Amazon paid music subscription will soon include ads and lose downloads

That's the problem with subscription services. It's a coercive relationship where the terms are unilateral. As an alternative, I've been buying music from Bandcamp for quite some time now and have a huge library built in addition to the CDs I already owned and ripped to my NAS, which I can stream from anywhere thanks to Jellyfin.

If I miss out on some stuff because it's not easily obtainable, whatever, at least my music is my own and doesn't magically go missing because of some random subscription licensing deal.

My favorite is when I canceled Spotify years ago, and they show this custom playlist like "we'll miss you" and has all these songs to say goodbye with or whatever. But.. due to Spotify's frequent delisting of songs, one or two of the songs were not playable. Gotta love it.

There is only one way to stop this:

Never subscribe, ever. No streaming, and no cloud.

If you don't have the [unencumbered] file, it's not your media.

Vote for a government that will levy hefty taxes on recurrent revenue model businesses when what is delivered could be delivered permanently in one transaction, like another sin tax.

Vote for defanging DMCA and mandating implementation of open protocols for commercial products; universal machines are not to be golden handcuffs pilfering the people!

This stops when we all decide we're mad as hell, and we're not going to take rentier games anymore!

Not to defend Amazon here, but I think this is talking about the already severely limited streaming benefit of Prime, not the dedicated Amazon Music paid subscription. The former is not really comparable to a actual paid music subscription service.

If youtube music pulls this I will literally cancel my sub and delete all of the apps. The music app is the only reason I still have premium.

Title is misleading. This is about the “free” add-on perk to Amazon Prime that was added to make the price raises for Prime somewhat less offensive, similar to Amazon Prime Video.

This is not about Amazon Music Unlimited, which is their computer Apple Music and Spotify.

I'm expecting most everything to go this route eventually. Charging a subscription fee and having ads seems to be a money maker, so most services will get here eventually.

This is also one of the reasons I don't like the direction the video games market has gone. Most games (at least on PC) require Steam or EGS or similar service to access them. At some point, I'm expecting those to transition to a subscription model and/or become very heavy with ads, and then you'll need to deal with ads or subscription fees just to keep accessing stuff you already bought.

Well then.. I'll gladly stick to Spotify

The best streaming subscription I've ever paid money for is Mullvad. I run my Radarr box through a VPN so my ISP doesn't complain and hijack my DNS.

I can search for any show, movie, music, or book ever published and have a copy with permanent unrestricted access forever, for free.

Fuck all these subscription services. Approximately none of the money you pay goes to the actors, musicians, authors that actually produced the work, it all goes to Amazon and Netflix and Disney. If the people who make your media don't get paid either way, why bother paying Amazon and Netflix for an inferior product, inferior service, and inferior experience?

Big Streaming has unwittingly fully conceeded the piracy wars to the pirates.

Make your own mix-tapes, mix-CDs, or mix-mp3s.

SomaFM is streaming music on 46 channels and it is all free (but give Rusty some money if you can).

Just saying.

This is what Amazon did with Amazon Prime. I was paying for no ads, then they added ads and demanded a ransomm of $36/year to return to the no-ad experience I was already paying for. I cancelled Prime and vote with my wallet by not giving them money. I also had AWS cloud stuff. I pulled everything. I don't believe that should even be legal, and there is probably a regulation against it that just isn't being enforced because the like of Amazon vote with money, because corporations are people and money is speech. The entire economic system in the USA is designed to do one thing, and one thing only. Find every way possible to make sure money goes up from the poorest to the richest. Citizens United must go if we want to see adults running the country again in good faith and with common-sense regulations opn the wealthiest corporations, and those with monopolies. We we are seeing is what happens when capitalism no longer has gaurdrails to protect consumer. I'm not anti-capitalism, but I do argure that umnregulated capitalism is unsustainable, and regulation is necessary bot both the good of the corporations and more importainly, the midle-class down to the poorest amongst us. Consumer protection used to be a thing, but all of the agencies that were a bulwark against enshittification have been dismantled or destroyed completely. Corporations are not people, and money is not political speech. Enshittification couldn't happen the way it is now where there were things the Consumer Saftey Board and other organizations that made sure there's no lead in your kids toys.

This is the enshitification path, sooner or later these services have to turn to shit or charge a premium to be sustainable.

Step 1 is to provide a good value, then lure in creators, then lock them in and profit.

As expected. This is the default path, happened may times before starting with premium TV channels.