I think a common factor on why torrents are having a resurgence and illegal streaming services are getting more traction, is subscription fatigue. Subscription fatigue doesn’t only contain itself to streaming services, movies or music, nowadays you’re also expected to subscribe to every app you download. Whether it’s a meditation app, a budgeting app (looking at YNAB that went from a one-time purchase to a really expensive subscription model), the Adobe suite, the MS Office suite, your Peloton bike that you’ve already paid hundreds of dollars for (referencing the earlier article on them establishing a startup fee for buying used bikes), or a podcast app where the money doesn’t even go to the podcasters themselves.
Is there a peak for this? I feel like subscriptions are becoming more of a rule than an exception. Having the ability to directly purchase digital goods seems more like a thing of the past. It’s just so stupid. But apparently people don’t care? They just keep paying for this? Apparently it’s still worth it for companies to establish a subscription model, even if there are no benefits for the customer, just the company. What are your thoughts? What can we do to stop it?
Most of them are cheap though. Like Spotify at ~$10 is nothing, you can barely get a beer for that in the city these days. That’s far cheaper than you used to pay for CDs!
Netflix really took the piss though - with the charging for no ads, HD and multiple screens. Then it gets to like $30 a month which just isn’t worth it with the diminishing library, so I cancelled that and use Amazon Prime Video for now as it’s still cheap in my country (and has no ads for now).
$10/month would be cheap if it would cover every movie and show you’d want to watch. It used to be that but nowadays you need about ten different subscriptions in order to get what you want, plus many more if you use SaaS. So you end up paying ~$200/month for everything.
IMO, Spotify still “works” and music piracy probably is not as common as movie piracy, because Spotify has close to everything one would want to listen to.
Don’t most music streaming services have all the major bases covered? Unlike for films or TV shows, there are hardly any music streaming exclusive versions of albums. Sure, Tidal tried to make it happen but still, at this day, most streaming services have most of the stuff one wants.
Imo, the mindset of “X is cheap!” what leads people to end up overspending.
Having worked with marketers, they use the whole “price of a cup of coffee” to convince people to buy services that they don’t need all the time.
I don’t have or need Spotify. Same with a lot of steaming services. I own Netflix stock but I don’t even own a Netflix account. I could afford it but why?
If the replacement for X is Y, sure! Buy the alternative. But honestly I think people should reevaluate what they really need.
I know I’m in the minority but I am also a software developer, and I think subscriptions are a much healthier payment model for everyone. The issue IMO is not recurring payments but the total cost of ownership.
“Digitial goods” is very rarely just a thing that you produce once and then it’s done. The OS is regularly updated which causes incompatibilities, app stores introduce new demands, and there’s a constant stream of security vulnerabilities in your dependencies that need to be patched. Failing to adress any of these things breaks the social contract and causes rage among your users (“I PAID FOR THIS, WHY ISN’T IT WORKING/WHY AREN’T YOU FIXING BUGS/etc”). Even movies and music need to be maintained because new media formats are introduced, streaming services have to be kept responsive and up to date etc.
A subscription models the cost distribution over time much better, and it does benefit the users because it means the company can keep updating their shit even if new sales drop, instead of going bankrupt.
I don’t think this stops with just digital goods. Manufactured products (and the environment) would also benefit from a subscription model because it means there’s no incentive for planned obsolescence. It’s an incentive for keeping the stuff we already built working for a long time, instead of constantly producing new crap and throwing the old in a landfill.
But, the caveat is that this shift must not result in higher total cost of ownership for the end users over time. In fact, it should reduce the cost because repairing and updating is cheaper than building new stuff. The way many companies are pricing subscriptions today, they are being too greedy.
What are your thoughts on ownership?
I feel a subscription model takes power away from me. Just like UBI would.
It just seems like a bad idea long term.
Would Universal Basic Income take power away from you?
Like you personally?
Or is UBI meaning something else too?
Yeah because it takes away leverage from unions.
It’s better to have national shares, so everyone owns the production, and that provides your income. But ya now I am probably a commie?
Depends what kind of ownership you’re thinking about. When it comes to electronics, “ownership” is just subscription with a longer period between payments. Your existing phone, tablet, TV, dishwasher or what have you will last a finite time and then you have to buy a new one.
If there’s something that will last a lifetime, that’s a different discussion. But those are rare. Almost every purchase you make is a commitment to a recurring cost.
That’s an interesting perspective, and it makes sense for certain objects.
I also disagree with something you’re implying. If you build a proper headphones it will last forever. It’s a symptom of a broken system to create headphones that break every 3 years. That applies to many objects that I can think of right now.
I completely agree with you in principle for people who want their software updated, but there is some software that is standalone and doesn’t depend upon changing codecs/APIs etc. Something like myfitnesspal or a thermomix shouldn’t be a subscription, there is no major updates to how someone tracks their exercise uses a hot blender that justifies it beyond users being locked in.
In the example of thermomix, you’ve already paid top dollar for the hardware, getting locked out of functionality you’ve paid for stings.
Something like myfitnesspal or a thermomix shouldn’t be a subscription, there is no major updates to how someone tracks their exercise uses a hot blender that justifies it beyond users being locked in.
I won’t dispute that both of these likely abuse the subscription model for their benefit. But they definitely have a social responsibility (and in many cases a legal responsibility) to keep updating the software in these products and the network infrastructure that go with them. The internet of things is one of the most vulnerable attack vectors we have. It has been exploited many times not just to attack individuals, but to create massive bot nets that can target corporations or even countries. The onus is on the manufacturer to continuously keep that at bay. You know what they say - the “S” in “IOT” stands for security.
I agree that IOT things need to be secure. Is it really too much to ask that apps/devices are made secure from the ground up?
To stay on the thermomix, all the subcription is is a connection to their servers to give access to their live step by step recipes. Surely that’s just a secure end-to-end encrypted connection? I’m not a developer but it doesn’t sound like buyers should be expected to pay the manufacturer to maintain beyond buying a thermomix/upgrading to new versions of the hardware when they want to access any new features.
I won’t dispute that both of these likely abuse the subscription model for their benefit. But they definitely have a social responsibility (and in many cases a legal responsibility) to keep updating the software in these products and the network infrastructure that go with them.
I mean, it would be zero cost if it was a fucking normal device. Someone had the idea that a juice squeezer or a toaster should be online… for… what, exactly? Remove the online (or even better, remove the software), you completely remove the cost that you want impugn on the user with “subscriptions”.
In the olden days software used to be sold by individual major versions. You paid for version 9, you paid for version 10. Or you skipped versions you didn’t need. You could use versions side by side. The newest installed would import its data from the older ones. etc.
App stores have made this very awkward or almost impossible. There’s no concept of separating major versions. You’d have to buy and install completely different apps to be able to pay for them separately and to use them side by side, but if they’re separate apps they can’t import your data from each other. Not to mention that people seem to hate having “too many apps” for some reason.
Software subscriptions switch the “support per major version” to “support per time of use”. It’s obviously shittier but it’s more realistic than a one-time price and expecting to use the app in all future versions in perpetuity. The one time price would have to be very large to be realistic.
This is an interesting point as well. Before, if you weren’t happy with an update or whatnot, you could just keep running the older version. But nowadays that’s impossible in many cases.
I think a lot of the blame lies on the shoulders of platform makers:
Apple constantly churning their already-working OS so software makers have to keep working just to keep already-working software running
Google constantly fucking with web browser standards/frameworks so it’s an endless stream of work to keep a web app up to date.
The basic productivity software that computers run hasn’t changed in functionality for literally my entire lifetime, yet there is an endless supply of software engineers working hard on these same basic tools for no apparent gains.
What I find annoying is for what you occasionally use.
For instance I started to listen more frequently to a songs service (which I was bypassing ads) and so I thought to officially subscribe. When I looked at prices I didn’t because it was too costly and knowing me I could stop anyday to use it. Price for one was above 10 when for two it was something like 14 so 7 per person and which I would have been ok to pay. Good for me because I stopped to listen some weeks after and it has beek years I didn’t really use it.
I think, especially for video and audio media consumption, you should pay a global amount and it should be split between services you used. Split should be based on usage.
It’s telling that my piracy of music all but disappeared when Apple Music came along. (Almost) Everything I want to hear is right there on my phone. I don’t have to switch between different services to find artists.
Now, whether such enormous consolidation of the record companies, allowing that kind of setup, is a good thing is another discussion…
