Well considering the last price hike got us gems like the music 8-ball/magic crystal thing, I can barely wait to see what banger they’ll come up with to bloat my music player with next.
I HATE these ‘made for you’ playlists, just repeats of my liked songs and songs it’s always trying to shove down my throat. Some of them barely fit the genre/vibe of the playlist too.
Part of the original appeal of Spotify for me years ago was the curated playlists.
Tidal is $11/mo for an individual and $17 for a 6 person family plan. I recently switched because they supposedly give a better cut to artists and serve flac files.
If i wasn’t paying for a family play on Spotify, I would have resorted to music piracy at this point. The quality is still garbage, the service is getting worse, but the prices are only going up every half a year
I tried sourcing my own music but man it’s a lot harder than movies and shows. Especially when you like to hear random recommended music how do you get enough
Yeah - credit where it’s due, Spotify did a really good job with their music recommendation engine. It’s just that recently, they’ve started to get into the sad part of the enshittification cycle. I kinda saw the writing on the wall when they started forcing Joe Rogan podcast promos fucking everywhere, without having a config anywhere to disable podcast suggestions (which I don’t use through Spotify)
I’m surprised you’re only getting these now. My recommendations have been mostly garbage for the better part of a decade so all this praise for finding new music confuses me a little. Spotify has many feats, but the algorithm never was one for me, quite the opposite. I find it more annoying than helpful, actually.
My beginning (about 6 years ago) was fine. Still miss the radio feature though.
They kinda brought it back but in a reverse form (former: 4 new 1 old, now: 5 old 1 new).
Playlist shuffle is atrocious but I am not picking them better any better.
You don’t need to be connected on the VPN to use it, I find it identical to my previous UK subscription.
Only difference is that your initial recommendations are for Nigerian music 😆 Those disappear quite quickly after you start listening to music you like tho.
I feel they’re all fairly similar. I won’t do apple music because I don’t do iOS, and I moved from Google play music when forced to the inferior YouTube music. I wonder if tidal or any other service has comparable pricing.
I use YT Music because I get it cheap (VPN shenanigans), you can upload your own music (hello Nintendo soundtracks), and I mod the Android app to stop it being a mess (ReVanced Extended is the GOAT).
I've been using Apple Music on Android for years, I definitely recommend it. The app is totally fine, I think it's still better than Spotify's crappy app. On desktop you can use the Cider app, which is much better than iTunes. It's even available on Linux.
I switched to AM a couple years ago due to the (better) privacy policy vs YTM. The app is ‘fine’ but it’s painfully obvious that they didn’t want to bother with the android UI guidelines. But it’s a small annoyance, and the price is… palatable, I guess? I think I’d jump ship at $14, but at $12, fine. I don’t use it that much.
Actually, it’d be nice if they would charge based on usage, not flat-rate. I doubt I’m using $3 of that $12 cost.
I use Apple Music, primarily because I need to pay for the higher tiers iCloud storage for my wife’s photo addiction and it’s basically “free” for the family plan.
If I didn’t already have the higher tier iCloud, I would probably prefer tidal for higher quality, or Spotify for the more diverse library.
Apple Music only raised the price by $1 since the launch in 2015 (9 years ago). But they added cool features like lossless audio quality and Dolby Atmos. They also had lyrics like 6 years before Spotify added them. I think you can even get it for $6 dollars if you're a student.
How does this work? Spotify has a deal with the music publishers, where they give 70 % of all subscription income to the music companies. The music companies (Sony, Warner, etc) then split the money based on the share of streams.
How can Apple pay out 2.5x70 %, so 175 %? Are thes losing with every subscription?
That whole article is BS, they even say it themselves:
Rates are rarely paid at a flat rate per stream
There is no payout per stream. Instead a fixed percentage of the subscription price is shared among each streamed song. So why does Tidal pay more then? Either their subscriber numbers are still incorrect (they have a history of publishing way higher numbers than in reality), their subscriber listen to less music (which is the main reason Apple Music pays more per stream on paper, since its often bundled) or their audience focuses more on a single artist (or a genre).
Sure. Obviously it’s more complex than that, but it helps illustrate where the math came from in the parent comment. I don’t know why Tidal pays more, but I’m hypothesizing its because most of their “co-owners” of Tidal are themselves, artists/musicians, which IMO is significantly better than the out of touch folks running Spotify.
This may actually be a net improvement to the Google Search experience, since the engine is borderline unusable without uBlock Origin. But also it feels weird that Google would make an AI generated prompt the focal point and not the entire rows of sponsored ads that litter all search results.
How did the big tech industry get this terminally stupid?
You’re right even though you’re getting down voted.
Doesn’t make Uber or Lyft any less shady of a company but so many people have no idea of the overhead it takes to “run an app”. They think that it’s just some computers talking over the Internet that they pay 100$ a month for and not the possible 100’s of thousands of dollars they pay monthly for the infrastructure to support those apps.
It’s not an offline game that someone can just download and play, it’s a live service that is running, plus all of the data whether financial or otherwise that is being stored on multiple levels of backups not to mention the security infrastructure that needs to be maintained etc etc etc.
That being said, I’m not defending these companies in the slightest, but for someone to just say “run an app” is a massive understatement.
You're right even though you're getting down voted.
Par for the course at LemmyWorld. Redditors brought their Redditor attitudes to LW and downvote anything they could possibly conceive as corpo sympathizing.
It’s relatively cheap to maintain the service. What costs money is marketing and expanding that service. That’s what most people are working on.
Remember, Lyft and Uber have thousands and thousands of people giving them money every day. They don’t even maintain the cars, they just take a cut off the top. Sometimes greater than 50% of the ride.
They are making a ton of money, but they are also wasting it on new markets, new features, and Superbowl ads. They could easily just charge a little more in Minneapolis to make the same money, but they don’t want the drivers to win.
"Maintaining" means more than just leasing out a few server farms. It also means hiring software engineers, customer/driver support staffs, HR, legal teams, designers, etc, all of which are required to keep the day-to-day going. Uber and Lyft aren't small operations, by any means. They are monstrously huge projects that require a lot of bandwidth - both technical and human - in order to keep the lights on.
For what it's worth, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and pretty much every gig app out there have all operated at a net loss from the very beginning. It's not just expensive to maintain the service, it's impossibly expensive.
I’ve had family member ask me about AI since I’m younger and I tell them every time that they aren’t ready for it at all. Especially in this years elections, AI will be weaponized immediately. Like in a few months the machines will turn on from countries around the world to generate fake images and mountains of fake articles and videos and sound bites. Basically, the average Facebook user will be flooded with misinformation and fakery to the point of overload.
AI stuff is survival of the believable, not reality. So if you can believe it, even just a little, you will reinforce an AI model on the edge of your disbelief and it is designed to perfect delusion and extremism.
When I say misinformation and fakery, I mean that this information won’t be the normal type. It’ll be closer to fabrication or lies where the truth is not even partially represented. Same with fakery. It’s the difference between propaganda editing and straight up CGI or photoshop. The propaganda editing is common. Skew the narrative to the point of misinforming. The other type is not currently common. Because making a believable lie vs a parody of the truth takes more time. But AI can and will change that.
For a while now Facebook has been a place of delusion where a different reality exists for people. This will double or triple that disconnect and will likely drive the whole platform into full post-truth but then also delusional truth. I hope I’m wrong but I doubt it.
It may be a 6 month sentence with an early release after 120 days, followed by 3 years supervision. However, perhaps if he served the full 6 months he wouldn’t have the supervised release.
The title is misleading and the article even points it out. She is displaying Doom (which is still cool and kinda fucking crazy) on bacteria. It is not being processed by the bacteria.
There’s zero sense in charging anyone anything until apple decides to not find ways to block it. If there’s going to be a cat and mouse game going on, the product isn’t going to be stable enough to be worth using, so only die-hards are going to be willing to pay anything to begin with.
Them getting shut down so fast is not making them look reliable at all
The only way Beeper can make this work is to make it literally indistinguishable from a real Apple device, one that’s recent enough that Apple can’t simply drop it out of support. Seems unlikely but I’ve got popcorn so I hope they keep at it.
Google and company can go fuck themselves on this one, and I’m usually the first one to bash on Apple for selling overpriced status symbols.
I’m frankly amazed at how much importance Google gives iMessage, when it’s not the number 1 messaging app anywhere in the world. Hell, even if you assume Apple halved its report of monthly active users in Europe, that’s 90 million people in Europe. Significant, but less than 25% of the total population of the EU
Outside USA and Canada, you’ll be hard pressed to find people who give a damn about iMessage, because most are using a different, cross compatible app anyway, like Whatsapp or Telegram, even across most European countries.
In my opinion, ALL nessaging apps should be compatible with each other. It should be like email, just different clients on the same protocol. I know it won’t happen anytime soon (if ever in my life), but I’d like that. And we should start somewhere. Maybe here.
Because those aren’t internet messages, RCS is supposed to supersede SMS and MMS, which is how Google whatever (hangouts? talk? messages?) sends messages to iPhone numbers. Meanwhile, apple-apple communication via iMessage is done via internet
Because the standard is mostly controlled by Google and Samsung, Apple’s biggest rivals in the mobile space
Because Google has been completely anal about being easily spotted in iPhone conversations for quite a while. It is pretty obvious that this has nothing to do with using better standards. AFAIK, even phones that can use RCS have it turned off by default.
Because anyone with an internet connection already has access to several widely used apps that do much more than RCS does
They will. This was most likely planned by their legal team in advance, will cost Facebook a negligible amount compared to their revenue and marked as a “risk.” And when they settle it will be a planned business expense, like a fine
Yeah they don’t even need to hire a law firm. They pay millions of dollars in retainer every year to keep lawyers on staff, so this is just someone’s day job to go through the motions
The article says Meta already tried to buy them out four times. So this company is waiting for a bigger payout or they don’t plan to sell. With a court decision on their side they will have much more leverage to force Meta’s hand.
The company has said that they’ve spent a decade building their “brand” under that name. So, if they’re pushing for a big payout, they intend it to be gargantuan rather than the usual payoff. Changing their name would essentially be starting over in some ways. And the confusion they claim as their reason for action is a legit thing.
I’m not saying that isn’t their goal behind the scenes, but FB tried to buy the name and failed, so I have a feeling they aren’t looking for the usual quiet payoff that’s the goal of that type of action.
engadget.com
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