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At this point the media companies are relying on the public being “normalized” to buying their content. “Of course I buy my songs and hit up Redbox and buy DVD

At this point the media companies are relying on the public being “normalized” to buying their content. “Of course I buy my songs and hit up Redbox and buy DVDs! That’s how it works!” The tools will get easier to use and the outputs will continue to approach studio quality. You hear the stories from folks in the industry: I grew up making movies with my parents camcorder. Today’s kids will grow up using a computer and iPad to quickly make a movie, aided by ML tools that help edit and create CG content, and publish it instantly for free.

vonseel 7y ago
Legal avenues have already replaced illegal downloading of music for nearly all of us. I grew up torrenting and was a proud member of what.cd when that tracker was still alive. These days I listen to nearly all of my music on paid Spotify subscriptions. The number of people who have access to either Spotify, Amazon Prime, or Apple Music subscriptions must be huge. Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place. Video is a different beast, but I do like Netflix. Torrents live on for new releases and less available content, though.
- p1esk 7y ago
  These days free streaming sites like putlocker have good enough quality most of the time (720p or better). Unless you want BR quality, and don't mind waiting overnight for the 20GB+ download to finish.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    If it's not a sitcom, I'd rather have FullHD quality (which is between 1 and 5 GB / hour for h265/264). And streaming is strictly inferior to downloading, as long as your bandwidth is good enough (since you can start watching while you download).
    - p1esk 7y ago
      For me it's either watching something on a 13" laptop, where 720p quality is sufficient and torrenting is just too much hassle, or having a "serious" cinematic experience on a 75" 4k HDR panel, where you want to have the best available quality (i.e. 4k BR rip with minimal compression). So Netflix just isn't very attractive, especially if it does not have some of the movies I want to watch.
      - BlueTemplar 7y ago
        I just recently upgraded to a 1920x1080 101 cm flat screen TV - I'll consider upgrading to UHD-1 HDR when more content is available - most of it seems to be upscaled 2k, and when I tried to buy Planet Earth 2, they didn't even have it in stock ! (Not to mention that I would have had to buy an Xbox just to play it...)
    - bscphil 7y ago
      Depends on what you consider full HD. Sure, if you're getting something from a streaming site you'll be lucky to get 5 GB/hr. But from a high quality source like a Bluray I would say 6 GB / hr is about the absolute minimum (for a crappy old transfer), and over 15 GB / hr would not be unheard of.
      - BlueTemplar 7y ago
        Well yes, "good enough" is very subjective.
- Hydraulix989 7y ago
  Much of the music I listen to is not on Spotify. Getting rid of what.cd meant losing really rare high quality rips not found anywhere else. The music recommendations on that site were top notch. It was the digital burning of the Library of Alexandria.
  - asdff 7y ago
    It's just a matter of getting the community reorganized. That's the beauty of bit torrent. Content is hosted no where in particular, instead it's maintained everywhere. The seeders just need to be rallied.
    - torified 7y ago
      I believe that there will eventually be a completely anonymous and unblockable bittorrent replacement. A bit like Freenet but (much) faster. Perhaps the sites or sharers would be funded by anonymous coins for seeding. Once that happens, the seeders will return. We keep dancing around the fact with copyright laws, but the laws of mathematics are unbroken and information wants to be free.
  - vonseel 7y ago
    I did not expect to see so many what.cd expats on HN!
- butteroverflow 7y ago
  >For nearly all of us in the US I live in one of the poorer countries. I know not a single person with a paid subscription of any kind. qBittorrent with an RSS feed is miles ahead of any paid offer anyway.
  - Iv 7y ago
    Ssshhh! Maybe if we don't tell them they won't get to us!
  - Jonnax 7y ago
    So what funding model do you agree with? Since you getting for free means somebody is paying otherwise more of what you consume won't be made. So if everyone decided to torrent, there won't be a market.
    - Endy 7y ago
      I disagree. The market would shift. We would see a very clear split between talented and passionate amateurs creating for the joy of creation and large soulless productions which release only behind paywalls. Frankly, I'm all in favor of "artist" being a hobby and not a career.
      - Jonnax 7y ago
        The joy of creation doesn't pay the bills or put food on the table. Most people working a full time job barely have free time.
        Endy 7y ago
        You are correct, and what you state with disparaging feeling, I state with glee. The joy of creation should not put food on the table. You should have to work like the rest of us. If you have no time, make time and budget to create in the time you do get.
        deleted 7y ago
- poium99 7y ago
  I’m not arguing against mercantilism itself in the context of art, really. Just the lock-in currently enjoyed by the companies that own the MPAA and RIAA. If all the work is done on a digital platform and can be published to a dozen websites with a few clicks, their traditional distribution arrangements hold less value. I say own even though legally that’s not accurate. The studios effectively control MPAA/RIAA talking points. Those two groups exist to make lobbying for studio interests more economical. Again, the elite get what the labor class does not: unions. I digress.
- Iv 7y ago
  These days I just search the music I want on youtube and then youtube-dl it. Things youtube don't have (I am french and I know that a lot of french punk/rock/metal I like is not easily found) Spotify is unlikely to have either.
  - noisem4ker 7y ago
    YouTube probably has the best catalogue of electronic music too, but since they removed the 256Kbps AAC format, we're stuck with the audibly lousy, frequency-limited 128Kbps crap. Well, it was good till it lasted.
    - clarry 7y ago
      What frequency limit do you see? Opus is transparent at that rate. Heck it's virtually transparent at 96 kbps, and does a great job at 64 kbps.
      - bscphil 7y ago
        They're probably getting mp3 streams I would imagine. Definitely not transparent at 128 kbps. I'm not sure who Youtube streams Opus to, I should look into that.
        Iv 7y ago
        On a random electro-swing video I get the following choices in youtube-dl: audio only DASH audio 53k , opus @ 50k, 1.01MiB audio only DASH audio 69k , opus @ 70k, 1.34MiB audio only DASH audio 130k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.2@128k, 2.63MiB audio only DASH audio 136k , vorbis@128k, 2.59MiB audio only DASH audio 140k , opus @160k, 2.69MiB Seems pretty decent to me.
        bscphil 7y ago
        Yes, I'm actually quite impressed that they offer opus @160k. The real issue with Youtube is that you never know what the source was. If they're reencoding that from a 128 kbps mp3, that suddenly becomes much less impressive.
- SamuelAdams 7y ago
  Agreed, I like Spotify quite a lot. But for movies, Netflix simply ins't cutting it these days. Try searching for any movie from 2000 - 2010 [1] that made more than a million in the box office on opening weekend. Most of them are not there. I want to watch films like Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, they are either scattered across a dozen different services or simply not there at all. What I would like is a rent-on-demand method. Xbox almost gets this right: they have plenty of titles you can rent for up to 24 hours. You typically pay between 3 - 6 dollars per film. More recent films are more expensive. However, I would like to see the cost go down, especially for older titles. Basically match any Redbox prices (1-2 dollars), and provide a way for me to stream it on-demand. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_in_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_in_film
  - mindcrime 7y ago
    What I would like is a rent-on-demand method. Have you tried Youtube? They have a pretty extensive catalog of rent-on-demand movies, and I rarely find a mainstream movie that I want to watch, that isn't in their catalog. Most of them range between $2.99 / $5.99 or so, with really recent releases going higher, and the rare oddball title that's $14.99 or something (presumably because that's what the rights-holder demanded?)
  - asdff 7y ago
    I hate the rental model, it's extortion. It made sense when you had to return a disk to a store for others to rent, but putting an expiration date on a digital file is absurd. At least with redbox you can rip the DVD.
    - ggg2 7y ago
      specially when you are already paying a fixed monthly fee for the transfer cost of the near-zero-cost-to-them crappy non-premium media content, which is the same bandwidth cost to provide you with reruns of what you "rented" before.
    - zrobotics 7y ago
      Well, if you consider ripping the DVD valid then there's absolutely nothing stopping you from saving the rented digital stream either. At the bare minimum, aside from whatever DRM is in place directly capturing the stream w/ OBS is always viable.
- imiric 7y ago
  > Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place. Or aren't interested in supporting closed corporations that benefit financially more than the artists who produced the music in the first place. It's a predatory system trying to get grandfathered in from the (g)olden music industry days, and to be fair involves bigger fish than streaming services (labels, promoters, etc.). I'd provide a counter argument putting blame on artists: those who aren't selling and promoting themselves via a personal website or websites like Bandcamp probably aren't that interested in monetizing their music career. As someone still paying monthly subscriptions to streaming services, I've recently begun to purchase more DRM-free music in lossless format. I get the best possible quality of audio, directly support the artist (or more directly than via streaming), and I get to keep the music indefinitely, as long as I can manage the storage requirements. It's not cheap nor easy, but I believe it's the fair approach for consuming music, and look forward to the day I disable my streaming subscriptions.
  - mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
    Going the independent route as a musician doesn't necessarily mean they'll successfully monetize their music. While more artists are doing this, there's still a lot of the old "looking to get signed" mentality. I agree with your post, but I wanted to point out that someone not taking the more independent routes doesn't necessarily mean they aren't interested in monetizing their work.
  - H1Supreme 7y ago
    > I get the best possible quality of audio, directly support the artist (or more directly than via streaming), and I get to keep the music indefinitely, as long as I can manage the storage requirements This is why I love Bandcamp. Lossless format for my good stereo at home, mp3's for my car, and streaming when I'm at work.
  - hackeridiot 7y ago
    AFAIK, bands don't make a lot of money from selling albums anyway. Most of their income comes from ticket sales and tour merch.
- officeplant 7y ago
  > Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place. Sorry I just don't buy into the spotify/applemusic/etc life. I adore music, but my first step is usually supporting the artist directly via bandcamp when possible. Luckily a huge amount of artists I follow have bandcamp pages. It's not as direct as going to a show and buying merch/albums there, but I don't get a lot of shows near me for the genre's I prefer.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  >These days I listen to nearly all of my music on paid Spotify subscriptions. This is absurd from my perspective; to go from the wealth of music created through history and countries available on what.cd such as the bootleg recordings of live music in a small Cairo bar to the limited and commercialized selection of what's on Spotify (and I do have experience with it), along with the fact you no longer "own" (in an informal sense) the music. Music on the periphery, older releases and things people may not want to listen to are my lifeblood. I couldn't imagine being only able to access Spotify. It works for you and that's good - but for me (and I imagine quite a few other music enthusiasts) it's a totally different situation. Often if it's not on Soulseek or a torrent tracker then the only way for me to obtain it is through buying a physical copy, maybe from an online collector's marketplace like Discogs. I might throw in an endorsement of the very new things one can find on Bandcamp too - I've profited greatly from that variety.
  - mustacheemperor 7y ago
    I was ready to make this exact same reply - the convenience and popularity of Spotify is exactly why the current copyright environment fails the consumer and why What.cd existed for more noble reasons than "let's rob the record labels." That failure extends past just cloud streaming, because huge swathes of What.cd can't even be acquired physically either - good luck finding that beat tape J Dilla handed out on cassette at shows in 1997 Detroit, that indie electronic album that was pressed to vinyl once, etc. I love Spotify too! But it is a perfect example of how copyright law gatekeeps the creative media we can consume, for reasons purely inherent to the system and not attributable to any individual's malice. Nobody set out to create an ubiquitous streaming service that's missing music people could love, it's simply impossible to create something else legally.
    - vonseel 7y ago
      >good luck finding that beat tape J Dilla handed out on cassette at shows in 1997 Detroit Ugh, now that I am actually making music I wish I had access to what.cd. When I was using it all I really wanted was the best FLAC / best master of a nice Vinyl I could find.
  - 7y ago
- asdff 7y ago
  Music is acceptable. Spotify/apple music is a one stop shop, and the only reason why I'm on spotify over apple music is the education discount; the services are otherwise identical in my eyes. Legal limewire. With video, its awful. Networks and production companies are all to eager to cancel licenses and pull their content off of a service. The golden goose is that every network and production has their own service that they milk customers for $9.99 a month for (like Disney's B.S.). The end result is instead of you paying $100 a month for cable, you are paying $100 a month for 10 different services to get the same coverage. Back to piracy it is.
  - XorNot 7y ago
    Your summary of the music situation feels very accurate given that in general Spotify and other services are apparently terrible for artists. Which was less of a concern for me when I was on the mainstream pop train, and has become a huge concern now that I've been exploring into less popular genres (and leaves an interesting dilemma: if it doesn't make it viable for artists somehow, what's the point?)
    - anieberry 7y ago
      Before Spotify and streaming, artists were already getting their pants pulled down by record distributors. At least now many artists can distribute their own music and keep more of the cut.
- buildzr 7y ago
  It's interesting - for music this has basically been solved because the industry was under tight financial pressures and many companies including Spotify, Apple and Google were able to work out large scale licensing deals. Heck, most music can be obtained legally for free on YouTube these days. Compare with video where the market is fragmenting beyond repair and I get asked to pirate things for family and friends several times a week. In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too. I hope more of these near-zero margin goods will go the cheap subscription route in the future. It makes this a much simpler time for consumers. Right now, I don't know what service even has a given TV show so it's easier to just click the button in Sonarr and watch it show up on my NAS a few minutes later.
  - Ayesh 7y ago
    > In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too. Haven't they, though? In mobile, free-to-play model has solved most of the friction. For PC/console, Steam and Origin are doing a good job too. Most games on Steam cost less than $50, and that's weeks if not many months of entertainment.
    - buildzr 7y ago
      > In mobile, free-to-play model has solved most of the friction. Not really, this model is pretty awful as it creates motivations for developers to make the game repetitive or overly difficult in order to convince people to pay for stuff. Just look at the recent mobile Lemmings game, they lock you out of the game with a timer, offering only temporary timer bypasses in the store. A few developers sell a simple "get out of bullshit and ads pass" which does solve it though. Overall though in the mobile world this hasn't been an issue as the expectation of prices for paid games is far lower. > Most games on Steam cost less than $50 AAA titles are still $60 and in recent years often include "season passes" and similar, doubling their costs. > that's weeks if not many months of entertainment. I get over 50 hours out of probably 1/20 games. So overall, I'd say far from solved still. Origin has attempted a subscription model but it's expensive and offers only trials of recent releases and significantly older titles. Humble Bundle actually has a decent subscription service going on, but it's not on the sort of "all access" model you get with music or movies. Perhaps streaming game services will change this, but I do worry that they're a move in the wrong direction in other ways.
- mattdotc 7y ago
  >Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place. Or we run our own media streaming setup rather than pay Spotify $10/month. Spotify gives the illusion of supporting artists but the artists you listen to will never see a significant amount of money from your subscription fee. I've downloaded thousands of albums over the years and have my own music library. Why should I pay Spotify for doing the same thing? This is literally how they seeded their library when they started out. I have since mainly moved from torrenting to buying vinyl and using Bandcamp like others here have mentioned. I still see artists tour on occasion, but I'm not convinced that touring is sustainable for musicians, so I'd rather buy the album. It's sad to me that so many have bought the lie that Spotify et al have pushed. They are no different from the music labels. DIY 'til I die.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    Isn’t touring how they make most of their money? Hasn’t that always been the case?
  - vonseel 7y ago
    Spotify is worth it alone for the discovery to me now, and I grew up with my weirdo foobar music player and etc. I don't know what your impression of Spotify is, but it seems quite different than mine. When I think Spotify, I think Discover Weekly, awesome machine learning that finds artists similar to whatever I was listening to every time I listen to an album / artist all the way through, often finding me new favorites, well made apps that integrate nicely between my iPhone / Mac desktop app - I can easily resume something on a different player. This seems like it's getting smarter. I don't really use it the way I used to use Foobar / Winamp / iTunes - but I probably abuse it. I create playlists for whatever I'm listening to lately, and just access those. I don't want to scroll 2000 artists in my library. Downsides I've experienced - not many: - quality not quite as good as Apple Music or Tidal ( and definitely not as good as FLAC, lol ). This isn't really a problem for me unless I A/B something. Sometimes the library is missing something. These songs are probably not available from competitors either. - Lyrics view? WTH guys seriously, this was good at first and now it only occasionally shows "Behind the music with Genius'... assuming this is licensing problems but if you can work out streaming rights, can't you work out lyric sheet rights? - That might actually be all of them. Buying vinyl is cool but I'll never listen to it. Inconvenient. It's a cool souvenir. I used to have a big FLAC library. Somewhere along the road, it was lost, along with many other digital heirlooms.
- bitcoinmoney 7y ago
  Spotify still don’t have the eclectic selection of live music ripped by what.cd members. 90% it can pass but man I miss whatcd sometimes.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  > Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place. I'm very interested in music but I won't pay for low-quality streaming and music I've paid for that could disappear at any time or be geoblocked. If it's not DRM-free FLAC that I can easily convert to MP3 for the car/portable player, or whatever format I may choose in the future, then I'm not paying for it.
- bikeshed 7y ago
  after what went away I moved on to the two sites that replaced it (xanax and redacted) and the selection and convenience is almost as good as what was. If I buy something it’s almost always on vinyl or from the artist’s own site.
- crispinb 7y ago
  > Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place .. or find that the endless-firehose model doesn't suit them? I honestly just prefer to buy one album (either CD or digital download) or so per month. The affordances of that encourage me to choose carefully and listen with attention rather than vaguely skim. I'd rather get to know a few things well than lots superficially. It's a bit like web-skimming vs reading books. Of course you can read long form on the web, just as you can get to know bodies of music well on Spotify et al, but it's going against the grain. [Edit: in fact on reflection, my view is almost the opposite to yours: streaming subscriptions suit a listening habit not that interested in music per se, that desires ongoing background novelty]
outlace 7y ago
Agreed. I think most people are willing to pay for things they value, but in the past many forms of digital content was just too difficult or inconvenient to obtain. Am I willing to go to a local record store and buy a whole album for $14 every time I find a new song I like? Not really. Am I willing to pay $10/mo for unlimited streaming? Absolutely. Am I willing to make sure I'm home at 9pm sharp on a Thursday to watch a TV show? No. Am I willing to pay $30 to stream the whole season on demand? Definitely.
Noos 7y ago
This is like saying because Daz 3D exists, we don't need pixar any more. If you've ever seen or tried to do just what you did, you soon realize that the tools alone won't help; to make good quality art you still need to master a lot of time-intensive skills and have to go beyond entry level stuff. That time requirement will slow the artist down if he has to do it for free, or may even prohibit them. The idea of renumerating the artist is to enable them to produce higher quality work more often; if he has to spend a lot of time begging on Patreon, and half of his projects now are porn because it's the only way he can get cash for his passion projects, we all suffer. Sorry, I know I get strident on this topic, and hope I come across as civil, but tools are not that important. You could make a TV show for free at your local cable company, remember public access?

vonseel 7y ago

Legal avenues have already replaced illegal downloading of music for nearly all of us. I grew up torrenting and was a proud member of what.cd when that tracker was still alive. These days I listen to nearly all of my music on paid Spotify subscriptions. The number of people who have access to either Spotify, Amazon Prime, or Apple Music subscriptions must be huge. Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place. Video is a different beast, but I do like Netflix. Torrents live on for new releases and less available content, though.

p1esk 7y ago
These days free streaming sites like putlocker have good enough quality most of the time (720p or better). Unless you want BR quality, and don't mind waiting overnight for the 20GB+ download to finish.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  If it's not a sitcom, I'd rather have FullHD quality (which is between 1 and 5 GB / hour for h265/264). And streaming is strictly inferior to downloading, as long as your bandwidth is good enough (since you can start watching while you download).
  - p1esk 7y ago
    For me it's either watching something on a 13" laptop, where 720p quality is sufficient and torrenting is just too much hassle, or having a "serious" cinematic experience on a 75" 4k HDR panel, where you want to have the best available quality (i.e. 4k BR rip with minimal compression). So Netflix just isn't very attractive, especially if it does not have some of the movies I want to watch.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      I just recently upgraded to a 1920x1080 101 cm flat screen TV - I'll consider upgrading to UHD-1 HDR when more content is available - most of it seems to be upscaled 2k, and when I tried to buy Planet Earth 2, they didn't even have it in stock ! (Not to mention that I would have had to buy an Xbox just to play it...)
  - bscphil 7y ago
    Depends on what you consider full HD. Sure, if you're getting something from a streaming site you'll be lucky to get 5 GB/hr. But from a high quality source like a Bluray I would say 6 GB / hr is about the absolute minimum (for a crappy old transfer), and over 15 GB / hr would not be unheard of.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Well yes, "good enough" is very subjective.
Hydraulix989 7y ago
Much of the music I listen to is not on Spotify. Getting rid of what.cd meant losing really rare high quality rips not found anywhere else. The music recommendations on that site were top notch. It was the digital burning of the Library of Alexandria.
- asdff 7y ago
  It's just a matter of getting the community reorganized. That's the beauty of bit torrent. Content is hosted no where in particular, instead it's maintained everywhere. The seeders just need to be rallied.
  - torified 7y ago
    I believe that there will eventually be a completely anonymous and unblockable bittorrent replacement. A bit like Freenet but (much) faster. Perhaps the sites or sharers would be funded by anonymous coins for seeding. Once that happens, the seeders will return. We keep dancing around the fact with copyright laws, but the laws of mathematics are unbroken and information wants to be free.
- vonseel 7y ago
  I did not expect to see so many what.cd expats on HN!
butteroverflow 7y ago
>For nearly all of us in the US I live in one of the poorer countries. I know not a single person with a paid subscription of any kind. qBittorrent with an RSS feed is miles ahead of any paid offer anyway.
- Iv 7y ago
  Ssshhh! Maybe if we don't tell them they won't get to us!
- Jonnax 7y ago
  So what funding model do you agree with? Since you getting for free means somebody is paying otherwise more of what you consume won't be made. So if everyone decided to torrent, there won't be a market.
  - Endy 7y ago
    I disagree. The market would shift. We would see a very clear split between talented and passionate amateurs creating for the joy of creation and large soulless productions which release only behind paywalls. Frankly, I'm all in favor of "artist" being a hobby and not a career.
    - Jonnax 7y ago
      The joy of creation doesn't pay the bills or put food on the table. Most people working a full time job barely have free time.
      - Endy 7y ago
        You are correct, and what you state with disparaging feeling, I state with glee. The joy of creation should not put food on the table. You should have to work like the rest of us. If you have no time, make time and budget to create in the time you do get.
        deleted 7y ago
poium99 7y ago
I’m not arguing against mercantilism itself in the context of art, really. Just the lock-in currently enjoyed by the companies that own the MPAA and RIAA. If all the work is done on a digital platform and can be published to a dozen websites with a few clicks, their traditional distribution arrangements hold less value. I say own even though legally that’s not accurate. The studios effectively control MPAA/RIAA talking points. Those two groups exist to make lobbying for studio interests more economical. Again, the elite get what the labor class does not: unions. I digress.
Iv 7y ago
These days I just search the music I want on youtube and then youtube-dl it. Things youtube don't have (I am french and I know that a lot of french punk/rock/metal I like is not easily found) Spotify is unlikely to have either.
- noisem4ker 7y ago
  YouTube probably has the best catalogue of electronic music too, but since they removed the 256Kbps AAC format, we're stuck with the audibly lousy, frequency-limited 128Kbps crap. Well, it was good till it lasted.
  - clarry 7y ago
    What frequency limit do you see? Opus is transparent at that rate. Heck it's virtually transparent at 96 kbps, and does a great job at 64 kbps.
    - bscphil 7y ago
      They're probably getting mp3 streams I would imagine. Definitely not transparent at 128 kbps. I'm not sure who Youtube streams Opus to, I should look into that.
      - Iv 7y ago
        On a random electro-swing video I get the following choices in youtube-dl: audio only DASH audio 53k , opus @ 50k, 1.01MiB audio only DASH audio 69k , opus @ 70k, 1.34MiB audio only DASH audio 130k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.2@128k, 2.63MiB audio only DASH audio 136k , vorbis@128k, 2.59MiB audio only DASH audio 140k , opus @160k, 2.69MiB Seems pretty decent to me.
        bscphil 7y ago
        Yes, I'm actually quite impressed that they offer opus @160k. The real issue with Youtube is that you never know what the source was. If they're reencoding that from a 128 kbps mp3, that suddenly becomes much less impressive.
SamuelAdams 7y ago
Agreed, I like Spotify quite a lot. But for movies, Netflix simply ins't cutting it these days. Try searching for any movie from 2000 - 2010 [1] that made more than a million in the box office on opening weekend. Most of them are not there. I want to watch films like Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, they are either scattered across a dozen different services or simply not there at all. What I would like is a rent-on-demand method. Xbox almost gets this right: they have plenty of titles you can rent for up to 24 hours. You typically pay between 3 - 6 dollars per film. More recent films are more expensive. However, I would like to see the cost go down, especially for older titles. Basically match any Redbox prices (1-2 dollars), and provide a way for me to stream it on-demand. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_in_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_in_film
- mindcrime 7y ago
  What I would like is a rent-on-demand method. Have you tried Youtube? They have a pretty extensive catalog of rent-on-demand movies, and I rarely find a mainstream movie that I want to watch, that isn't in their catalog. Most of them range between $2.99 / $5.99 or so, with really recent releases going higher, and the rare oddball title that's $14.99 or something (presumably because that's what the rights-holder demanded?)
- asdff 7y ago
  I hate the rental model, it's extortion. It made sense when you had to return a disk to a store for others to rent, but putting an expiration date on a digital file is absurd. At least with redbox you can rip the DVD.
  - ggg2 7y ago
    specially when you are already paying a fixed monthly fee for the transfer cost of the near-zero-cost-to-them crappy non-premium media content, which is the same bandwidth cost to provide you with reruns of what you "rented" before.
  - zrobotics 7y ago
    Well, if you consider ripping the DVD valid then there's absolutely nothing stopping you from saving the rented digital stream either. At the bare minimum, aside from whatever DRM is in place directly capturing the stream w/ OBS is always viable.
imiric 7y ago
> Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place. Or aren't interested in supporting closed corporations that benefit financially more than the artists who produced the music in the first place. It's a predatory system trying to get grandfathered in from the (g)olden music industry days, and to be fair involves bigger fish than streaming services (labels, promoters, etc.). I'd provide a counter argument putting blame on artists: those who aren't selling and promoting themselves via a personal website or websites like Bandcamp probably aren't that interested in monetizing their music career. As someone still paying monthly subscriptions to streaming services, I've recently begun to purchase more DRM-free music in lossless format. I get the best possible quality of audio, directly support the artist (or more directly than via streaming), and I get to keep the music indefinitely, as long as I can manage the storage requirements. It's not cheap nor easy, but I believe it's the fair approach for consuming music, and look forward to the day I disable my streaming subscriptions.
- mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
  Going the independent route as a musician doesn't necessarily mean they'll successfully monetize their music. While more artists are doing this, there's still a lot of the old "looking to get signed" mentality. I agree with your post, but I wanted to point out that someone not taking the more independent routes doesn't necessarily mean they aren't interested in monetizing their work.
- H1Supreme 7y ago
  > I get the best possible quality of audio, directly support the artist (or more directly than via streaming), and I get to keep the music indefinitely, as long as I can manage the storage requirements This is why I love Bandcamp. Lossless format for my good stereo at home, mp3's for my car, and streaming when I'm at work.
- hackeridiot 7y ago
  AFAIK, bands don't make a lot of money from selling albums anyway. Most of their income comes from ticket sales and tour merch.
officeplant 7y ago
> Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place. Sorry I just don't buy into the spotify/applemusic/etc life. I adore music, but my first step is usually supporting the artist directly via bandcamp when possible. Luckily a huge amount of artists I follow have bandcamp pages. It's not as direct as going to a show and buying merch/albums there, but I don't get a lot of shows near me for the genre's I prefer.
claudiawerner 7y ago
>These days I listen to nearly all of my music on paid Spotify subscriptions. This is absurd from my perspective; to go from the wealth of music created through history and countries available on what.cd such as the bootleg recordings of live music in a small Cairo bar to the limited and commercialized selection of what's on Spotify (and I do have experience with it), along with the fact you no longer "own" (in an informal sense) the music. Music on the periphery, older releases and things people may not want to listen to are my lifeblood. I couldn't imagine being only able to access Spotify. It works for you and that's good - but for me (and I imagine quite a few other music enthusiasts) it's a totally different situation. Often if it's not on Soulseek or a torrent tracker then the only way for me to obtain it is through buying a physical copy, maybe from an online collector's marketplace like Discogs. I might throw in an endorsement of the very new things one can find on Bandcamp too - I've profited greatly from that variety.
- mustacheemperor 7y ago
  I was ready to make this exact same reply - the convenience and popularity of Spotify is exactly why the current copyright environment fails the consumer and why What.cd existed for more noble reasons than "let's rob the record labels." That failure extends past just cloud streaming, because huge swathes of What.cd can't even be acquired physically either - good luck finding that beat tape J Dilla handed out on cassette at shows in 1997 Detroit, that indie electronic album that was pressed to vinyl once, etc. I love Spotify too! But it is a perfect example of how copyright law gatekeeps the creative media we can consume, for reasons purely inherent to the system and not attributable to any individual's malice. Nobody set out to create an ubiquitous streaming service that's missing music people could love, it's simply impossible to create something else legally.
  - vonseel 7y ago
    >good luck finding that beat tape J Dilla handed out on cassette at shows in 1997 Detroit Ugh, now that I am actually making music I wish I had access to what.cd. When I was using it all I really wanted was the best FLAC / best master of a nice Vinyl I could find.
- 7y ago
asdff 7y ago
Music is acceptable. Spotify/apple music is a one stop shop, and the only reason why I'm on spotify over apple music is the education discount; the services are otherwise identical in my eyes. Legal limewire. With video, its awful. Networks and production companies are all to eager to cancel licenses and pull their content off of a service. The golden goose is that every network and production has their own service that they milk customers for $9.99 a month for (like Disney's B.S.). The end result is instead of you paying $100 a month for cable, you are paying $100 a month for 10 different services to get the same coverage. Back to piracy it is.
- XorNot 7y ago
  Your summary of the music situation feels very accurate given that in general Spotify and other services are apparently terrible for artists. Which was less of a concern for me when I was on the mainstream pop train, and has become a huge concern now that I've been exploring into less popular genres (and leaves an interesting dilemma: if it doesn't make it viable for artists somehow, what's the point?)
  - anieberry 7y ago
    Before Spotify and streaming, artists were already getting their pants pulled down by record distributors. At least now many artists can distribute their own music and keep more of the cut.
buildzr 7y ago
It's interesting - for music this has basically been solved because the industry was under tight financial pressures and many companies including Spotify, Apple and Google were able to work out large scale licensing deals. Heck, most music can be obtained legally for free on YouTube these days. Compare with video where the market is fragmenting beyond repair and I get asked to pirate things for family and friends several times a week. In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too. I hope more of these near-zero margin goods will go the cheap subscription route in the future. It makes this a much simpler time for consumers. Right now, I don't know what service even has a given TV show so it's easier to just click the button in Sonarr and watch it show up on my NAS a few minutes later.
- Ayesh 7y ago
  > In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too. Haven't they, though? In mobile, free-to-play model has solved most of the friction. For PC/console, Steam and Origin are doing a good job too. Most games on Steam cost less than $50, and that's weeks if not many months of entertainment.
  - buildzr 7y ago
    > In mobile, free-to-play model has solved most of the friction. Not really, this model is pretty awful as it creates motivations for developers to make the game repetitive or overly difficult in order to convince people to pay for stuff. Just look at the recent mobile Lemmings game, they lock you out of the game with a timer, offering only temporary timer bypasses in the store. A few developers sell a simple "get out of bullshit and ads pass" which does solve it though. Overall though in the mobile world this hasn't been an issue as the expectation of prices for paid games is far lower. > Most games on Steam cost less than $50 AAA titles are still $60 and in recent years often include "season passes" and similar, doubling their costs. > that's weeks if not many months of entertainment. I get over 50 hours out of probably 1/20 games. So overall, I'd say far from solved still. Origin has attempted a subscription model but it's expensive and offers only trials of recent releases and significantly older titles. Humble Bundle actually has a decent subscription service going on, but it's not on the sort of "all access" model you get with music or movies. Perhaps streaming game services will change this, but I do worry that they're a move in the wrong direction in other ways.
mattdotc 7y ago
>Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place. Or we run our own media streaming setup rather than pay Spotify $10/month. Spotify gives the illusion of supporting artists but the artists you listen to will never see a significant amount of money from your subscription fee. I've downloaded thousands of albums over the years and have my own music library. Why should I pay Spotify for doing the same thing? This is literally how they seeded their library when they started out. I have since mainly moved from torrenting to buying vinyl and using Bandcamp like others here have mentioned. I still see artists tour on occasion, but I'm not convinced that touring is sustainable for musicians, so I'd rather buy the album. It's sad to me that so many have bought the lie that Spotify et al have pushed. They are no different from the music labels. DIY 'til I die.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Isn’t touring how they make most of their money? Hasn’t that always been the case?
- vonseel 7y ago
  Spotify is worth it alone for the discovery to me now, and I grew up with my weirdo foobar music player and etc. I don't know what your impression of Spotify is, but it seems quite different than mine. When I think Spotify, I think Discover Weekly, awesome machine learning that finds artists similar to whatever I was listening to every time I listen to an album / artist all the way through, often finding me new favorites, well made apps that integrate nicely between my iPhone / Mac desktop app - I can easily resume something on a different player. This seems like it's getting smarter. I don't really use it the way I used to use Foobar / Winamp / iTunes - but I probably abuse it. I create playlists for whatever I'm listening to lately, and just access those. I don't want to scroll 2000 artists in my library. Downsides I've experienced - not many: - quality not quite as good as Apple Music or Tidal ( and definitely not as good as FLAC, lol ). This isn't really a problem for me unless I A/B something. Sometimes the library is missing something. These songs are probably not available from competitors either. - Lyrics view? WTH guys seriously, this was good at first and now it only occasionally shows "Behind the music with Genius'... assuming this is licensing problems but if you can work out streaming rights, can't you work out lyric sheet rights? - That might actually be all of them. Buying vinyl is cool but I'll never listen to it. Inconvenient. It's a cool souvenir. I used to have a big FLAC library. Somewhere along the road, it was lost, along with many other digital heirlooms.
bitcoinmoney 7y ago
Spotify still don’t have the eclectic selection of live music ripped by what.cd members. 90% it can pass but man I miss whatcd sometimes.
brokenmachine 7y ago
> Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place. I'm very interested in music but I won't pay for low-quality streaming and music I've paid for that could disappear at any time or be geoblocked. If it's not DRM-free FLAC that I can easily convert to MP3 for the car/portable player, or whatever format I may choose in the future, then I'm not paying for it.
bikeshed 7y ago
after what went away I moved on to the two sites that replaced it (xanax and redacted) and the selection and convenience is almost as good as what was. If I buy something it’s almost always on vinyl or from the artist’s own site.
crispinb 7y ago
> Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place .. or find that the endless-firehose model doesn't suit them? I honestly just prefer to buy one album (either CD or digital download) or so per month. The affordances of that encourage me to choose carefully and listen with attention rather than vaguely skim. I'd rather get to know a few things well than lots superficially. It's a bit like web-skimming vs reading books. Of course you can read long form on the web, just as you can get to know bodies of music well on Spotify et al, but it's going against the grain. [Edit: in fact on reflection, my view is almost the opposite to yours: streaming subscriptions suit a listening habit not that interested in music per se, that desires ongoing background novelty]

outlace 7y ago

Agreed. I think most people are willing to pay for things they value, but in the past many forms of digital content was just too difficult or inconvenient to obtain. Am I willing to go to a local record store and buy a whole album for $14 every time I find a new song I like? Not really. Am I willing to pay $10/mo for unlimited streaming? Absolutely. Am I willing to make sure I'm home at 9pm sharp on a Thursday to watch a TV show? No. Am I willing to pay $30 to stream the whole season on demand? Definitely.

Noos 7y ago

This is like saying because Daz 3D exists, we don't need pixar any more. If you've ever seen or tried to do just what you did, you soon realize that the tools alone won't help; to make good quality art you still need to master a lot of time-intensive skills and have to go beyond entry level stuff. That time requirement will slow the artist down if he has to do it for free, or may even prohibit them. The idea of renumerating the artist is to enable them to produce higher quality work more often; if he has to spend a lot of time begging on Patreon, and half of his projects now are porn because it's the only way he can get cash for his passion projects, we all suffer. Sorry, I know I get strident on this topic, and hope I come across as civil, but tools are not that important. You could make a TV show for free at your local cable company, remember public access?