5 ms·

It still amazes me that these kind of 'illegal business models' usually have a far better customer support than legal business models :)

Telaneo 1y ago
The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-laurels. I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
- FinnKuhn 1y ago
  Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
  - Telaneo 1y ago
    Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant. But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
    - b3lvedere 1y ago
      Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry. Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
  - paol 1y ago
    They are, and that's exactly why music piracy fell off a cliff in the streaming era and movie/tv piracy didn't. "Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell
    - b3lvedere 1y ago
      If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.
      - thatcat 1y ago
        it was what.cd, which is how they got their original comprehensive catalog so fast
        lfam 1y ago
        Citation?
        tmerc 1y ago
        Not OP: https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-files-new-book-1795109991 https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-f...
        pseudalopex 1y ago
        The article said the Spotify CEO was CEO of uTorrent. And Spotify used files employees got from The Pirate Bay. Not what the HN comments claimed.
        thatcat 1y ago
        To clarify I'm not suggesting owners of what.cd started spotify just some elite members. I happened to join what.cd before Spotify came out and the tracker was shut down. Initially spotify overlapped with what.cds comprehensive library of rare high quality audio significantly and as they moved out of grey market, over the first year or so, some were removed after complaints or contracts were signed with artists. Then what.cd servers were seized for copyright infingement and other trackers tried to replace it. To download that much data from their platform you'd need to have shared a significant amount yourself for years. They probably used pirate bay and other less comprehensive libraries as well, but the high quality lossless audio that you paid for was likely from what.cd. This was discussed on those tracker forums and irc during that time.
  - gorbachev 1y ago
    But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer. Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies. This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
    - jonathanlydall 1y ago
      "Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.
    - notyourwork 1y ago
      Music catalogs are nearly identical identical. Much different from video streaming services where the divergence is dramatic from one to another.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      > Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music What? If a piece of music is on one streaming service, it's on all of them.
      - brian626 1y ago
        That may be true for bigger artists on major labels, but for smaller independent bands it’s not always the case. I am a heavy user and fan of Bandcamp for listening to and purchasing music but I use Spotify for listening in the car and sharing playlists. I often find albums that are only available on either Spotify or Bandcamp but not both. The ones that aren’t available on Spotify tend to be self-released but otherwise there isn’t much of a pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be mediocre at best. And that’s not even mentioning bands that are pulling their music from Spotify in protest…
      - tmerc 1y ago
  - throawayonthe 1y ago
    that's partly how music streaming is so cheap (or even free with ads)
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.
  - port11 1y ago
    Catalog differences aside, I think that's a nice market to analyse. Qobuz differentiates itself on audio quality, Apple on its integration with iOS, etc. I do think they ended up competing on price and product alone, except for little things. My GF's Spotify makes great playlists, but they deleted my account twice and I'd never go back. So in that sense I'm willing to pay extra for customer service, which many of them don't care for. That's an interesting differentiator.
- moffkalast 1y ago
  20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.
  - Telaneo 1y ago
    The other large factor is copyright. If we had 21 year copyright terms for shows and movies, I'd imagine someone would have set up a streaming service with every show and movie under the sun that they could fit into that, and people would eat it up, since they often just want to half-watch Seinfield, Friends, Star Trek, et cetera, since its their comfort show. A service that can provide that without being hostile is quite a lot of what many people look for in a streaming service.
- billy99k 1y ago
  What would be the incentive to pour millions of dollars into a product,only to have virtually no way to make money or get your investment back? What would stop much larger companies, with more resources, to just keep taking anything good from smaller companies/startup? This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market. Piracy sites are competing with other piracy sites and the only differing factor is support.
  - Telaneo 1y ago
    > This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market. Tell that to the music industry. That is not without its fault, but the products on offer are much better than the movie industry has. The market is smaller than it once was, i.e. there's less money flowing through the system, because the consumer isn't being squeezed from every side. The customer is being provided a better product for less money. That's a good thing in my opinion. Having the market be artificially inflated because everyone's got their own small realm no-one else is allowed to touch without paying a hefty licence fee is not a good thing in my opinion.
    - filleduchaos 1y ago
      I don't think "tell that to the music industry", an industry where it is notoriously near-impossible for the people who actually _create_ music to earn a living from their work without signing a deal with a tiny handful of record companies, is the ringing endorsement of "customer getting service for pennies is good actually" that you are portraying it as.
      - Telaneo 1y ago
        If you can't earn a living by creating music, then don't. If you can't earn a living by creating movies, then don't. If you can't make money writing books about the intricacies of Unix system calls, then don't. You aren't entitled to earn a living just because you create music, movies or writings in our current society. If we're going to have free market capitalism and not have UBI, then that's the way the cookie's gonna crumble. Some industries earn lots and are easy to make a living off of, and other are never going to earn you a penny. Over time, which one's are which start to change. It happened to music. I believe it will happen to movies too, and look forward to that day so the consumer can reap the benefit.
nosianu 1y ago
Many years ago I spent two months in Odessa, Ukraine. I lived in a rented apartment not far from the pretty famous half open-air book (and CD/DVD) market (https://wanderlog.com/place/details/10511015/books-market https://wanderlog.com/place/details/10511015/books-market). I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service! PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
- egorfine 1y ago
  Ukrainian here. Odessa is indeed a city on another level. Easily the best city in the country and incredibly nice in the summer. Glad you liked it! <3
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    I heard "was". due to destruction from russian attacks.
    - egorfine 1y ago
      Well, summer or not, it's not really comfy to walk around a city during explosions happening right over your head. Been there, done that.
      - throwaway290 1y ago
        or walking around ruins, explosions or not
        egorfine 1y ago
aqme28 1y ago
I have often found that the illegal sites have much better UX for finding movies to watch. I can filter by review score, year of release, genre, country of origin, or half dozen other variables and in all combinations. And then they're presented in a big readable table rather than five options I have to scroll endlessly through one at a time.
- pimeys 1y ago
  With usually the best reviews compared to Rotten Tomatoes et.al.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction. You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper." Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
  - aqme28 1y ago
    It sounds like we used different sites. To be fair, a good adblock is MANDATORY on these streaming sites.
joshmn 1y ago
I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's incredibly hard to scale personality—which I have in spades—and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer support individual to operate equally as themselves. You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.
- freedomben 1y ago
  > I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. IMHO that's an asshole and not somebody you want as a customer anyway.
  - joshmn 1y ago
    That was one of the lessons I took away was that not every customer is a good customer. While I did have really accessible customer service, I didn’t want to be everything to anyone, even if it left money on the table. The quirks and features of the site where enough for the typical Reddit user (at the time) to discern, more so than those who were accustomed to official services, sports or otherwise.

Telaneo 1y ago

The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-laurels. I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.

FinnKuhn 1y ago
Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
- Telaneo 1y ago
  Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant. But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
  - b3lvedere 1y ago
    Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry. Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
- paol 1y ago
  They are, and that's exactly why music piracy fell off a cliff in the streaming era and movie/tv piracy didn't. "Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell
  - b3lvedere 1y ago
    If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.
    - thatcat 1y ago
      it was what.cd, which is how they got their original comprehensive catalog so fast
      - lfam 1y ago
        Citation?
        tmerc 1y ago
        Not OP: https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-files-new-book-1795109991 https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-f...
        pseudalopex 1y ago
        The article said the Spotify CEO was CEO of uTorrent. And Spotify used files employees got from The Pirate Bay. Not what the HN comments claimed.
        thatcat 1y ago
        To clarify I'm not suggesting owners of what.cd started spotify just some elite members. I happened to join what.cd before Spotify came out and the tracker was shut down. Initially spotify overlapped with what.cds comprehensive library of rare high quality audio significantly and as they moved out of grey market, over the first year or so, some were removed after complaints or contracts were signed with artists. Then what.cd servers were seized for copyright infingement and other trackers tried to replace it. To download that much data from their platform you'd need to have shared a significant amount yourself for years. They probably used pirate bay and other less comprehensive libraries as well, but the high quality lossless audio that you paid for was likely from what.cd. This was discussed on those tracker forums and irc during that time.
- gorbachev 1y ago
  But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer. Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies. This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
  - jonathanlydall 1y ago
    "Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.
  - notyourwork 1y ago
    Music catalogs are nearly identical identical. Much different from video streaming services where the divergence is dramatic from one to another.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music What? If a piece of music is on one streaming service, it's on all of them.
    - brian626 1y ago
      That may be true for bigger artists on major labels, but for smaller independent bands it’s not always the case. I am a heavy user and fan of Bandcamp for listening to and purchasing music but I use Spotify for listening in the car and sharing playlists. I often find albums that are only available on either Spotify or Bandcamp but not both. The ones that aren’t available on Spotify tend to be self-released but otherwise there isn’t much of a pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be mediocre at best. And that’s not even mentioning bands that are pulling their music from Spotify in protest…
    - tmerc 1y ago
- throawayonthe 1y ago
  that's partly how music streaming is so cheap (or even free with ads)
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.
- port11 1y ago
  Catalog differences aside, I think that's a nice market to analyse. Qobuz differentiates itself on audio quality, Apple on its integration with iOS, etc. I do think they ended up competing on price and product alone, except for little things. My GF's Spotify makes great playlists, but they deleted my account twice and I'd never go back. So in that sense I'm willing to pay extra for customer service, which many of them don't care for. That's an interesting differentiator.
moffkalast 1y ago
20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.
- Telaneo 1y ago
  The other large factor is copyright. If we had 21 year copyright terms for shows and movies, I'd imagine someone would have set up a streaming service with every show and movie under the sun that they could fit into that, and people would eat it up, since they often just want to half-watch Seinfield, Friends, Star Trek, et cetera, since its their comfort show. A service that can provide that without being hostile is quite a lot of what many people look for in a streaming service.
billy99k 1y ago
What would be the incentive to pour millions of dollars into a product,only to have virtually no way to make money or get your investment back? What would stop much larger companies, with more resources, to just keep taking anything good from smaller companies/startup? This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market. Piracy sites are competing with other piracy sites and the only differing factor is support.
- Telaneo 1y ago
  > This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market. Tell that to the music industry. That is not without its fault, but the products on offer are much better than the movie industry has. The market is smaller than it once was, i.e. there's less money flowing through the system, because the consumer isn't being squeezed from every side. The customer is being provided a better product for less money. That's a good thing in my opinion. Having the market be artificially inflated because everyone's got their own small realm no-one else is allowed to touch without paying a hefty licence fee is not a good thing in my opinion.
  - filleduchaos 1y ago
    I don't think "tell that to the music industry", an industry where it is notoriously near-impossible for the people who actually _create_ music to earn a living from their work without signing a deal with a tiny handful of record companies, is the ringing endorsement of "customer getting service for pennies is good actually" that you are portraying it as.
    - Telaneo 1y ago
      If you can't earn a living by creating music, then don't. If you can't earn a living by creating movies, then don't. If you can't make money writing books about the intricacies of Unix system calls, then don't. You aren't entitled to earn a living just because you create music, movies or writings in our current society. If we're going to have free market capitalism and not have UBI, then that's the way the cookie's gonna crumble. Some industries earn lots and are easy to make a living off of, and other are never going to earn you a penny. Over time, which one's are which start to change. It happened to music. I believe it will happen to movies too, and look forward to that day so the consumer can reap the benefit.

nosianu 1y ago

Many years ago I spent two months in Odessa, Ukraine. I lived in a rented apartment not far from the pretty famous half open-air book (and CD/DVD) market (https://wanderlog.com/place/details/10511015/books-market https://wanderlog.com/place/details/10511015/books-market). I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service! PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)

egorfine 1y ago
Ukrainian here. Odessa is indeed a city on another level. Easily the best city in the country and incredibly nice in the summer. Glad you liked it! <3
- throwaway290 1y ago
  I heard "was". due to destruction from russian attacks.
  - egorfine 1y ago
    Well, summer or not, it's not really comfy to walk around a city during explosions happening right over your head. Been there, done that.
    - throwaway290 1y ago
      or walking around ruins, explosions or not
      - egorfine 1y ago

aqme28 1y ago

I have often found that the illegal sites have much better UX for finding movies to watch. I can filter by review score, year of release, genre, country of origin, or half dozen other variables and in all combinations. And then they're presented in a big readable table rather than five options I have to scroll endlessly through one at a time.

pimeys 1y ago
With usually the best reviews compared to Rotten Tomatoes et.al.
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction. You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper." Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
- aqme28 1y ago
  It sounds like we used different sites. To be fair, a good adblock is MANDATORY on these streaming sites.

joshmn 1y ago

I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's incredibly hard to scale personality—which I have in spades—and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer support individual to operate equally as themselves. You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.

freedomben 1y ago
> I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. IMHO that's an asshole and not somebody you want as a customer anyway.
- joshmn 1y ago
  That was one of the lessons I took away was that not every customer is a good customer. While I did have really accessible customer service, I didn’t want to be everything to anyone, even if it left money on the table. The quirks and features of the site where enough for the typical Reddit user (at the time) to discern, more so than those who were accustomed to official services, sports or otherwise.