I'd be disappointed if apple had made the purchase, though it would be less out of left field.
I'd be disappointed if apple had made the purchase, though it would be less out of left field.
If you don't sell, it's likely the large companies trying to buy you will copy you and use their piles of money to undercut you out of business (and if they don't, any VC backed startup can try).
So you either survive as small and unnoticed, or become big enough to be interesting (and then bought or killed unless you achieve absurd growth).
Tech is kind of a dark forest now (https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/02/heres-...).
I've worked for 2 companies that didn't sell and were obliterated this way.
That's been the state of tech ever since Web 2.0 or so.
I care about one thing, and one thing only: an irrevocable right to experience a particular piece of media where and when I please in the original form it was released, subject to natural degradation of the physical medium. Now that music is digital, I expect the "when" to be "at any point in my life, starting from when I purchased it", and the "where" to be "any device with the ability to play music".
Streaming is essentially asking for permission to re-experience a piece of media every time I want to do so, and Spotify's and YouTube's answer is often "no". My music library is simply a necessary evil that facilitates security against their whims.
Is "good enough" compatible with "capitalism"? Even ignoring the money aspect of things; you mention the website getting worse but I'm not sure the website has fundamentally changed (for better or worse) in a decade. Their iOS app isn't even compatible with ipads, it's locked to a phone aspect ratio with massive black bars surrounding it. Yet one could make the argument that things were "good enough" tech wise. Bandcamp (in my opinion) was a product/company that was good enough. But there's doesn't seem to be societal incentives to keep companies like that around in today's world... or maybe you just don't hear about them lol