Obviously the answers here might be a bit lower than other places…
Spotify. It is the only subscription I have aside from my VPN, and mostly because their library is MASSIVE.
With how much I drive I’m constantly listening to the damn thing and being able to pick a genre and let it shuffle without thinking about it is 1000% worth the ten bucks a month to not be constantly picking songs, downloading them, sorting and transferring the library to my phone, maintaining storage space, etc…
Yeah, discovery was one of my main reasons for using it. Getting my own music just sounds like a huge undertaking considering how I listen on a whim.
Use a modded apk?
Sure. I could. But you misunderstand my point. As Gaben said, piracy is a service problem, not a cost problem. Spotify’s service is clean and very nice to use, add on the available library and it makes it very worth my time to pay for and support it.
Hell yeah. I’ll pay a reasonable price for a service with lots of stuff on it if it’s reliable and has a great UI. I’ve considered Spotify, even though I have my beautiful flac collection. It’d be nice not to have to worry about converting them to my phone so I can listen in my car.
Spotify like many others here. Just haven’t had many issues with the program and it does what I want for a reasonable price.
Wanna give a big shout out to Nebula. It’s meant to be a YouTube-esque site but solely for educational content. I found it via LegalEagle but it has a ton of documentaries and other educational content creators. I believe my subscription is $5/year or something like that. Just insanely cheap for really high quality content.
I have the Disney+/Hulu bundle. I love Disney movies and with all the franchises they own now I feel it’s worthwhile. Hulu happens to have quite a few of my favorite shows and the bundle made it worthwhile to me.
Currently trying out YouTube premium and, I know this won’t be a popular opinion, but I think it’s worth it to me. I use a lot of YouTube and also chromecast it. While it’s possible for me to get ad blocked YouTube for free on mobile and cast it to my TV it’s… Cumbersome and unstable. I generally have the opinion that I don’t mind paying for services I enjoy using so… For now, gonna stick with YouTube premium. Just so much less of a headache.
AmazonPrime but only for Amazon’s services really, the few shows that are on Prime Video for free are a nice bonus though.
And currently I pay for Netflix and share it with my family but the very first second Netflix cracks down on that I’m dropping it and have told my family as such for years. Already started torrenting most shows I kept up with via Netflix in preparation.
The only other one I consider is HBO… But there just hasn’t been enough of an allure thus far.
Spotify. It’s the only paid streaming service I’ve ever used.
We’ll see what YouTube is going to do with their war against adblockers but if it gets too inconvenient to use I’ll probably get the premium. I get so much value from that site that I almost feel bad for using it for free.
Spotify (great service and easily worth it) & Amazon Prime (but that’s really an extra bonus on top of the same day and next day free delivery?
seedbox or vps(torrent) in a privacy/legal protected country may be a viable alternative for mainstream movie or tv shows.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=country internet privacy lawJust Spotify at the moment. I might look into trying to stream from Netflix without streaming from Netflix sometime while using friends’ passwords for other places. Once my currently roommate but soon to not be roommate (moving back in with parents soon) doesn’t renew their Dropout subscription, I’d be willing to sign up for that only because I am willing to support the people over at CollegeHumor.
I stream natural gas, electricity, garbage pickup and internet. That’s all.
A good quality usenet server.
I pay for the only streaming related site worth it’s money and that’s Real Debrid (or any of the equivalent alternatives). Stremio + Torrentio Addon to friends and family even if they don’t know shit about technology cause it’s so damn easy and fast.
I’m surprised at how many people are paying for YouTube premium. Just patch the YouTube app with revanced and you get better than YouTube premium for free
Only helps on mobile, though.
Ublock origin
Spotify only. I get an Amazon Prime voucher for 30 days from another telco whenever I subscribe to a data plan.
Tidal. I lowkey hate spotify and I think the audio quality is the same or better, for the same price (I don’t shell out for the highest tier).
Can I ask why you hate Spotify? Is there a problem with their service or is it more about how they treat artists?
Besides promoting Joe Rogan during the height of the pandemic when he was on a real stream of misinformation about COVID? Yeah it’s mostly how they treat artists they’re just like YouTube (and Tidal for that matter) where they claim to care about artists but there’s no way anyone but the top 1% is actually making living wage money from streaming. I just use Tidal cause pirating music took up too much storage for me and it makes music discovery a little more convenient.
Just Spotify, they haven’t ruined their service yet. I will never be one of those boomers who manually download all their mp3s and think normal people want to transfer files around between devices.
deleted by creator
I don’t think the average baby boomer knows how to download an mp3 or play it on a smartphone.
who do you think are the people filled in IRC chatrooms? anyone under 40?
Yeah, (wild estimation) 0.5% of boomers worked in various fields of computer science and were absolutely brilliant with what they accomplished. They built the foundations of everything that we used today, and enabled us to work at levels of abstraction that make our lives way easier.
But still, the average boomer needs to call their grandkids over to switch their TV from HDMI 1 to HDMI 2. I’m being a little bit hyperbolic, but the boomers who didn’t work in tech spent most of their adult lives with virtually no exposure to the computing metaphors that younger generations understand implicitly.
The difference between them and younger generations is that the average millennial grew up using computers, and so the average millennial had vastly better computer literacy.
Gen X: still the forgotten generation.
Not all boomers who manually download mp3s transfer them around. I’m one of those “boomers” (I’m in my 30s) that download their mp3s because I like to own my stuff. I then stream it to my devices using a selfhosted media server without transferring anything.
Yeah that sounds like a very painful experience
Nothing. Why pay for an inferior experience?
Never pay for an inferior experience, but for £2.50 a month the experience of using Spotify instead of having to manually find, download, synchronise, and manage a music library is worth it for me.
Not being able to listen to everything I want makes it inferior. I’m also fundamentally against paying money for things that don’t actually pass that money on to the people who deserve it (in this case, the artists). If I spend money on music I just buy the album directly from the artist.
Fair enough, it works for me but not for everyone
Lol so many “pirates” in here
“piracy is a service issue” - if a product doesn’t cost much and saves you time/effort then it can be worth paying a little versus essentially paying yourself less than minimum wage if it’s hard to pirate (depends how valuable your time is though!)
