4 ms·

This is the model that helped the music industry come out of the Napster era. $1 single-serve songs with minimal friction to purchase was an attractive proposi

• rchaud 5y ago
  $1 songs are about as dead today as $2.99 ringtones. I'd argue we never moved past the Napster era. Spotify was freemium at birth, it was Napster with a subscription option. Nobody is paying piecemeal for audio or video these days. Over the past decade the Internet became mobile-centric rather than desktop-centric. A generation of users grew up connecting entertainment with phones and tablets, rater than computers. Mobile devices are opaque and locked down in ways computers never were, but they're also much easier to use. So it's not a surprise that someone today might look at you pityingly if you show them how to get something from a torrent or p2p client. They'll pull up the Youtube/Spotify link in a couple of seconds, and for them, it's the exact same thing.