I heard it from someone (not me) that they've been using a modded spotify app downloaded from apkmody.io for more than a year now and it's basically free spotify premium. They (again, not me) say its pretty damn good, unbelievably good actually. They (NOT me) are pretty happy with it.
I hate that this has been co-opted by "Jews control the world" people, because it is an apt and concise way of describing how shitty everything is going; some car manufacturers are brazen enough to charge a subscription fee for headed seats, and it's probably gonna stick and become the norm in maybe 10 years
I don't get what the alternative is supposed to be. You can't make stuff like blockbuster quality movies on ads and/or donations alone. And between ads vs subscriptions, ads are iffy because you end up with sketchy or unethical advertisements. Plus ad blockers make it hard to sustain a business on just ads.
In an ideal world, nobody would need to "make a living" and we'd be able to offer more services for free. But we don't have that ideal world. Musicians, animators, writers, programmers and more all need to get paid somehow.
It's admittedly annoying how fractured subscriptions get, though. I miss when Netflix was the only streaming video subscription I needed. Now there's half a dozen major services and they all want exclusive contracts to show certain movies and TV.
Personally, I'm happy to pay for the stuff I use a lot. Which includes stuff that I don't even have to pay for (eg, I donated $20 to kbin). It does suck for stuff I only want a little of, though. eg, I don't have any news subscriptions because I only check news sites here and there and it's almost never the same site, too (mostly I get linked from sites like this). I want to see subscriptions become a bit more centralized, spanning multiple sites to account for this.
When cable TV was first a thing, it was advertised as extra content and with NO commercials. Pay us money, we'll give you a big bundle of channels, and you won't have to see commercials anymore.
Then they started adding more and more commercials in. Nowadays, a half-hour slot is 1/3rd commercials, and probably another 15% of that time is credits and "previously on" or "before the break" or pointless shitty padding
Then Netflix came out. Pay us a monthly fee, you can see all this content whenever you want, no commercials.
Then everyone wanted a slice of Netflix's pie, and now we have a dozen separate streaming services you all have to pay monthly fees for.
The solution is Cable TV 2.0. Compile it all back into one service, charge a higher fee, cut all the ads out (again). Call it Fiber TV or something, idk. Otherwise people will realize it's easier to pirate shit again than to navigate and pay for 8 different streaming services
I just want to own stuff. I wanna pay for the series and music I like once and then have them forever. The problem with subscription gated media is that the subscription will eventually go away, and then so will the media. You will have paid hundreds over multiple years for it, but you will have nothing of it once it shuts down.
If only super intelligent dinosaurs that could recycle things for us and could remove the need for jobs, came in our planet. We'd have more time making Marvel movies too.
I think what would work best in an ideal scenario would be a free and independent platform. Something like Wikipedia or something.
Part of the subscription would be to keep the platform itself up and running, and anyone like Netflix, Disney, Fox, whomever would be able to upload their movies/shows/etc there, with no discrimination.
Payment could be the platform maintenance fee + access to the library of shows (and here more popular creators could get a bigger share of the pie) or it could be maintenace fee + paying for shows individually.
for me, it's far more about it being recurring than paying itself. I pay for software and media all the time. I just don't like having to pay over and over when i'm likely only occasionally using these services
We have to fight back against this. Remember the Horse Armor DLC? Everyone laughed... now look at shit. The best defense against this is an offense. Make this shit taboo and anyone who buys into it a fucking buffoon, socially.
It's quite similar to when I used to run a small cafe and people would say "you can make this yourself", "you can make that yourself" instead of buying stuff in - then they would say "if it hasn't sold by the end of the day, you can just eat it yourself - you don't have to throw it away".
Yes - that was fine when it was just egg mayonnaise. But then Tuna mayonnaise, and Chicken mayonnaise and then grated cheese, and ham....
When am I going to have time to eat all these unsold sandwich fillings? Oh and cakes, and scones....
A small amount is fine.
A few subscription services is fine.
But gradually EVERYTHING wants you to pay a "fair" monthly fee. Until you are spending more on these monthly fees, than you are on the electricity bill!
It was annoying with streaming cable replacements but I got it, I was replacing one overpriced subscription with a few lower priced ones. Now it’s mostly break even on that. I’m happy to have YoutubeTV, I split it with two friends and it works for me…
But lately it has been software subscriptions that have pushed me over the edge. I now have AllTrails, Strava, Adobe Photoshop / Lightroom, Silverstack XT, Xero, Mailfence, so on and so on… some days feels like my brain is gonna pop when the charges go through.
yeah I feel you I started getting rid of all my subscriptions about a year ago, I just went back to lightroom 6 which I own already and got rid of photoshop, I didnt use it for anything professional just making memes so I just use photopea for that. then for streaming I just setup a plex server and learned about usenet. I also started looking for software like davinci resolve instead of premiere pro, the old version of sketchup that they offer for free instead of the new cloud based one that I use for planning home remodeling. then I just started cancelling things that were nice to have but didnt really need, like the google play pass just because I wanted to fight against subscriptions and went and built a modded game boy advance instead
Would it be possible for everyone to switch to piracy? Could the current piracy infrastructure support that? I've never actually considered that. Video is heavy.
Of course, if that's where we're going as a society we're going to need a new way to fund productions. That's not a bad thing, the artificial scarcity model we have is dumb. Maybe state-funded agencies like the BBC could massively expand.