There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers. My experience with Rdio was one of frustration. Their desktop player was buggy and frequently failed to play anything at all. When it did work, I found the consistency of the music catalog to be unreliable. One we…
Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service
221–230 of 266 posts
Re: Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service
#222There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers. My experience with Rdio was one of frustration. Their desktop player was buggy and frequently failed to play anything at all. When it did work, I found the consistency of the music catalog to be unreliable. One we…
Re: Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service
#223There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers. My experience with Rdio was one of frustration. Their desktop player was buggy and frequently failed to play anything at all. When it did work, I found the consistency of the music catalog to be unreliable. One we…
Re: Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service
#224Rdio made a mistake by trying to compete directly with Spotify. And Pandora is making a huge mistake by shutting down the service and losing a valuable niche group of users. Everyone I know who actually uses Rdio is DIE HARD (I see evidence of this in the comments too). The users I know are pro audio guys, musicians, programmers, artists, etc who use the app 6+ hours a day across desktop and mobile. Rdio could easily…
Re: Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tech generation grew up in a 'free' culture of internet: illegal downloads, open source, pro bono collaboration. Paying for something that is equally equivalent to something that was free for decades usually is a tough sell. This doesnt apply to all people.
This probably also explains why it's so hard to find a good editor. So many devs are totally unwilling to pay a decent amount for anything. Maybe the exception being hosting. Outside of hosting a server and dns and an SSL cert, it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life. Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10…
I paid JetBrains $100, because their IDE is awesome, and worth every penny. $100 is probably worth more to me since I am third-worlder[1], I earn far less than 6 figures.
>Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10 a month for all their awesome (but very specialized) IDEs and people are going nuts over how much that is
No - it wasn't about the money for me; I was one of the very vocal critics about that[2]. The subscription was actually worked out cheaper per year! My complaint was that once you stopped paying subscriptions, your IDE would stop working (they have since backtracked). Previously, if your licence expired, you'd be left with a working IDE which you can no longer upgrade/get updates for, but working nonetheless.
It also didn't help that I felt personally betrayed by the decision after recommending JB to my colleagues and coworkers for years.
1. Middle class third-worlder, but $100 is a larger percentage of my income vs. first-wolrd
Re: Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service
#226Rdio made a mistake by trying to compete directly with Spotify. And Pandora is making a huge mistake by shutting down the service and losing a valuable niche group of users. Everyone I know who actually uses Rdio is DIE HARD (I see evidence of this in the comments too). The users I know are pro audio guys, musicians, programmers, artists, etc who use the app 6+ hours a day across desktop and mobile. Rdio could easily…
Such is the way of the world. 50,000 customers willing to pay $50 a month aren't worth the trouble, especially if they're even slightly demanding. Everyone wants the 50 million users willing to put up with ads that bring in $3 a month or are willing to pay $5 or $10.
Re: Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Music has definitely used fingerprinting for some time - I think from its inception. I haven't used Spotify for a long time, so I'm not sure how it works.
Spotify does not allow you to upload your music or anything like that. You simply have access to their full catalog, and can choose to download any part of it for offline consumption.
Re: Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service
#228Thinking of going back to buying CD's (or getting Flac files). Streaming services are to unreliable :/ They are only good for discovery.
First there were records, then cassettes, then compact discs, and they all wore out. A plausible lifetime for something you bought was maybe 15-20 years: not really a problem but indeed a nuisance. You knew the day would come when the cassette would snap or the CD would just jump way too much.
Moving to digital music was the big revolution. I could encode songs into files on my computer and I could replicate those literally forever. I would never, ever lose my music again, or be forced to buy it back in the de facto format of the next decade.
Then came the streaming services. That meant convenience but it did trade in even worse life expectancy and uncertainty. Anyone could bet money that a digital streaming service in the 2000's would not be around 20 years later. But they did become popular, especially when mobile 3G/4G data appeared everywhere.
Ironically, while it did become possible to stream anything anywhere, you could also fit all your audio files onto a memory card. Several times. At a negligible cost. Surely you would only have your own collection with you, but that collection was actually hundreds or thousands of compact discs all compressed into a manageable amount of data.
For reference, I still have my music in ogg/mp3 format and digitally bought albums as flac. I didn't have plans to move away from that and I still don't.
If I want my music in a new phone or in my car, I'll just replicate my collection to a new device or memory card. And I then have the exactly same collection on my phone that I have on my desktop. And my work computer. I still have my 80's-90's CDs in the closet but I've ripped the most important albums no later than the turn of the millennium, at the latest. The setup is so manageable and dirt cheap that I can't but wonder what would it take to replace it.
Re: Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service
#229Re: Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service
#230It's pretty much just Deezer and Apple Music left now. Google Play Music, Pandora and Spotify are all region-locked.