this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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Futurology
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Assuming you plan on living a long time, sometimes the long term investment comes out ahead. If you keep renting, you'll never make any progress.
But get why it can seem daunting.
Imo unlike movie/TV-streaming music-streaming services at the moment still kind of fulfill their promise to the consumer:
A for the average consumer mostly complete selection of content at a reasonable price (at for the consumer, maybe not for most artists) and a high degree of convenience.
Until you build your own library, which would take quite a while until you drop a lot of money in advance, you'll have a worse experience.
And even when living alone you could still share with friends, parents/siblings or a partner.
All that said I am very sympathetic to your line of thinking. Because it only works as long as the deal doesn't change.
And we see all to well how it might not last when looking at the movie/tv streaming market. Prices might increase beyond purely matching inflation, content might fracture into multiple services, sharing might get disallowed, and specific versions of songs or artists might disappear due to censorship (or similar reasons).
That's very like the normal path of enshittification. Offer a good deal to customers for a while, but once you have a big chunk of the market you can jack up the prices. When you buy drm-free media, no one can take it from you.
Right. That's what I was just writing. There's a little competition now with like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, whatever, and competition can keep things from becoming deeply shitty. But I wouldn't be terribly surprised if in 5 years the big players had merged together, and then things get more expensive. There's no reason to believe Spotify (or whatever private for-profit org you choose) will continue to offer a good deal indefinitely.
I get why people go with the cheap-at-the-point-of-sale and convenient option, I just would rather they thought further ahead. Especially people I know have money and means.
But the distribution side is only one part of the equasion and tbh the much easier one, which is why there are still so many even smaller players that offer a more or less complete (or at least large) library. Besides the ones you mentioned i can also think of amazon music, youtube music, deezer, and napster. I think there are also plenty more. It's really not that hard from a technical side to stream audio, certainly easier compared to the high bandwith you need for visual content.
The more interesting part is if anything could happen on the rightsholder side, which unlike with movie/tv-streaming is completely seperate. There you have Disney, WB/Discovery, and so on all doing their own streaming services primarily with their own content (Sony is one of the few to just produce and sell). But on the music side you don't have the large record labels like Sony, Universal or Warner Music to try and make their own streaming service. And smaller indipendent labels also make up a much larger share, and sometimes the music rights might also lie with the artists themselves or descendants.
That fragmentation of rights combined with the large variance of musics tastes requiring a mostly complete library to make sense imo is what currently holds of enshittification. So i would actually say there is decent competition, although at the same time it is very hard to truly distinguish yourself from the other services.
The question is whether something can break this balance.