They are ridiculously expensive to begin with, thus my waiting for a special occasion to spend that much money to get a first-party one. Here it is, probably priced lower than the others because of the ugly colour that I kind of like.
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
Not great, but not bad for something to half-pay attention to.
Report them
How?
I have not been able to find anything about restrictions to stop the price gouging.
It was so hastily-implemented that I think it's either an oversight or by design.
It's not confirmed afaik, but there is big motive behind it for Spotify to flood listeners with artists they don't have to pay.
There's also the apparent problem of third parties uploading AI slop. Spotify is putting in minimum listener requirements to supposedly deal with this, but what it will do instead is it choke out real small artists, and the AI artists will just get botted above the minimum pay threshold. To me, this gives Spotify even more motive than before to dilute all artists on the platform with their own AI music. They already make deals with large labels and podcasters, they don't care about the other 90% of artists who eat at their bottom line.
"Spotify ... anticipates reaching profitability for the full year in 2024, which would mark the company's first full profitable year since it launched 18 years ago."
Interesting that they anticipate a full year of profit when there is this "AI problem" plaguing them. How convenient it would be if it turned out to be their own AI artists they don't have to pay.
"Ek said moving forward, Spotify will be more disciplined about how it spends money. "You should not expect that we're going to go back to 2021 behavior. We want to be very resourceful," he said. "
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/13/spotify-projects-first-full-year-of-profitability-ever
This video shows some AI artist profiles and talks about it more:
Bandcamp is a good option for directly supporting artists for the time being, especially if you queue up all your purchases for a Bandcamp Friday, where artists/labels receive all the money rather than BC taking their 20% cut.
Not just a good option, but the best option I know of. If you buy an album for $5, that's equivalent to the earnings for thousands of plays on Spotify. And that would be assuming the artist even gets enough total Spotify plays to qualify for their payout under the new rules.
They are stealing from artists who bring business to the platform, and using the guise of protecting themselves from bot streamers. Oh, and they recently raised the subscription price by 25% in my country. Spotify was the most satisfying subscription to cancel that I have ever cancelled.
They're also being accused of pushing their own AI-generated slop music so that they have to pay out even less to real artists. Fuck Spotify.
Land of the free
How did it happen?
How are you currently surviving?
How do you plan to change the situation?
Graphics have never been a priority for me, they're more like an inevitable side effect of technology advancing. Luckily there is no shortage of good old games, and a lot of smaller studios are making amazing titles with older art styles / less demanding specs.
hits blunt Cars on the highway are like data in a network. What if Earth is just a computer for aliens?
Agreed. I'm a sucker for fantasy.
I wish I had thought of it. I tried the Honey extension which sometimes shows historical prices, but no luck this time. I couldn't find any other way to double check the previous prices either.