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Using the "frog in boiling water" technique
(lemmy.world)
This is a $1 dollar increase from what I was paying. But soon subscribers will be $15/month, then $20/month. I wonder how much of deezer's income actually goes to the artists.
I don't know about Deezer, but Spotify is raising prices while telling artists they will no longer be paid at all unless they reach a certain threshold of popularity. So they're boiling the frogs on both ends.
The middlemen who neither create nor appreciate music will still do OK though.
Problem is, Spotify has always been making a loss, so I’m not sure what side I’m on here
The great problem is that, as it turns out, as always when it comes to mass media distribution services (ie: YouTube, twitch, etc), bandwidth is expensive, having servers around the world to have proper content delivery is expensive
Windows does this with updates. You torrent them. It's called Delivery Optimization and should be turned off immediately.
I guess I misunderstanding delivery optimization, I thought that was only with your local network?
That's an option, along with M$ stealing your bandwidth, and turning the entire system off, so noleeching4u.
I assume this will have to be a streaming service, as opposed to a download service for various reasons. Here are some points related to it:
Skype (the video/voice call and chat application) used to be federated in a similar way on desktops until late 2000s. Users with available bandwidth were treated as nodes. People even reported, that sometimes, whenever Internet wasn't working, Skype was the only thing that continued to work — because someone on the same network was a node at the time and their Internet was working.
This all broke down due to the advent of mobile devices. Phones cannot be used as such nodes for traffic. Nobody was going to put up with Skype draining both your data (if your tariff/contract has data limit) and your phone battery. This feature of Skype is long gone now.
Similarly, too many people are using Spotify on the go. People would have to pay way more for using such a "torrented" service via phone apps.
The different nodes in such network will have vastly different bandwidth, which makes it more complicated to maintain a consistent stream (i.e. with not buffering, stuttering, etc). Regular BitTorrent downloads don't care, because they usually aren't streamed. However, it's possible to make BitTorrent downloads more favorable to streaming the content by forcing downloads of chunks of files in order.
The nodes in such service need to manage bandwidth for obvious reasons. They would also need to manage storage – the music, the audiobooks, and the podcasts need to be stored somewhere. Also, the nodes would need to manage CPU (or GPU or whatever) for encoding/reencoding/whatever. Managing resources (using them, allocating, throttling, deallocating) on a computer that you don't control is extremely hard, which is an additional layer of complexity. It is even hard on computers that you do control (this video explains why).
Apparently podcast apps Juice and Miro support BitTorrent, but I don't know anything about it. They download the whole thing, i.e. don't stream, as far as I can tell.
See also:
@shalafi
Its a beautiful dream, but youre missing the part where copyright holders refuse to rent you distribution rights :(
Surely it would be easier to have people download the content and then have the app relay the number of plays it gets would use less bandwidth? Maybe?
Then free users could then turn off the internet and not listen to ads, cutting all your monetisation
Would be viewed as a worse service
If only there was a protocol they could use to allow customers to share files with each other, using their own bandwidth.
You pass the storage problem to the user. How do you know which files to host where if most users watch most content once?
The ones other people are watching at the same time.