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This is a $1 dollar increase from what I was paying. But soon subscribers will be $15/month, then $20/month. I wonder how much of deezer's income actually goes to the artists.
I don't know about Deezer, but Spotify is raising prices while telling artists they will no longer be paid at all unless they reach a certain threshold of popularity. So they're boiling the frogs on both ends.
The middlemen who neither create nor appreciate music will still do OK though.
Problem is, Spotify has always been making a loss, so I’m not sure what side I’m on here
The great problem is that, as it turns out, as always when it comes to mass media distribution services (ie: YouTube, twitch, etc), bandwidth is expensive, having servers around the world to have proper content delivery is expensive
You got my gears turning. LOL, for good or for evil.
What if we had a paid service that worked like torrenting? DEEP discount, but you opt to share upload costs? (Best for last, bear with me.)
Company like Spotify coordinates it all, takes their skim off the top for running the servers, devs, payroll, workman's comp, unemployment insurance, managers, janitors, tech support, typical business stuff. Might not be $BIG% profitable, but 0.001% is hella money in this game.
We could even have upload tiers. How much you want to upload back? More = cheaper. Unlimited download no matter the tier, but you gotta "pay back" the system to for low rates. Wanna mooch? No problem! Top tier pricing for you! Go over? No problem! We got a grace period. Hell, we'll let your MB's roll over if you don't use 'em! Keep pushing your down vs. up, and sorry, we gotta tack a bit on next month. Would you like to go up a tier and maybe save?
And we only try to sell that offer to people our algorithm shows it will truly help. Had a vendor do that to me last week! "Don't take the standard offer. You're already doing $X, so $Y costs nothing more in your case." Wish I could remember the deal, but it was great to have a rep shoot me straight!
We'd almost have to start with an existing company. They got the infrastructure, contracts, and such, but they also got stubborn inertia. Some billionaire needs to get me onboard with this!
Any yes y'all, I understand the DevOps, Dev, infrastructure, payroll, management, etc., spend would be astronomical from scratch. Hell, ever considered the company needs a UI expert for $150/yr. at a minimum? Double that with taxes and benefits. And throw in the AWS bill. shudder
It would be a massive clusterfuck to get going. But what if we could get "Spotify" for $1-$10/mo. depending on your contribution?
Best: What if it was a federated/socialist sort of thing? I like country and rap (seriously), so I opt into servers that mainly have that content. Saves me and my fellow fans upload, because we're uploading to each other and not costing the service anything but a few pennies to the artist!
I know this has 12 holes in it, but am I straight nuts?
Windows does this with updates. You torrent them. It's called Delivery Optimization and should be turned off immediately.
I guess I misunderstanding delivery optimization, I thought that was only with your local network?
I assume this will have to be a streaming service, as opposed to a download service for various reasons. Here are some points related to it:
Skype (the video/voice call and chat application) used to be federated in a similar way on desktops until late 2000s. Users with available bandwidth were treated as nodes. People even reported, that sometimes, whenever Internet wasn't working, Skype was the only thing that continued to work — because someone on the same network was a node at the time and their Internet was working.
This all broke down due to the advent of mobile devices. Phones cannot be used as such nodes for traffic. Nobody was going to put up with Skype draining both your data (if your tariff/contract has data limit) and your phone battery. This feature of Skype is long gone now.
Similarly, too many people are using Spotify on the go. People would have to pay way more for using such a "torrented" service via phone apps.
The different nodes in such network will have vastly different bandwidth, which makes it more complicated to maintain a consistent stream (i.e. with not buffering, stuttering, etc). Regular BitTorrent downloads don't care, because they usually aren't streamed. However, it's possible to make BitTorrent downloads more favorable to streaming the content by forcing downloads of chunks of files in order.
The nodes in such service need to manage bandwidth for obvious reasons. They would also need to manage storage – the music, the audiobooks, and the podcasts need to be stored somewhere. Also, the nodes would need to manage CPU (or GPU or whatever) for encoding/reencoding/whatever. Managing resources (using them, allocating, throttling, deallocating) on a computer that you don't control is extremely hard, which is an additional layer of complexity. It is even hard on computers that you do control (this video explains why).
Apparently podcast apps Juice and Miro support BitTorrent, but I don't know anything about it. They download the whole thing, i.e. don't stream, as far as I can tell.
See also:
@shalafi
Its a beautiful dream, but youre missing the part where copyright holders refuse to rent you distribution rights :(
Surely it would be easier to have people download the content and then have the app relay the number of plays it gets would use less bandwidth? Maybe?
The frog in boiling water is actually a complete myth. The frog jumps out when the water is too warm for it, it's not completely stupid. If the price is 'too hot' for you, jump out. Deezer (or any other streaming service) isn't forcing you to stay subscribed.
I remember people giving Spotify shit for increasing their monthly price from 10 to 11. It was the first price hike in over a decade. That doesn’t seem devastating or bad or wrong.
Compare it to something like Disney plus and how drastically they increased the price since service introduction
I'm OK with the increase in price if I knew that extra money was actually going to the artists. But how do we know?
The extra money is probably going into server upkeep, software development, etc., not to artists.
If you want to support artists, Spotify definitely is among the worst choices, while Deezer isn’t great but not horrible either. A little while ago I compiled the most official numbers I could find for any service that I could find. Now mind you, they are a little older (2-ish years) and I cannot remember the source, so take those numbers with a grain of salt but here they go:
Per 1000 streams an Artist gets on average:
• $4.02 on Amazon Music
• $4.37 on Spotify
• $6.76 on both Deezer and YouTube Music
• $7.35 on Apple Music
• $12.50 on Tidal
• $19.00 on Napster
• $38.16 on Quobuz
As I said, the numbers are most likely not the most accurate anymore, the process for these services have changed a little since. However, they might still be interesting enough to know. Maybe someone is bored enough to search the web for more up to date data.
For consumers it might also be interesting to add, that Spotify and YouTube Music, while costing the same as most of the other services (excluding Tidal HiFi Plus and Quobuz), offer a significantly worse audio quality than any other service (aka no lossless audio) and that Tidal‘s expensive HiRes audio tier uses a codec (MQA), that is proven to be terrible and mostly snake oil.
In short: If you want to support artists, stay away from Spotify or amazon. If you want the best audio quality, stay away from Spotify, YouTube Music or Tidal and maybe Deezer (no support for HiRes lossless. Although to be fair, CD-Quality is enough for almost anyone). If you want both and don’t mind paying a little more: use Quobuz
I wish there could be good, honest transparency on these figures. Figuring out which streaming service actually best funds musicians is almost like playing with a Ouija board.
Spotify is continually reducing the amount they give to artists.
According to Max, Deezer pays more per play but Deezer has less users than Spotify.
Deezer has a smaller catalog, as far as I'm aware. Tried switching, but it's hard when I have 700 liked songs on Spotify and only a fraction available on Deezer. Liked everything else about them though.
You can upload mp3s on deezer (website, but once you're uploaded them you can Listen to them and download them in the app). So if there's something particular that's missing and you have a mp3, you can add it. I've personally never had problems to find things on deezer, but I've been using it a lot and it definitely shaped my taste.
Privacy.com card, limit $1. Deezer premium free trial with fake email, immediately lock and delete privacy card. Login to Deezer in the deemix-gui app. Proceed to download all the music you could possibly want, in lossless format, until the trial runs out. Proceed to create a new privacy card and a new Deezer premium trial with a new fake email. Problem solved.
I'm still trying to buy physical CDs. It is getting more difficult, but they're still around.
This shitshow will only get worse, NOT better.
Yep, if you buy the music you actually like, yeah that CD you bought at FYE in 2013 was $12, but that's $12 literally 10 years ago, water under the bridge, and you can still use it however you want to use it.
Meawhile Deezer nuts is making you pay for a CD-worth of content every month. That's 12 CDs a year.
Now That's What I Call a LOT of Music.
So I pay a CD worth of music but can listen to every new album I want every month? How's that expensive?
And that is why I pay for things I actually use. And suggest other people do as well. I pirate the stuff that is being removed or I know I can watch free with garbage ads or if I went to goodwill with a dollar but still pay for my music and YouTube. I'll get a lot out of my hundred bucks I give them a year and my artists know I appreciate them.
People are really used to free. They forget even their servers have costs even. Piracy should be a hobby or used when you don't have the means because of circumstances beyond your control. Bit an entire fuck everything personality.
You can just burn CDs if there is no offiical one.
I know it might be an unpopular opinion over here, but I feel that's still an acceptable price. Music is honestly the only media where I just can't see myself going back to piracy again, because the comfort and ability to discover new music is just pretty much impossible to achieve without a streaming service... unfortunately
It depends whether you enjoy the datahoarder experience or if you just want to listen. Also internet avaliability. My mobile data isnt even 320kbps sometimes so streaming isnt an option. I also don't want it all tied to someone else. I have a lot of music in my hoard that was pulled from streamers or wasn't on them to begin with.
I've been using Youtube Music with a custom front end (Innertune app) lately and it's a decent compromise between piracy and paying for a good streaming service — everything is free, it is streamed, I have an access to a huge library of music and the only downside is that the songs might have poorer quality
Innertune is fantastic. I recommend it to everyone looking for genuinely good alternatives to enshittified music services.
Remember that cheap subscriptions for digital media is the compromise we made. If they want to fuck around and find out then you should remind them that you can just as easily pay nothing for the same content.
At this point people should be posting things that HAVENT seen a price hike. Because if there are companies out there not jacking up their rates, they deserve a standing O.
Arizona Ice Tea. 99 cents a can for 20 years.
Cost Co. Hotdog and a drink is still 1.50.
Arizona ice tea is now $1.39 where I'm at in the midwest.
Even Cigarello's, which were always 99 cents as long as I can remember are now listed at $1.39 where I'm at.
My nebula subscription hasn't gotten more expensive.
I like deezer and I like that they are not part of big tech. It's just a small French company with a quality product as an alternative to Spotify, which is in bed with Google and everyone else.
Well worth the money.
AFAIR, they were aso one of the companies that paid most onto artists.
You can disable the Google Meet navbar at the bottom in Gmail settings by the way
My Tidal Hi-Fi quality with veteran discount hasn't gone up a penny. It's like $6-7 a month for the CD quality lossless.
Tidal
Woah, 40% off for vets! I might have to give it a whirl!
Oh pirate bay... Lol
This is why I steal everything. Jk
Qobuz has been fantastic for me. Great music quality and selection, and not just garbage hit list music.
I checked them out and it seems like they have great selection, but I was turned off by their shady marketing. On their home page it says $10.83 per month in bold letters. Then underneath in small print says "for a 12 month no refundable subscription with one payment of $129. Monthly subscription is $12.99/ month" not cool.