Hacker News Reader

Comment by rapfaria | Hacker News Reader

Until you are paying for 10 distinct services, and the music colossi start to create services of their own.

Who you gonna call? Plex+sonarr

A music colossus already tried this, and Tidal landed with a thud.

People are loyal to artists, not labels, and artists change labels on a fairly regular basis. It's not like TV where shows generally live and die on a single channel, and maybe get salvaged onto a second one.

And if not loyal to an artist it is a genera or station. Classical music listeners can get Bach from a number of different artists, if a few are missing they typically can get by with the others. If someone puts a station on Pandora it will be a long time before they notice that something is missing.

With TV there is a long standing character development to get people interested in something in particular. With music you often just want a style - though there are favorites with particular meaning that you may want.

Even loyalty to an artist is overrated. Tidal had exclusivity with some of the biggest names in music with dedicated fanbases and this mostly got people to sign up for the one-month free trial and cancel.

Beyonce and Jay-Z moved back onto Spotify. This is a model that is proven not to work.

To be fair, there is also a difference between streaming shows and music.

For shows, I sit on my couch and either open Netflix or Prime Video, and then start the show I'm going to be watching the next hour.

For music, I have Spotify playlists for different moods/genres. If a specific song/artist is not on Spotify, too bad, but I'm not going to stop cooking, wash my hands, go to my phone to switch apps, go back to cooking, stop again in 10 mins. to go back to Spotify

This is why Netflix was great, it showed the TV world they were doing it wrong by having 100's of services rather than one with everything.

Now people want a cut of Netflix pie and making the same mistake again.

Maybe unpopular opinion: you don't need to pay for 10 distinct services at the same time. Like, there's a show that I want to watch on Crave, I pay for a month and watch it - along with other stuff that might interest me. Then there's something else on Starz - I do the same.

2 concurrent streaming service is good enough for most people, I think, specially considering most streaming services add full seasons at once, instead of weekly episodes. And even in that case, you can just wait a couple months until the whole show is available, and spend 10 bucks for a month's subscription.

It definitely adds some friction though. At least for me, I would probably just ignore, say, new Disney+ content rather than try and go through a whole setup and cancellation process. It might be annoying. I might forget. There is a reason why "see what subscriptions you're actually using" is a frequent first step in programs to rein in your personal finance.

> There is a reason why "see what subscriptions you're actually using" is a frequent first step in programs to rein in your personal finance.

Oh yeah, absolutely. What I do for anything supposed to be temporary, is cancelling after subscribing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com