In Reply to: Subscriptions are totally out of hand posted by russsmith on November 09, 2026 at 11:19:20
to milk you dry through ensh*ttification, but they're also there to shortchange the artists, and slowly choke the art form out of its life,
I can go on and on the devastating effect streaming models had on music. It's a good reason to go for buying the physical product whenever you can.
OTOH: when I but music on Bandcamp, I am paying the artist (BC gets its commission), and I can download the music in any format I please (mp3 or flac in my case) and put it on any digital player I have at the moment (love my HiBy). That should exactly be the case when I buy a book on Amazon. I should (a) be paying the author(s) directly with Amazoin getting a commission out of it, and (b) own a copy of the book, be able to download it in any format I please (epub, mobi) and be able to put it on any device I own, irrespective of their proprietary format. Otherwise, it's scam, and it's theft.
Modern capitalism has us in such a bad psychological state that we are no longer able to demand better. Instead all we get from these companies is AI music on Spotify, and god knows how long before AI books on Amazon.