[anthropodie]

>Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.

>I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions.

I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?

[flessner]

For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content creators.

For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.

[itissid]

You know if we could this open source self hosted stuff with a layer of Patreon on top people would pay something to all the people. If one could make it non-intrusive it could become a decent alternative to paying all these artists. I think Kanopy.com comes pretty close, its funded by tax payer dollars and is available via your local library.

[chillfox]

Sure, but they also got a cut from all of those dvds I bought before streaming services was a thing or the new dvds/blu-rays I am picking up now.

I mostly watch movies I have already seen before, but with the fragmentation and constant moving around that's happening with steaming services I would frequently end up using 3+ different ones every month. The constant cancel/renew cycle was a real hassle and very error prone, I would often forget one or two.

I only watch about 20 new movies a year, so even without hunting for bargains I will easily save a lot of money. But I will be looking for bargains, because why not.

[WhyNotHugo]

I suspect that buying an album through bandcamp results in the artist receiving way more money than what a subscription will ever pay them.

[pdntspa]

It is an incredibly, and almost criminally, small portion of the pie

[godelski]

Weird thought, but doesn't some of the stuff the blockchain people do potentially apply here? I'm not talking building a new coin or any of that crap. But rather more about just handling the transactions of plays and a distributed anonymized ledger. Artists can formulate a contract, users pay in and their pay gets distributed proportionally. I'm sure you could add zkps to help protect privacy. Could you get away with "proof of listen"? Could you stream via other users torrent style to move away from a central hub? Hosting and high upload speeds give you discounts. Maybe there's something in this (bad) idea?

I'm really just spitballing here. Seems really difficult to pull off, but what would such a system look like if we didn't design it for profit extraction and instead designed it to cut out all the middlemen? To really just make it as easy as possible for artists to connect to listeners. If we designed it without a desire to get rich

[tirant]

I really don’t understand the argument that these subscriptions are just making the rich richer.

In the first place why would that be a problem? If a company offers a good value and service for your money, isn’t it fair to compensate them for it? Does someone need to be compensated less just because they have been successful in the past providing good value for money? That would create weird or negative incentives.

Then, what’s the negative consequence of rich people getting richer? It’s not like the economy is a zero-sum game. The proportion of poor and extremely poor people has gone downhill in the last 200 years, while population has increased 8x (we’re probably around 10% of extreme poverty compared to +90%).

And then, there’s the lack of evidence of really rich people getting richer. How much of your money going to Spotify is really going to rich people compared to employees, artists, little shareholders? Maybe the impact of the earnings of Spotify is disproportionately helping normal citizens make a living compared to the very few big shareholders that are already rich.

What’s the alternative? Spending the same amount of money exclusively on Albums that probably bring a higher cut to big music companies and do not expose you to little or unknown artists? While at the same time you spend hours every month in the maintenance of your own music service while you could have used that time to help in some community projects or just earning more money to donate to causes impacting the extremely poor?

I’m really not sure at all that a subscription service like Spotify has any negative consequence for humankind.