I’ll start: it wasn’t too long ago that one wasn’t expected to pay out of one’s coked up nose for programs (apps). One used to be able to buy a thing and then own the thing. Vacuum cleaners. Video games. Photoshops. Now one has to sign up for it, enter one’s credit card info and fucking pay monthly for some harebrained “service.”
And I blame all of you. Probably 9/10ths of you are on apple products and/or are locked into absolutely insane digital ecosystems and you all laid down and took it. All of you fucking libs. You took it, you normalized it, and fuck all of you.
unpopular opinion: music streaming is a much better deal than movie streaming services (not ethically of course lol) because the only time streaming services tried to have exclusive albums or artists (Tidal), it never worked because one or even a handful of artists aren’t big enough to attract people away from their preferred service. So unlike Netflix or Hulu, with Spotify and Apple Music you pay $8 a month for access to most of the music ever recorded unless its super obscure, rather than paying $10+ a month to have Netflix’s shitty selection of films that change every month.
That’s true, though I like classical so I have to sign up to Idagio to escape the other service’s shitty selection and trash search filter functions. (How is Google fucking play bad at search?)
And yet someone has done it, just not on the mainstream streaming apps. Classical is small and yes dominated by Andre Rieu and bad Puccini operas (Puccini sucks and I will die on this hill.) but it’s still a niche with hundreds of millions of regular listeners worldwide. And they skew rich, buy and listen to a LOT of music and obsess over their FLAC codecs and their Barenreiter urtext sheet music.
As for Jazz, it can be plenty hard to search if you’re not just looking for Song/Artist. Try comparing the evolution over time of a particular Jazz players performance practice of the same piece using Google. Just as hard as finding the Mozart Arrangement of Handel’s Acis and Galatea by Harnoncourt.
It’s amazing that Apple, a group who’s petty cash draw is bigger than the GDP of a mid-sized country, and Google, who’s job is literally to solve difficult search problems, and is currently trying to solve death as a side gig, couldn’t be bothered to throw a few million at this as a lark.
