My term for these kind of purchases is "DRU" - defeasible right to use.
Piracy
61–70 of 120 posts
Re: Piracy
#62GOG exists. Blu-ray discs of movies, shows and music exist. Even when consumers have the option to buy from those modes, they don't. They prefer Steam and Netflix and Spotify instead. Why? Because contrary to the opinion of a couple of online aficionados, the masses don't care that much about preserving media after they have consumed them once, or once the trend has subsided. The market has spoken, the affordability…
GOG doesn't sell most games. I do buy on GOG when possible, but GOG sells a sliver of what Steam sells.
Re: Piracy
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do yourself the favor of joining Red and download your music in flac or mp3 made from high-quality sources instead of YouTube. The interview is not hard to pass if you prepare for it.
Was red the eventual winner after what/pth? I never found out what happened post what.
I think so, yeah. Although orpheus is also all right.
Re: Piracy
#64I don't think Spotify should be celebrated. For a start, Spotify exists because the music companies basically lost against piracy, but it was their own fault. That devalued recorded music to such an extent they had to change that business model. They collect a paltry amount from streaming (the artists get even less), but it's all they can get now. They've changed their model entirely. Bands are gone. Generic, marketa…
Spotify essentially solves music for me. I'm not a huge music fan. I like the stuff I grew up with, and very, very rarely something recorded in the last 10 years. I don't study music, rarely actually listen to the lyrics, don't care about the quality too much. It's always background to what I'm actually focusing on. And the less it distracts, the better. I used to have a few Gb of music, but deleted it all [0] becaus…
> I used to have a few Gb of music, but deleted it all [0] because Spotify fills this niche now.
And now instead of reading bits from your local storage you are increasing your carbon impact by streaming from somewhere else...with pretty much 0 actual value.
Re: Piracy
#65I have pirated everything my whole life and I will proudly pirate these things forever. I do pay for original music, media, movies, but I also pirate everything. These two things are not mutually exclusive and I think every person who is interested in having and owning their own media should be pirating.
This. If you really want to support a musician buy their merch not their music. Specifically posters. Posters have the highest profit margin of any merch item and goes directly to the artist… and if you want extra credit, share the pirated music with others so that their fan base grows. Sure musicians would love to sell albums, but those days are long over. Musicians don’t see squat from ticket sales except in rare c…
Very true. I don't know how can get this through to the heads of the artists and have them put some more effort in their merch. I can't count the number of concerts where I carry cash specifically to buy merch, but the merch is crap, so I walk away. Having a dedicated merch manager DOES make a huge difference. E.g. Abbath has one, and I have bought merch in 3 out of 4 concerts in a timespan of 2 years. I don't think this is coincidence.
There is a catch though: venue merch fees [1]. Which may in turn explain why the merch is often crap: The profit margin becomes tiny if you need to pay the merch fee. So you need to choose between exorbitant prices (think $60 for a tshirt) or crap quality to make a profit.
*I hope this is an American thing, which would explain why on average it appears that American bands have worse merch than European ones.
[1] https://variety.com/2023/music/opinion/venue-service-fees-me...
Re: Piracy
#66The main problem with digital game distribution imo is that you still pay the full price, but you can't resell the game later. So you're getting much less value in the end. It would be fairer to price digital copies maybe 10-20% of the physical ones because of how single-use they are.
Re: Piracy
#67Having worked in the game industry in the past it's amusing to see people talk about the greed of game developers. You have no idea! You have no idea what an effort it takes to ship a game. An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost. Because of that you can have services like Spotify that allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$…
This is from a gamer's PoV, not someone in the industry:
AAA Games are too expensive. Pricing for a retail product is not solely based on the cost to produce it, you have to price in what the market will bear and I think the games industry just isn't doing that. £60 or £70 for a base game (that often has microtransactions in it, or is often kinda incomplete with major plot still to be delivered via DLC, usually with £80 or £90 'premium' editions) is a lot of money for what are already stretched budgets. Most gamers I know wait for sales with significant discounts (50% or more) before they even consider buying AAA titles.
If you can't make a game affordable, then maybe the big AAA industry is making the wrong games, oversaturating the marketplace, or quality is suffering. Starfield's a good example - years of work to produce a game that is resoundingly 'meh'. You can't expect customers to shell out £60+ for 'meh', no matter how many people or resources were used to create it.
There's a lot of smaller 'indie' developers that do not have hundreds of staff that are making games that the market engages with and seems to love. Anecdotally I know my friend group generally prefers these titles to AAA. They frequently fill a significant percentage of the Steam Top Selling lists and these lists are sorted by revenue, not by number of sales. Their prices are more affordable (£10, £15, £20 or £30 are common price points) compared to AAA titles that are trying to cling to that £60 price point.
Re: Piracy
#68I don't think Spotify should be celebrated. For a start, Spotify exists because the music companies basically lost against piracy, but it was their own fault. That devalued recorded music to such an extent they had to change that business model. They collect a paltry amount from streaming (the artists get even less), but it's all they can get now. They've changed their model entirely. Bands are gone. Generic, marketa…
While Spotify was mentioned in the original post, it isn't the only game in town and there are alternatives like Deezer and Tidal, which offer higher-quality masters, more consistent libraries and ensure a better compensation for artists. > The only way the record companies could have kept selling records is with vinyl. But they killed that to get more profits decades ago. Maybe I don't understand something about you…
>> Yeah, let me sit down and listen to Cardi B for the next 40 minutes, said no one.
> That seems very reductive.
It seems, but it isn't. Music is produced for the YouTube/Spotify "formats" these days. Putting together an album that would be listened on a turntable or a cassette player, is a very different task than releasing a Spotify single.
As an analogy, modern artists are more like weekly columnists on a magazine. Past artists were more like book writers. Both categories write, but their output is very much affected by the format they use. And a columnist is very likely to be bad as a book writer, and vice-versa for the book writer.
Re: Piracy
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have games that I have given money to access many years ago, and I can still select them in Steam and install them without paying rent again. Steam is better value for me over more than a couple of months, and so was eMusic until Sony ruined it.
How about games that require an account in order to play at all? It's not a new concept and has been around for at least 15 years. Additionally, by modern games relying on matchmaking and lobby systems, almost any multiplayer game over the past 5-10 years is unplayable without an internet connection.
I'm not sure I follow.
Is the argument that Steam is worse than Spotify because a subset of games have got built in self destruct, while Spotify only requires ongoing rent to access that 99¢ song?
I think the self destruct is bad, and requiring 3rd party logins for single player games should not be allowed.
Re: Piracy
#70I think this is conflating two problems. One is preservation and ownership (or lack of), which is a huge problem. Live service games aside, even if you buy physical, what’s on the disc is often unplayable or incomplete without a day-one patch, so you’re just as screwed when the servers go offline. I’ve heard this period described as a future dark ages for games due to how many will be lost, and I think I agree. It’s…
Regarding preservation, even with a user-friendly format, platforms that allow downloading a zip archive or mkv in the desired quality provide no guarantee that the content will exist in 10 years. HDDs fail, they get lost, etc. The reason why old content is difficult to find is not because it's in the wrong format—FLAC copies of all albums ever made exist, and copies of all movies exist, but they are illegal to share.
It's not so much a technical issue as it is a legal one: the only way to reliably preserve content is to ensure it can be shared. One solution might be to limit IP duration to only a few years.