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.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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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
You got my gears turning. LOL, for good or for evil.
What if we had a paid service that worked like torrenting? DEEP discount, but you opt to share upload costs? (Best for last, bear with me.)
Company like Spotify coordinates it all, takes their skim off the top for running the servers, devs, payroll, workman's comp, unemployment insurance, managers, janitors, tech support, typical business stuff. Might not be $BIG% profitable, but 0.001% is hella money in this game.
We could even have upload tiers. How much you want to upload back? More = cheaper. Unlimited download no matter the tier, but you gotta "pay back" the system to for low rates. Wanna mooch? No problem! Top tier pricing for you! Go over? No problem! We got a grace period. Hell, we'll let your MB's roll over if you don't use 'em! Keep pushing your down vs. up, and sorry, we gotta tack a bit on next month. Would you like to go up a tier and maybe save?
And we only try to sell that offer to people our algorithm shows it will truly help. Had a vendor do that to me last week! "Don't take the standard offer. You're already doing $X, so $Y costs nothing more in your case." Wish I could remember the deal, but it was great to have a rep shoot me straight!
We'd almost have to start with an existing company. They got the infrastructure, contracts, and such, but they also got stubborn inertia. Some billionaire needs to get me onboard with this!
Any yes y'all, I understand the DevOps, Dev, infrastructure, payroll, management, etc., spend would be astronomical from scratch. Hell, ever considered the company needs a UI expert for $150/yr. at a minimum? Double that with taxes and benefits. And throw in the AWS bill. shudder
It would be a massive clusterfuck to get going. But what if we could get "Spotify" for $1-$10/mo. depending on your contribution?
Best: What if it was a federated/socialist sort of thing? I like country and rap (seriously), so I opt into servers that mainly have that content. Saves me and my fellow fans upload, because we're uploading to each other and not costing the service anything but a few pennies to the artist!
I know this has 12 holes in it, but am I straight nuts?
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: