Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

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I pirate movies because it simply provides a better user experience than streaming services.

I happily pay the €9.99 for Spotify Premium. I think I actually use it maaaybe 4 or 5 days a month, but it has virtually all the content I listen to, it has a pretty good app, and it Just Works on all my platforms. I probably wouldn't go back to downloading MP3s if you paid me to.

Meanwhile, the movie streaming experience sucks. The ecosystem is extremely fragmented (I'd probably need half a dozen subscriptions), content randomly disappears, the apps are universally awful and not even available on half my devices, and the bitrate is terrible.

Alternatively, I can enter whatever title I want - no matter how obscure - into a torrent website and get a 4K download link. It's way more convenient! I am currently building a small Raspberry Pi based NAS to offload downloads from my space-limited main machine, and that thing will probably end up costing me €400-450 altogether. I could get two to three years of Netflix for that amount of money - and I would've happily given it to them if they just... didn't suck so much.

The music industry saw a renaissance due to streaming and has never been more successful. The movie industry got greedy and delved too deep - they've got nobody to blame but themselves.

The music industry saw this renaissance, but did the musicians?

Except for the most popular artists, they seem to make very little from streaming.

Before streaming the vast majority of music artists never made a dime, and was never able to actually release content on previous media (vinyl LPs, printed CDs, etc.), most were able to record some cassette tapes and distribute around a town square, bars they had a gig, etc.

As fucked as royalties from streaming is, mostly also due to the Big-3 music labels royally fucking artists on the way and blocking streaming services to actually pay the artists more, at least now there's a way for the vast majority of artists to release their works to the world.

So in a sense the music industry hasn't changed: a few artists still make the bulk of money, but it gave a much larger avenue for upcoming artists to find an audience.

Living off record sales was never an option for the vast majority of musicians either.

The record sales were the ad, money was in touring and merchandising. It's the exact same today.

This isn't so for every kind of music. Folk musicians, who mainly play small venues and even house concerts, would make $100 to $300 per show from selling CDs. The merch table at a Jazz club would mostly sell CDs and depending on the size of the club could pull in $500 or more in CD sales. Small classical groups like quartets and chamber music would play salons and again, CDs would be a big factor. This income would often double or more the artist's take from door sales (if any) and make the gigs viable at all.

There used to be space for these musicians to eke out a modest but sustainable living touring a circuit of these types of gigs and festivals, but streaming really has killed most of it off. They could record a CD for a few thousand dollars and print maybe 5,000 copies, knowing that would turn into $50,000 - $75,000 of revenue at $10 to $15 per CD that they would mostly keep.

But the crowd just don't buy CDs at anything near the rate that they used to. Now most of those musicians make most of their living by some other means and the music has become the side. It's very unfortunate.

I work in the touring industry as a tech and its often the case that a production makes enough money for all the crew salaries and hotels from merch alone. And the crew on these tours are well paid.

This fact is often repeated by the PM at 1am when they are loading box after box of merch onto the truck.

How big is the band?

I saw a band recently in a 600 capacity venue. It was probably 70-80% full. Near the end the singer said the tour was losing money so please buy something.

Of the metal bands I usually see, I assume the majority have other jobs.

Half a dozen subscriptions? I’d need all of them, and they still would fall short. We’re talking hundreds/month to cover a good percent of media in existence. The marginal cost of storing and streaming a video is basically zero. There are so many shows and movies that do not exist on any services as far as I can see. Capitalists are too damn greedy for their own good in this case. If services provided everything at fair rates the arguments against piracy would hold water. Instead they create artificial scarcity that actively pushes people towards piracy. The individual actions of these gatekeepers may seem rational in the immediate context but lose all rationality when put into proper perspective. Unfortunately vast wealth and strictly hierarchical organizations have shaped these people to reject compromise and collaboration - the foundational survival adaptation of our society.

Podcasts are the same way. I have like 300 subscriptions and over 200 of those have patreons or similar with minimum donations of $5. The UX of rotating through the premium subscriptions to each is terrible. Ignoring the $1k/yr minimum, I don’t have hours every month to waste on signing up for and cancelling subs. I’d happily pay a non zero amount to support all these casters but the default easy path of paying over $1k/mo is so ludicrous I won’t materially support any that use platforms with such high minimums out of principal. Once again, these are conscious decisions made by patreon and credit card processors to actively prohibit true micro transactions. This has a deleterious effect on the industry by keeping people like from supporting podcasters. I’m sure this state of affairs is seen as a positive by the incumbents whose interests are threatened by these bootstrapped creators.

Why do you "pay" for spotify when you have innertune and blackhole apps on fdroid? They use YouTube music and works "good enough".

They follow newpipe ideology so its not even piracy

Music discovery? Ease of playing an album? Better quality? I've never tried those apps but I don't like using YouTube for music. Even when I had YouTube Music. I'd rather the song just not be there if the only version available is a 64kbit live version some guy made on his Sony Ericsson back in 2005.

youtube for music and youtube music are different i think

https://music.youtube.com/

it uses this

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