Well, since you mention it, it seems like a heavy Spotify user will use far more bandwidth than someone who torrents everything to their Zune. If you listen to La Isla Bonita 200 times on Spotify, you’re downloading the same file 200 times. In fact, the main use case for BitTorrent is probably lack of a fast enough internet connection to use Netflix.
Obviously, I am using the word “download” in the sense of “download” there. I’m not sure exactly what it means to recording execs; possibly a stew of half-remembered images from Tron and 60 Minutes “satanic panic” segments that they saw in the late 80s, right before the senility started overtaking the cocaine.
Yeah exactly! And Spotify is paying them for that streaming… I mean if they think they aren’t getting paid enough that’s probably true, but that has nothing to do with the internet provider.
Yet another reason the ISPs should be Title 2 services. I don’t like getting endless calls from “Scam Likely,” but I don’t want to sue the phone company for it, nor for anyone else to either. That would be dumb.
This is pretty OT, but it’s quite fascinating how quickly people can be led to argue for a monopoly being a good thing if it’s convenient. I’m not a fan of the current trend towards launcher exclusivity, but it’s decidedly better than Steam’s utter domination of the games market during the last decade or so. At least Epic offers a (far) better deal to developers, who have been forcibly screwed over by Steam for years. What has Steam and Valve done to deserve this blind devotion? The kick in the pants Epic is giving them is only a good thing.
It’s occurred to me before that, while we fret about the dossier Facebook has on everyone, that’s just stuff your friends know anyway. The file Spotify has on you… if that got out…
And I know it’s not just me (I actually don’t use Spotify anyway). It feels like every time I’m in someone’s home and they’re streaming music, they will at some point look stricken and be all “I don’t know what’s wrong with their algorithm!” or “oh yeah, I put this track on the other day to Waco my spouse out of the bathroom, ha ha ha. HA HA HA!”
When looking at the payment rates artists get in a overview like this:
I don’t really feel too great about paying Spotify money. I’d rather get it more directly to the artist then giving them less then half a cent per stream through a very opaque process.
I prefer downloading(!!!) the music via Bandcamp. They pay the artists 70% of whatever the artists asking price is. Usually this is something between € 7 and € 12 for a album or € 0.70 to € 1 per song. This earns them roughly € 5 per album I download or € 0.50 a song. I would have to stream it via Spotify a 100 times to get the same amount of money to go to the artists. I don’t think I ever listen to songs that often.
Spotify is actually close to the worst paying service on that list (beaten only by Youtube and some smaller services). If you then also just download a copy of that outside of the Spotify program then you are skewing this low number even lower. In that case, you may as well just outright pirate the music.
Also, now I think about it a bit more, your comment really looks like your just trying to sell this Spotify downloading software. Quite spammy…
I’m really surprised artists get that much per album when you buy it on Bandcamp. Traditionally artists would see $0.50 or so per album sold in a store, with the record label capturing most of the rest.
In the end there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, we just have to be mindful about our part in participating to be able to support the others who are stuck tied to this system.
I’m not saying that a monopoly is good. Ideally, every service would be able to sell all games and compete on price and quality of service, but instead they “compete” with exclusivity of titles. This isn’t a black and white issue where a single vendor is a good or bad thing. I’m just observing that pattern that the current situation leads to.
But you’re not just observing, you’re drawing conclusions based on those observations that are very heavily tinged with the sentiment that “things were better back when we had a de-facto monopoly”, whether you like it or not. Either that is you opinion - which you’re of course entitled to, but you also have to expect that it’ll be challenged - or you’re misrepresenting yourself.
If spread-out exclusivity leads to piracy, the only logical reason for this is pissy people who either a) want Steam to have a monopoly on games distribution (because they idolize Steam and Valve, which a lot of gamers do for no real reason beyond them making good games a decade or two ago), b) don’t give a damn, but are lazy enough to want Steam to have a monopoly on games distribution, or c) think anyone and everyone other than Steam is somehow less deserving of their money than Valve, since Steam was first, and that’s somehow important. People nag about EULAs or poor featuresets (or just the inconvenience of having multiple launchers, which … seriously? How hard is opening an application?), but the truth of the matter is that Steam is arguably at the very least as bad as every single one of their competitors. There are no good choices here, but a monopoly is the worst of them, and resisting that is worthy in and of itself (even if, as pointed out by @AsteriskCGY, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism).
And, while Epic is undoubtedly bad, at the very least they’ve actively improved upon arguably the most unfair practice of Steam - their revenue cut. This is where small developers are hurt the most, and where the size and power of large developers allow them to cut better deals while the little ones are left with garbage terms that have dramatic impacts on their lives.
There is so much wrong about the current organization of the games industry (one of the students I’m supervising for their BA this year is writing their thesis on industry consolidation and how this affects game production and content, which makes me very happy), but a move away from Steam’s monopoly is (a tiny, but still) a move towards something ever so slightly better.
Sure, but for that to happen, Steam’s current monopoly needs to be broken up - and attempts at “also selling stuff other places” have so far had zero effect on this. More is needed. As such, arguing for this without suggesting ways to break up Steam’s monopoly without exclusives on other storefronts is accepting Steam’s monopoly by default and not objecting to it continuing into the future.
