• That's the problem with subscription services. It's a coercive relationship where the terms are unilateral. As an alternative, I've been buying music from Bandcamp for quite some time now and have a huge library built in addition to the CDs I already owned and ripped to my NAS, which I can stream from anywhere thanks to Jellyfin.

    If I miss out on some stuff because it's not easily obtainable, whatever, at least my music is my own and doesn't magically go missing because of some random subscription licensing deal.

    My favorite is when I canceled Spotify years ago, and they show this custom playlist like "we'll miss you" and has all these songs to say goodbye with or whatever. But.. due to Spotify's frequent delisting of songs, one or two of the songs were not playable. Gotta love it.

    • Take away the DMCA, plus make copyright infringement only apply to commercial copy operations and not individuals freely sharing the thing P2P. That will spank the likes of Adobe, RIAA, MPAA, and Siemens.
  • There is only one way to stop this:

    Never subscribe, ever. No streaming, and no cloud.

    If you don't have the [unencumbered] file, it's not your media.

    Vote for a government that will levy hefty taxes on recurrent revenue model businesses when what is delivered could be delivered permanently in one transaction, like another sin tax.

    Vote for defanging DMCA and mandating implementation of open protocols for commercial products; universal machines are not to be golden handcuffs pilfering the people!

    This stops when we all decide we're mad as hell, and we're not going to take rentier games anymore!

  • The best streaming subscription I've ever paid money for is Mullvad. I run my Radarr box through a VPN so my ISP doesn't complain and hijack my DNS.

    I can search for any show, movie, music, or book ever published and have a copy with permanent unrestricted access forever, for free.

    Fuck all these subscription services. Approximately none of the money you pay goes to the actors, musicians, authors that actually produced the work, it all goes to Amazon and Netflix and Disney. If the people who make your media don't get paid either way, why bother paying Amazon and Netflix for an inferior product, inferior service, and inferior experience?

    Big Streaming has unwittingly fully conceeded the piracy wars to the pirates.

  • This is the enshitification path, sooner or later these services have to turn to shit or charge a premium to be sustainable.

    Step 1 is to provide a good value, then lure in creators, then lock them in and profit.

  • Well then.. I'll gladly stick to Spotify
  • Not to defend Amazon here, but I think this is talking about the already severely limited streaming benefit of Prime, not the dedicated Amazon Music paid subscription. The former is not really comparable to a actual paid music subscription service.
  • As expected. This is the default path, happened may times before starting with premium TV channels.