I was talking just today with some coworkers about how having subscriptions instead of owning is what is normal to kids now - not just games, but things like Netflix and Spotify. So this doesn’t surprise me, but does depress me. Technofeudalism is the new normal.
In my teen years I spent a large fraction of my disposable income on music. A Spotify subscription is a vastly better value than buying whatever I could scrounge from a used CD store. Back then it was common for me to read about some semi-obscure recording and just have to wonder what it sounded like, because I had no hope of finding it in a store, and a special order was way out of my budget, especially for something I had no idea if I’d even like. Now I can listen to damn near anything that’s ever been published for less than I spent as a teenager. I find new music by listening to personalized recommendations instead of local radio stations. It’s just better in every way (except probably for the artists, but music has always been a cutthroat business so who knows).
A lot of subscription services suck and are just a way to milk customers, but streaming audio and video are not in that category.
I keep hoping–perhaps naively so–for a major backlash against this. Sometimes consumers have power, and sometimes they don’t. But maybe we’ll all get fed up with this bullshit and start just dropping any and all unnecessary subscriptions from our lives. The big problem is when a brand becomes synonymous with a product (like fucking Adobe and ProTools, for two examples).
I was talking just today with some coworkers about how having subscriptions instead of owning is what is normal to kids now - not just games, but things like Netflix and Spotify. So this doesn’t surprise me, but does depress me. Technofeudalism is the new normal.
In my teen years I spent a large fraction of my disposable income on music. A Spotify subscription is a vastly better value than buying whatever I could scrounge from a used CD store. Back then it was common for me to read about some semi-obscure recording and just have to wonder what it sounded like, because I had no hope of finding it in a store, and a special order was way out of my budget, especially for something I had no idea if I’d even like. Now I can listen to damn near anything that’s ever been published for less than I spent as a teenager. I find new music by listening to personalized recommendations instead of local radio stations. It’s just better in every way (except probably for the artists, but music has always been a cutthroat business so who knows).
A lot of subscription services suck and are just a way to milk customers, but streaming audio and video are not in that category.
I keep hoping–perhaps naively so–for a major backlash against this. Sometimes consumers have power, and sometimes they don’t. But maybe we’ll all get fed up with this bullshit and start just dropping any and all unnecessary subscriptions from our lives. The big problem is when a brand becomes synonymous with a product (like fucking Adobe and ProTools, for two examples).