent in the experience. Let's see how it plays out on the future.
  - leviathant 8y ago
    >Let's see how it plays out on the future. Exactly as you'd expect. Aphex Twin had a CD that included the video on the data portion of the CD (I think it was Windowlicker, circa 1999) - but you had to unlock the video online. After a couple of years, the server shut down, and you no longer had access to the video. Of course, someone released a crack, and eventually the advent of YouTube negated that particular problem. I still keep local copies of my music. Part of this is because I have a not insignificant amount of music that I listen to that is not and might never be part of a subscription service. Part of it is because I've experienced early attempts at controlling access to music and video that I purchased, and saw how that failed, and I don't plan on risking that loss again.
  - TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
    Me too. My favorite band has 3 albums that aren't in print any more, and which aren't available anywhere. Like, you can't even get the CD's from Amazon. I've ripped them and put them in my library. But the freedom of finding NEW stuff, when you have access to (just about) EVERYTHING... THAT has been the real eye-opener for me. I've discovered a lot of acts that I would never have otherwise heard of.
- shermanyo 8y ago
  I had the realization that I may lose some specific music one day, but I'll always have access to new music
norealidea 8y ago
Digital "ownership" is just as temporary, and when "buying" digital products online (or, technically, even physical copies of media), you're only paying for a license that can be revoked at any point. Just because they don't hunt you down doesn't mean you properly own something. There's a reason SaaS took off, just like media streaming took off. Convenience is higher on the list of priorities than ownership. If they take my stuff away, I'll just switch to media that isn't barred from public use.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > If they take my stuff away, I'll just switch to media that isn't barred from public use. That's if you treat your media/services as substitutable goods. I don't understand this view. For me, the vast majority of books, songs, movies and games I peruse are not substitutable. SaaS services maybe - but then, they do their damnest to be not substitutable - that's called "having a competitive advantage". So when a company decides to stop serving some media I used (or paid for directly), I see something of value being lost.
  - general8bitso 8y ago
    Exactly this.
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  If my concern is losing access to my music, a hard disk failure is more likely than getting banned from Spotify.
TheLoneAdmin 8y ago
There's 100 million paying Spotify subscribers that don't meet your "requirements". Ease of convenience trumps free (stealing).
- general8bitso 8y ago
  These are not mutually exclusive.
- a_tractor 8y ago
  >100 million paying subscribers Out of 7+ Billion...
alexashka 8y ago
Ownership, funny. You mean how you own your electricity, clean water, shelter and food? You're in complete control, nobody can come and take any of those away at any point in time right? The solution to dumb infrastructure decisions, is better infrastructure decisions via communication and thought, not trying to hang on to your tiny scrap of stuff via guns, files on a computer or building a bunker.

kalleboo 8y ago

> We've reached the endgame - it's streaming The last line from the article hit it home - "I mean, where else are you going to get a copy of The Mr. Belvedere Show theme song?". Today, you don't need P2P for that, YouTube has it. Along with the video.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
For now. Check again in a year, there's a good chance it won't be there anymore.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  I support decentralization and do agree with you in principal (and I youtube-dl any video I care about), but in practice I've actually seen the breadth of content expand. You can even find clips of The Simpsons on there now. (of course there are the high-profile examples of political content being taken down)
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I do not disagree. I've seen both, really - on the one hand, I find recently uploaded clips of old things; on the other hand, I recently scrolled through my "likes" list on YouTube, and something like 1/4 of it points to removed videos.
    - kalleboo 8y ago
      Same here. While it's not a system I'd like to trust the future to, I see it continuing to pass the "I mean, where else are you going to get a copy of The Mr. Belvedere Show theme song?" test for the foreseeable future.
- amyjess 8y ago
  In which case, running youtube-dl when you discover something you want to keep around for good is going to be a better solution than Napster.

perakojotgenije 8y ago

XKCD - Steal This Comic https://xkcd.com/488/ https://xkcd.com/488/

ArtWomb 8y ago

>>> We've reached the endgame - it's streaming Good analysis. Implicit in this, is that the same fault that ultimately drew users from Napster, the lack of end user anonymity, is inherent in modern services. There is a broader ethical issue at play as well. Can you fund and develop technology that is in the present moment operating in a legal grey area. Betting that in some possible future, culture and the laws will change?

AsyncAwait 8y ago

> If you want to store and maintain a personal 128GB collection of MP3 files. Actually, it annoys me how it's widely accepted that MP3 is an acceptable format to pay the same price for as CDs, while you could rip lossless FLACs from CDs. Either MP3s should be cheaper, or switching to FLAC should be an option, (like Bandcamp does it).

nolok 8y ago
That's because nobody knows what FLAC is. Why does nobody knows what FLAC is ? Because 192kbps MP3 quality is acceptable enough to most. If people don't have a problem, they don't expect a fix. I'm not saying you're technically or auditively wrong, I'm saying that's not how the market has ever worked.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  There are places that provide the option, such as Bandcamp, 7digital, HDTracks etc. so it doesn't seem to be a completely deserted market. What I don't understand about iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play and many others is that they're likely getting the tracks lossless anyway, they're then taking than and downsampling it to their common MP3 encoder settings for all tracks. It seems to me it would be trivial to add a 'FORMAT:' option, (that defaults to MP3), but allows for FLAC for these who know what it is. Am aware there are specialist lossless streaming services, but I just don't understand the block of making this an option everywhere, including the iTunes Store, which has a massive catalog and Spotify, where the curated playlists etc. are.
  - Erwin 8y ago
    Tidal offers exactly this, see e.g. https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000397069-TIDAL-MASTERS https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000397069-TID... and Tidal HIFI. If there's sufficient market interest in this (Tidal HIFI is twice the cost of normal Tidal) then the enthusiasts will rally around the service. It doesn't look like the market cares that much, and I couldn't really hear a significant difference between's Spotify 320k stream and Tidal's masters (using HD800S + Mojo Chord as DAC).

LandR 8y ago

I'd much rather have my own mp3 collection, and do, of thousands of tracks. All legally purchased, I don't steal music. I don't want to rely on a song being on a particular streaming service.

api 8y ago

I don't disagree with you, but the two are not mutually exclusive. I tend to use streaming for some music but when I really love something I like to have it. It's also not that hard to organize music files and 128gb of storage is peanuts. (Am I the only one who doesn't hate iTunes? It's not a bad organizer.)

black_puppydog 8y ago

The "endgame" would have to include something that Napster had, and spotify etc don't: guaranteed, unlimited, non-regulated access to everything from everywhere, any time. I recognize that is the ideal spotify is striving for, and they're on the right trajectory. But they rest within the boundaries set by (inter)national copyright law, and that just goes counter to some of those features. In that sense, we may be in an endgame-like situation, but I don't see this game being over before copyright is severely reformed or just outright destroyed by technological means.

raxxorrax 8y ago

Audiogalaxy (RIP) is still superior to any currently available streaming service and had a vastly more diverse palette on content.

grendelt 8y ago
That and Scour were where I found the really good, obscure (or properly titled) tracks. I used them to locate some of the biggest FTP archives of MP3s I liked, then I'd just grab as many as I could (while uploading other obscure tracks from other sources to keep my ratio up).

godzillabrennus 8y ago

I pay Apple $35 a year for iTunes Match. That puts my "ripped" music into their cloud. Years later they introduced streaming and I got hooked on an Apple Music Subscription. The biggest issue I have these days is that Apple's smart home stuff is overpriced so now I also pay for an Amazon music subscription to us with the Echo hardware. That all said I am so uninspired by the Apple hardware offerings these days. The high end Macbook Pro 10 years ago was around $3K and these days its over $7k. 10 years ago it had an expansion slot (ExpressCard) and now it doesn't even have magsafe.

eclipxe 8y ago
Apple Music works on Echo hardware as of December 2018

Semaphor 8y ago

For me the endgame is Bandcamp. The music I want, in the format I want (and often even for the price I want) and I can stream it as much as I want before I buy it. Though I realize that doesn't work for people into main stream music.

ip26 8y ago

You could actually go even further and draw more parallels between newspapers and streaming (especially podcasts). Yeah, you could store huge archives of old newspapers that are difficult to organize and look after. But it was fundamentally ephemeral, printed on cheap paper and all. And, that nature lent itself to a business model that lasted many decades. (Newspaper companies would have had a hard time surviving, after all, if you just kept reading the same twenty papers from your bookshelf)

toyg 8y ago

You’ve missed my point. Those are technical trivialities specific to music, which were being slowly solved through services like Musicbrainz. My point was more general: in the future, everyone will eventually be free to share any data with anyone. It’s just too easy not to happen, and too hard to police indefinitely. Exactly like printing books - even easier, in fact!