Are you referring to a specific incidence, or the general idea of downloadable software with DRM?
This is why I’ve opted out of… well, just about everything non-essential.
I’m unable to think of any business, dotcom or not, that hasn’t in some way succumbed to seeing customers are people to be fleeced rather than competed for with good products.
I tried Spotify for a week or so awhile back, and I thought it sucked, but maybe I was doing it wrong. It was chock full o’ ads, and I remember at point it played a couple of ads then said “Now 30 minutes of uninterrupted music.” Nope, it played two songs then more ads. It also seemed to play the same songs in the same order several days in a row. I found it very frustrating and decided it wasn’t worth paying for a subscription.
Sorry that you had that experience. A paid subscription doesn’t have ads (I mean, not from Spotify, at least… many podcasts will have their own sponsorship messages). Listening to music, I haven’t heard an ad in more than a decade. We pay for a family plan for $20/mo split among 6 people, but everyone has their own accounts and playlists and such. They don’t really check for location the way Netflix does, and several of the 6 people are in different countries.
Most people I know use playlists (which can be community-curated or AI-recommended), usually with dozens or hundreds of songs that you can shuffle through. If you turn on “smart shuffle”, it will also keep playing after the end and suggest similar songs. Its recommendation system is nowhere as powerful as Pandora’s Music Genome Project, but generally good enough if your playlist is more than an album or two large.
It also has “radio” stations that play similar-sounding tracks from the beginning, rather than a strict premade playlist.
That said, it’s really not that different if you already have YouTube Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc. But if you’re a traditionalist and prefer album ownership, then it’s not the right service.
Thanks for this. I have never heard of it, and googled. I think I understand what it is, and I’ll look for an opportunity to try it out.
I think they sent an email about it sometime in the last six months or so. Yeah, I really think the whole thing is bullshit. I believe that once you buy something, you should own it. And I think creative works in particular - books, music, movies, games - should always be things that can’t be taken away from you. I think policy in this case should overwhelmingly favor the consumer.
In the book Enshittification one of the examples used was Adobe suddenly deciding all of its users had to pay to subscribe to certain colors in its palette - and if you didn’t subscribe, every work you ever created throughout history using Adobe would render these colors in black and grey. It’s basically extortion.
I am pleased that it’s starting to be possible to buy ebooks without DRM. Both T Kingfisher’s and Nghi Vo’s work all seems to be available drm-free. (So i bought several books.)
While I have some sympathy with this point of view, the idea of buying access to experiences as opposed to buying things has a long and respectable history: movie tickets, concert tickets, theater tickets, etc.
That’s not what we’re talking about, though. We’re talking about media that worked perfectly fine as personal property until corporations decided they had a right to corrupt and ruin them, and due to regulatory capture, nobody stood in their way. We live in a society that overwhelmingly favors corporations over people and this is just symptomatic of that. For art in particular, it’s potentially pretty dire, when they start deciding what books, music and movies you should no longer be allowed to see.
Also, I don’t want to conflate two issues. There’s a difference between “I don’t want you to copy this thing,” which, fine, and “I don’t want you to own this thing you paid for.” This is really going far beyond DRM. Amazon did it by no longer allowing people to download their purchased books and Steam did it by forcing all purchased games to run through Steam and reserving the right to take away what you bought for any reason whatsoever.
I don’t know what you mean; it looks to me like there has always been a struggle to figure out how to balance the rights and needs of the people who create content, those who distribute content, and those who consume content, in a way that is workable and sustainable and fair for everyone.
What does it mean to “own” a thing if that thing is not a material object? That’s the part I’ve never been clear about.
But, getting back on topic, is bandcamp.com a dotcom that has not enshittified?