"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.
I was going to say that this is where I disagreed with the OP. It is 100% about price and has absolutely nothing to do with bloat or hostile design. As I wouldn’t consider Spotify’s design or Apple Music’s design choice bad. If anything they are popular because of their design choice.
If people cared about bloat they wouldn’t be on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. The rest of the consuming world lives in a pretty concerning place financially. Anyone who thinks it has to do with the design of the apps is either missing the point and not looking at the rest of the shit going on in the world or blatantly wants to believe Apple bad and FOSS good and I have found that to be a part of what I call the Lemmy mentality.
Paying for spotify, was google music before. Current “experience” is bad, I hate pop-ups to try to upsell me something I don’t want or features I don’t care. It happens too much and I’m considering switching to self host.