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Spotify doesn’t need to “get better” - you’re paying the fee for streaming rights to an ever-growing content library. Same with Netflix, etc. There’s also an u

Spotify doesn’t need to “get better” - you’re paying the fee for streaming rights to an ever-growing content library. Same with Netflix, etc. There’s also an unspoken but important accounting detail here - if you run an online software business and offer a one-time, lifetime purchase for your product, you are now contractually on the hook to provide that service to customers forever, even if your business stops growing, which means that the liabilities of your business are not capped. This is bad if you operate with a lot of cloud expenses, and it means that these businesses are unsustainable unless new customers keep coming in, whereas a subscription model scales with utilization.

nullcaution 4y ago
Not really, support for software, especially games are discontinued publicly all the time. The real rule is not pissing off your customer base by taking important services offline while they still use that particular product. Doing so would be a PR blunder, and obviously effect sales of future products.
- jacobsimon 4y ago
  Sorry I think you misunderstood my point - if you want to continue providing a service to customers that runs online, then a one-time payment doesn’t work as a business model. The fact that they have to shut down game servers is a testament to that problem. At some point the costs exceed the revenue and it becomes unprofitable to honor the lifetime purchase.
diffeomorphism 4y ago
No. If that were true I could simply use spotify or netflix with any software of my choice. You are paying for both the content and the software bundled together. And no, you don't get it "for free".
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  But you can, in the case of spotify: https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot
coldtea 4y ago
>for streaming rights to an ever-growing content library Ever-growing my ass. I've had lots of songs on my playlists removed because they were taken off the platform. And not some obscure acts, for example Westbam's Götterstrasse (which features anybody, from Brian Molko and Iggy Pop to Kanye and Lil' Wayne).
- jacobsimon 4y ago
  Spotify added over 20M new tracks to its library last year.

nullcaution 4y ago

Not really, support for software, especially games are discontinued publicly all the time. The real rule is not pissing off your customer base by taking important services offline while they still use that particular product. Doing so would be a PR blunder, and obviously effect sales of future products.

jacobsimon 4y ago
Sorry I think you misunderstood my point - if you want to continue providing a service to customers that runs online, then a one-time payment doesn’t work as a business model. The fact that they have to shut down game servers is a testament to that problem. At some point the costs exceed the revenue and it becomes unprofitable to honor the lifetime purchase.

diffeomorphism 4y ago

No. If that were true I could simply use spotify or netflix with any software of my choice. You are paying for both the content and the software bundled together. And no, you don't get it "for free".

colonwqbang 4y ago
But you can, in the case of spotify: https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

coldtea 4y ago

>for streaming rights to an ever-growing content library Ever-growing my ass. I've had lots of songs on my playlists removed because they were taken off the platform. And not some obscure acts, for example Westbam's Götterstrasse (which features anybody, from Brian Molko and Iggy Pop to Kanye and Lil' Wayne).

jacobsimon 4y ago
Spotify added over 20M new tracks to its library last year.