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by sushid
1398 days ago
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> If I use my account to listen to one band only, my $10 contribution should go to them (modulo taxes, margins etc). I'd argue that pooling the funds and divvying it up evenly across all played songs is actually the most fair. If anything, your implementation would be more prone to scammy content farmers (e.g. spammers using trials/locale pricing arbitrage to play only one $SCAM_ARTIST song per account). Most importantly, however, your model is just not how memberships work in the real world. HBO doesn't (and shouldn't) reward a TV show with more budget because you only binged one TV show despite having access to all the show. Nor do gym memberships. Do you think Costco shouldn't allocate your membership funds for their gas stations because you have an EV? What about cable TV? What about your local/state/federal taxes? |
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Wat? You're saying that if you misimplement it and count all users including free/trial as equal paying you could get problematic incentives? Well, yeah. The point is today you have correctly implemented per-stream and there is a massive open arbitrage. A bot account can control 100-1000x of revenue compared to a human.
> Most importantly, however, your model is just not how memberships work in the real world. [...]
Spotify doesn't produce music, they act as middle man between you and the artists you listen to. There's a reasonable expectation that Spotify takes a cut between you and the artists you listen to, similar to an app store. Splitting your contribution between the artists you're listening to makes sense and importantly does not have arbitrage for content farm spammers (modulo a tiny bit of value from stolen accounts).
HBO and Costco aren't just funneling money around, they're producing physical goods and content, so it doesn't apply directly. You could make a more convoluted argument that they should follow the same principles but it's really not clear what that would mean, so I'm not gonna defend it. Same with taxes, I don't know what either per-stream or per-customer would even map to in that space.