Amazon paid music subscription will soon include ads and lose downloads

java-man

As expected. This is the default path, happened may times before starting with premium TV channels.

FlippieFinance

Well then.. I'll gladly stick to Spotify

amatecha

That's the problem with subscription services. It's a coercive relationship where the terms are unilateral. As an alternative, I've been buying music from Bandcamp for quite some time now and have a huge library built in addition to the CDs I already owned and ripped to my NAS, which I can stream from anywhere thanks to Jellyfin. If I miss out on some stuff because it's not easily obtainable, whatever, at least my music is my own and doesn't magically go missing because of some random subscription licensing deal. My favorite is when I canceled Spotify years ago, and they show this custom playlist like "we'll miss you" and has all these songs to say goodbye with or whatever. But.. due to Spotify's frequent delisting of songs, one or two of the songs were not playable. Gotta love it.

avgDev

This is the enshitification path, sooner or later these services have to turn to shit or charge a premium to be sustainable. Step 1 is to provide a good value, then lure in creators, then lock them in and profit.

throwaway3060

Not to defend Amazon here, but I think this is talking about the already severely limited streaming benefit of Prime, not the dedicated Amazon Music paid subscription. The former is not really comparable to a actual paid music subscription service.

rustcleaner

There is only one way to stop this: Never subscribe, ever. No streaming, and no cloud. If you don't have the [unencumbered] file, it's not your media. Vote for a government that will levy hefty taxes on recurrent revenue model businesses when what is delivered could be delivered permanently in one transaction, like another sin tax. Vote for defanging DMCA and mandating implementation of open protocols for commercial products; universal machines are not to be golden handcuffs pilfering the people! This stops when we all decide we're mad as hell, and we're not going to take rentier games anymore!

vitally3643

The best streaming subscription I've ever paid money for is Mullvad. I run my Radarr box through a VPN so my ISP doesn't complain and hijack my DNS. I can search for any show, movie, music, or book ever published and have a copy with permanent unrestricted access forever, for free. Fuck all these subscription services. Approximately none of the money you pay goes to the actors, musicians, authors that actually produced the work, it all goes to Amazon and Netflix and Disney. If the people who make your media don't get paid either way, why bother paying Amazon and Netflix for an inferior product, inferior service, and inferior experience? Big Streaming has unwittingly fully conceeded the piracy wars to the pirates.

Ancalagon

If youtube music pulls this I will literally cancel my sub and delete all of the apps. The music app is the only reason I still have premium.

W-Stool

SomaFM is streaming music on 46 channels and it is all free (but give Rusty some money if you can). Just saying.

pjmlp

Make your own mix-tapes, mix-CDs, or mix-mp3s.

protimewaster

I'm expecting most everything to go this route eventually. Charging a subscription fee and having ads seems to be a money maker, so most services will get here eventually. This is also one of the reasons I don't like the direction the video games market has gone. Most games (at least on PC) require Steam or EGS or similar service to access them. At some point, I'm expecting those to transition to a subscription model and/or become very heavy with ads, and then you'll need to deal with ads or subscription fees just to keep accessing stuff you already bought.

NetMageSCW

Title is misleading. This is about the “free” add-on perk to Amazon Prime that was added to make the price raises for Prime somewhat less offensive, similar to Amazon Prime Video. This is not about Amazon Music Unlimited, which is their computer Apple Music and Spotify.