I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service!
PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
> I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop
That reminds me of the time I had moved to another city. I still had my old apartment but had brought most of my things and was more or less officially moved and moved-in. Of the stuff that I did still have at the old place was a lot of food (non-perishables, oil, eggs) because it had been better to leave it there for the time being instead of moving it all (because food). When I was back in my old city to take care of some business there and showed up to my old apartment in the late morning one Sunday, I decided to make a big brunch to use up a lot of the consumables. I needed a measuring cup, though, and I no longer had one there. (It happens that the one I did have at my new apartment was also cracked (in the physical sense) from moving, so it actually wouldn't have been any help, because even though I was going to fix it, I hadn't gotten around to it.)
I went to the store and lifted one (same brand), since I knew I had once already paid for one once.
Except I would have been allowed to install it on that laptop, I just didn't have the original media with me, and I also did not care.
I also, again already having paid for the original license years before, got a cracked Warcraft III Russian edition (offline only, no BattleNet, obviously), so if you want to tell more stories to show what a bad person I am, here is one more to add.
I did watch a lot of movies in my life that I never paid for though, so there is that. If they ever have one reasonable ad-free subscription that covers them all (also across borders, like Asian anime) I promise to sign up for that. Haven't watched anything at all in over a decade though, except for the occasional Twitch or Youtube. I don't even have a TV.
I guess for some people making sure everybody follows the rules is more important than anything else. I admit that I am the occasional rule breaker, including as a pedestrian crossing a red light when I feel stopping all traffic just for little me when there are plenty of large gaps in traffic is more reasonable.
So yes, thanks for pointing that out, I'm not a model citizen. I don't even feel bad about it. Also, physical goods are obviously exactly the same, so your made-up story is totally relevant, and nobody asks the question why you changed it from a virtual to a physical good when you had complete artistic freedom. Maybe your story would not be as convincing?
I don't understand. (For example: what you mean "except" and how much of a bad person you are and the tone of your last paragraph?) It sounds like you're arguing with me (and you think I'm arguing with you).
The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-laurels.
I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer.
Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies.
This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
"Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.
In the US, this song is unavailable on Spotify where I found it, but available on YT music. Preface by Man Without Country. Given another 5 minutes, I could also find a song that is not listed on one but available on another.
That may be true for bigger artists on major labels, but for smaller independent bands it’s not always the case. I am a heavy user and fan of Bandcamp for listening to and purchasing music but I use Spotify for listening in the car and sharing playlists. I often find albums that are only available on either Spotify or Bandcamp but not both.
The ones that aren’t available on Spotify tend to be self-released but otherwise there isn’t much of a pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be mediocre at best.
And that’s not even mentioning bands that are pulling their music from Spotify in protest…
If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.
To clarify I'm not suggesting owners of what.cd started spotify just some elite members. I happened to join what.cd before Spotify came out and the tracker was shut down. Initially spotify overlapped with what.cds comprehensive library of rare high quality audio significantly and as they moved out of grey market, over the first year or so, some were removed after complaints or contracts were signed with artists. Then what.cd servers were seized for copyright infingement and other trackers tried to replace it. To download that much data from their platform you'd need to have shared a significant amount yourself for years. They probably used pirate bay and other less comprehensive libraries as well, but the high quality lossless audio that you paid for was likely from what.cd. This was discussed on those tracker forums and irc during that time.
I used to be a big digital music hoarder. I hate Spotify, YouTube is the thing that killed music downloading for me. It has pretty much everything worth listening to, it's free, AdBlock keeps it usable, and it has a great diversity of other content.
Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant.
But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.
Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry.
Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.
Catalog differences aside, I think that's a nice market to analyse. Qobuz differentiates itself on audio quality, Apple on its integration with iOS, etc. I do think they ended up competing on price and product alone, except for little things.
My GF's Spotify makes great playlists, but they deleted my account twice and I'd never go back. So in that sense I'm willing to pay extra for customer service, which many of them don't care for. That's an interesting differentiator.
> This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
Tell that to the music industry. That is not without its fault, but the products on offer are much better than the movie industry has. The market is smaller than it once was, i.e. there's less money flowing through the system, because the consumer isn't being squeezed from every side. The customer is being provided a better product for less money. That's a good thing in my opinion. Having the market be artificially inflated because everyone's got their own small realm no-one else is allowed to touch without paying a hefty licence fee is not a good thing in my opinion.
I don't think "tell that to the music industry", an industry where it is notoriously near-impossible for the people who actually _create_ music to earn a living from their work without signing a deal with a tiny handful of record companies, is the ringing endorsement of "customer getting service for pennies is good actually" that you are portraying it as.
If you can't earn a living by creating music, then don't. If you can't earn a living by creating movies, then don't. If you can't make money writing books about the intricacies of Unix system calls, then don't. You aren't entitled to earn a living just because you create music, movies or writings in our current society. If we're going to have free market capitalism and not have UBI, then that's the way the cookie's gonna crumble. Some industries earn lots and are easy to make a living off of, and other are never going to earn you a penny. Over time, which one's are which start to change. It happened to music. I believe it will happen to movies too, and look forward to that day so the consumer can reap the benefit.
20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.
The other large factor is copyright. If we had 21 year copyright terms for shows and movies, I'd imagine someone would have set up a streaming service with every show and movie under the sun that they could fit into that, and people would eat it up, since they often just want to half-watch Seinfield, Friends, Star Trek, et cetera, since its their comfort show. A service that can provide that without being hostile is quite a lot of what many people look for in a streaming service.
I have often found that the illegal sites have much better UX for finding movies to watch. I can filter by review score, year of release, genre, country of origin, or half dozen other variables and in all combinations. And then they're presented in a big readable table rather than five options I have to scroll endlessly through one at a time.
Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction.
You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper."
Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's incredibly hard to scale personality—which I have in spades—and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer support individual to operate equally as themselves.
You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.
That was one of the lessons I took away was that not every customer is a good customer. While I did have really accessible customer service, I didn’t want to be everything to anyone, even if it left money on the table. The quirks and features of the site where enough for the typical Reddit user (at the time) to discern, more so than those who were accustomed to official services, sports or otherwise.
