this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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This is why 20 years ago we had CDs and ripped them to hard drives. Streaming is a sham when you pay continually for access.
Who pays for Spotify?
https://github.com/SpotX-Official/SpotX
https://www.xmanagerapp.com/
CDs were sooo much more expensive than streaming. I would spend $12 to $18 per CD in early 2000's dollars and buy multiple CDs per month.
This feels like trying to explain forests to someone who only wants to tell me about their favorite tree.
I get how the technology has changed. As an elder millennial, my entire life has been a constant shift of technology. From analog to digital, and back again- from betamax to DVDs, from 8 tracks to tapes to pocket rockers to mini discs to ipods. And including resurgences as people "discovered" the benefits of vinyl.
My point is that this new paradigm has shifted ownership of what we pay for away from consumers, to give gatekeeping power to corporate entities that can shut down, or shut off access, on a whim. And what's the ROI? Increasing access costs without ownership is just a more expensive lease.
I am simply arguing that physical media puts consumers in a greater position of control over the property they have paid for than streaming. And I am intimating that it's by design that technology "leaders" have moved away from allowing people to OWN what they buy.
I pirate basically everything, but streaming music isn't a sham. You pay for the catalogue and the recommendation feed. Getting anything close to an actual streaming platforms variety and convenience through piracy is hard and frankly not worth the effort.
...and the artists get peanuts.
I listen to a lot of music. like, a lot. and yet from my calculations the artist I've listened to the most during that year still didn't get even a dollar from my listens. and with how absolutely garbage the Spotify app has become, I've resorted to just archiving my entire collection online in lossless format and buying albums I particularly like on Bandcamp every now and then. it costs me less than an ongoing subscription because one purchase is just one or two month's worth of Spotify Premium, I get to keep the music even if the service goes down, I don't have podcasts that I don't want shoved in my face, and the artists I like actually get something from me.
TIL: 20 years ago was just yesterday. Go buy CDs! They still make them!
My whole music library is local and DRMless. I find CDs highly impractical in the age of cheap high-capacity storage. I would rip them anyway, as using normal copies is just far more convenient, after which they'd need to either waste space, be resold or be thrown out. If I were insistent on paying and there was no DRMless option, I'd rather buy a DRMed copy corresponding to the one I downloaded.
Of course, but it's worth pointing out that PCs phased out the addition of ROM drives, which allowed the layperson to rip their content. Naturally, this allowed Apple and ilk to introduce streaming access, as though it was a fucking boon. No CD/DVD-Rom, no ports, just an enshittified processor, display, and a cloud. Because THAT'S WHAT WE ARE TELLING YOU YOU WANT.
Enshittified processor? What are you talking about? Processors are vastly better than they used to be, have much wider functionality, and they're cheaper than they used to be.
Screens are so much better than they used to be that I feel like you're trolling. Do you want to go back to shitty smeary 16:9 768p TN panels with terrible accuracy, viewing angles, refresh rates, contrast, huge light bleed? Because I sure don't.
PCs got rid of disc drives because nobody used them and they used up a huge amount of space.
USB disc drives exist. They are cheap. There's nothing stopping you from using CDs.
They may be, but you're missing the larger perspective by harping about the processor.
When the technology was ubiquitous, it didn't require specialized equipment ie USB disc drives, because the necessary gear was already built in. Which means more people had access and more sharing was happening.
Of course there's nothing stopping ME, I already know about CDs. But ask the average teenager where they get their music. Ask them how they would share an album. Do any amount of critical thinking about this, and my original premise holds true. But nah, you'll probably revert back to internally screaming that some guy on the internet insulted your processor speed, because THAT is the point.
People stopped ripping CDs and instead started downloading them (legally) via iTunes or (illegally) via napster or similar software more than a decade before disc drives became obsolete. Even the launch of Spotify predates the removal of disc drives from mainstream PCs/laptops.
Also, teenagers still know about CDs. They just don’t see a reason to use them and to some degree, I agree. While not having to worry about monthly payments and availability of your own library, music discovery has never been easier. I don’t want to buy a whole album from an artist that has maybe one good song. I also want to be able to listen to whatever song comes to mind, whenever it does. I don’t want to be limited by the CDs I have in my collection or whatever my friends might be able to send me.
With my shared family subscription to a streaming service, I can listen to whatever song I like, whenever I like for the price of 4 CDs a year. And I’m definitely adding more than 4 albums to my library every year.
That gear is necessary for a vanishingly small subset of PC users. It makes absolutely no sense to put them in PCs anymore. As a child of the 80s, you're reminding me very much of the people that decried the advent of the CD, and pined for the days of vinyl dominance. I'm guessing you think cars should still come with tape decks too.
Yeah, then everyone stopped using it. Disc drives were on PCs for years after people stopped using them. People took the piss out of new systems with them. It'd be like laptops coming with 5.25" floppy readers.
You're the one displaying a lack of thinking here.
My newer laptop doesn't have a CD drive and I never once felt the need to use it. Why do so if an external SSD fits multiple times more data, takes up less space and is rewriteable?
It's much cheaper if you have a varied taste though.
lol, ok. You do realize that if you OWN your media you can just hand over a thumbdrive or send the files directly to a friend? CDs are also cheap to burn. You can build an entire library for the cost of a couple months' streaming access.
You are parroting marketing and those words are hollow.
Sure you could do all that but that depends on your friends having the same music taste and also seems like a pain over just paying a few bucks. Ripping CDs is also pretty damn annoying.
I currently have 6728 liked songs on Spotify. Assuming the average album is around 11 songs per album that would be slightly more than 611 albums. CD albums seem to cost anywhere between 100 and 300 kr, so lets say they cost 150 kr.
150 kr * 611 = 91 650 kr.
Spotify Premium is 116 kr per month.
91 650 / 116 ≈ 770.
770 / 12 ≈ 64 years.
Could I get many of those albums used? Yeah probably.
Could I borrow a few disks from friends? Yeah maybe.
Could I even find all the albums in my country? No, I would have to. import some of the more niche ones.
Could I pirate them? Yeah, sure but that would be very very time consuming and illegal (not that I care about the last part) and we aren't discussing piracy anyways.
With all that in mind lets just half the amount of years (fairly generously). It's still a long ass time and the time and monetary invesment it would take to procure all these disks would be that it would very high. My time is also worth something and doing that seems like a gigantic waste of time I could be spending actually listening to music.
I don't give a jack shit if I don't own the media afterwards. I'm paying for a service and I get a service. I don't see the problem.
If you don't think it's worthwhile to you then just don't use it.
You are parroting Lemmy nonsense and those words are hollow.
P.S. If I am gonna burn CDs why not just pirate.
I would find having all my music on streaming EXTREMELY inconvenient. Not only can you lose access to some of it, not only are you paying continuously, but you're also locked to a specific player for this all. I do use streaming, but only for discovering new tracks. I do have a bigger collection on streaming - the tracks I like but not particularly so - but the main collection is just more convenient to have locally. I didn't download it all at once so no inconvenience here - just download a song as soon as I realize I like it enough.
Also even if I could afford to pay for my media, I'd rather buy digital DRMed downloads rather than CDs if DRMless aren't available. Not to actually use, but to correspond to the copy I do use. Specifically because it's indeed impractical, can be hard to get and and will be ripped anyway.
"You guys should argue more"
TBH I mostly get mine from Youtube, although have recently tried Soulseek.
I ain't the fuckface whisperer.
I pay to continually rip music from them, best of both worlds.
You wouldn't be able to point me in the direction to learn about such things, would you?