this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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Spotify wants me to have a card from said county. I read that you can use PayPal, but they want a phone number from that country.

Any advice?

Edit: I'm aware that there are a lot of solutions to get it for free. I'm aware that I can just download my music.

Currently, I'm running running navidrome for my downloaded music and x manager Spotify for myself.

My wife has an iPhone. I don't want to download her music. But she's paying full price for Spotify.

I also like to listen from my work desktop. I have administrative rights, but it would be really dumb to download something like this to my work machine.

In several countries, I can get Spotify for like $30 dollars a year for 2 people. This price would be worth moving to legal. Especially for her, since she's paying $11 right now

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Price discrimination just means charging different prices to different customers based on what you think you know about them. Its benign form would be a market vendor asking higher prices of individual people who look like they can afford it, and then really fleecing the tourists who look like they'll fall for it. In that form it looks perfectly wholesome compared to what the big corporations get up to today: Supermarkets selling smaller package sizes in poor areas at lower sticker price but higher unit price, airlines asking different ticket prices depending what they know about your web browsing history, et cetera. I do not rate it a good thing overall. Even if we take it for granted that international borders are a thing, and services can't be intermediated or subjected to arbitrage, the rich man in a luxury condo in Brazil paying less for some thing than the minimum-wage worker in New York does not strike me as reflecting any kind of justice.

But this is the Internet. International borders are not supposed to be a thing here, and still aren't for the most part despite the best efforts of the most repressive governments to change that. The cost of shipping data from one side of the world to the other is effectively zero. The system where it's broadly true that different parts of the world have vastly different purchasing power is an injustice, it's not something we should be attempting to replicate in cyberspace. I can route my network packets so that they appear to be coming from any region I choose, and so can anyone who can afford Netflix in any country. It's not a freedom I want to give up so that big streaming services can extract maximum revenue from each national market separately.