teawrecks

Switzerland: "lol you already couldn't afford our products"

Literally cartoonish levels of villainy.

Yeah, i couldn't find anywhere on their site that indicated I would be able to download tracks I own. That would change the equation I think. Then maybe they only charge for streaming and track download bandwidth. I could behind something like that. Then it feels like a better version of Bandcamp.

Currently I use Tidal to supplement my self-hosted library, but that's primarily due to music selection and artist compensation. If they didn't have random tracks I want to play, I would use something else.

From what I can find online, it is illegal in the US too.

"As specified in the Smithsonian's charter, the Chief Justice of the United States and the Vice President of the United States are ex officio members of the Board, meaning that they serve as a duty of their office. The Chief Justice also serves as the Chancellor of the Smithsonian."

In other words, you're wondering why Chief Justice Roberts and J.D. Vance let this fly.

Only as long as they can put it on debt. But the "vast majority" of Americans already can't afford to buy the $12 thing, let alone the $18 one. At some point it's not that they'll choose to not buy more expensive stuff, it's that they won't have the ability. At which point, people will just buy less stuff.

Democrats will prove Bernie won the 2016 election with this one weird trick!

Even if we assume there's an achievable rate of growth that can consistently outpace owned plays at any given time, as with every business, there will come a day when growth slows. And at that point, they'll be forced to solve the problem.

And then there's all the questions of, can I download my tracks to play offline? What if they go out of business? How many artists/labels are even going to agree to this? What about tracks I buy outside of their platform? And what does "own" actually mean given that you never "own" music you buy physical media for, you don't have any copyright, you can't play that media for profit, you just have a license to listen to that copy personally. By default the artist "owns" their art. But do they have to give that ownership up to the co-op?

It's going to be tough to convince people who don't care to switch away from spotify, and there's no reason for someone who can self-host to use it unless it's somehow more effective at funding musicians than just buying their tracks directly.

I wish them luck making the idea work, but I think they have their work cut out for them.

That's fair, just...for this to scale, it needs to be competitive with existing streaming services. And if the experience for a listener is the same whether a democratic panel raises prices, or greedy enshittification raises prices, there's not going to be an upside.

To me, the potential upside is identifying the problems with their revenue stream now out in the open, and addressing it now, rather than trying to build a captive audience now and pivot to something more sustainable later (as is the strategy for capitalist startups).

I would need to buy a lot of CDs at this point and I'm not doing that anymore.

This is how the music industry is screwing artists.

Think about it. Hollywood is union, which ensures money and jobs make it down to every blue collar worker involved in every Netflix-funded project. But music isn't union, there's just a bunch of random bands, and middlemen who will gladly take everything. The record labels and streaming services turn a profit, pay their execs, and get away with sending fractions of a cent per play to the artists. Most artists don't post to streaming services for the money, they do it just for the convenience of fans.

Giving money directly to an artist in exchange for their tracks or merch (CDs, Vinyls, etc) is the best way to fund an artist. Bandcamp is another middleman that enables this, but at least they have Bandcamp Fridays periodically, which is where they waive their cut and give the bulk of your payment directly to the artist.

IMO buying tracks on Bandcamp Friday + self-hosting Plex/Jellyfin + using Plexamp/Finamp on mobile is the best way to support music right now, and also future proofs your library.

This is an interesting idea, but I would assume that over time, the number of "owned" streams would dominate the number of "new" streams, and thus eventually their operating costs would reach a point where they don't have the revenue to cover it...

Uh, no, you don't do anything to them because this is clearly an expression of free speech reflecting the environment these kids live in, and clearly not a threat towards anyone whatsoever.

The only thing we need to do in response is fix the environment we've created where children think of school shootings so casually that they would make something like this.