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Comment by ececconi | Hacker News Reader

The one product that I use and pay for that is so good that I recommend to all of my friends is Spotify. I'm so surprised how few of my friends actually pay for it though. They're willing to put up with ads and reduced quality for just $10 a month.

Other services I found so good that I recommend to all of my friends but do not pay for because my data needs are very small are dropbox and evernote. I bet some of my friends wonder why I wouldn't spend such a small amount of cash for their usefulness.

Getting people to pay for digital services is hard.

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> They're willing to put up with ads and reduced quality for just $10 a month.

I see two reasons for this:

1) Free is huge. Most people are willing to put up with a lot of bullshit for free.

2) Netflix. We pay $7.99/mo for essentially infinite TV on multiple devices, but $9.99 only gets me audio on one device at a time. It seems like a worse deal, so why would I pay?

Also: never underestimate laziness. Typing in a credit card takes work.

Re: Netflix/Spotify price differences. The relative size of the libraries (vs all content in the domain) is something to keep in mind. Netflix gives users access to some videos, but Spotify gives users access to almost all songs [1].

[1] Can't find precise estimates for sizes of libraries, so apologies for the argument from anecdotal evidence.

OTOH, $120/yr for music is, depending on your assumptions and how you measure, actually pretty high compared to what people have historically spent on recorded music. [1] I know I've been on the fence about paying for a subscription given that I already have a big library of most of the music I care about. It's not so much that I'm too lazy to subscribe but I'm very slow to sign up for services that are going to hit my credit card every month.

Netflix video streaming is close to worthless for movies. But combined with DVDs it's pretty good.

[1] http://recode.net/2014/03/18/the-price-of-music/

I guess it's because I value music much more than TV and movies. I listen to music all day at work, but I may watch a movie or show once every couple of weeks.

Because I consume more music than video -- music is on all day, movies are not.

I am one of those people. I usually use Spotify only to listen to a few popular songs – I am not one of those people who has 2657 carefully curated playlists and 22693 files in their music library.

So, to me, Spotify is really more like a convenient desktop client to the local radio station. And, just like I don't mind the ads from the local station, I don't mind the ads from Spotify. I'm certainly not paying them more than I pay Netflix per month.

Funny, I pay for Netflix but consistently cancel it because I rarely watch TV or movies but I consume music so much.

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