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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

So I assume you give money to every single beggar artist that is playing in the street, metro, etc, right?

It's not about choosing which artists you like and whether you want to give money to some particular artist or not, and not even just personally refusing to give money to any artist.

It's about going out of your way to create something that gets in the way of artists getting paid, such as obscuring/eliminating an option to buy music or give money to an artist, not just from yourself alone but from other people, who might not even have such a stance, or even realize that there has been an anti-artist decision made for them.

Not even adblockers go this far, because they just remove third party ads, and artists are still free to promote their stuff in other ways (for example, on youtube, there's still stuff in description, annotations, things inside the video, etc.). A player like this removes those options from artists completely.

It's also like, not even that different on bandcamp - you can just listen to some music there and move on without buying it. Removing an option to buy an album is kind of different. Imagine if ad blocker did that to a bandcamp webpage, that would be absurd. (bandcamp doesn't even have ads though. well, depending on what you consider "advertising or promotion", maybe the whole website looks like endless promo to you, if that's the way someone looks at entertainment)

> Removing an option to buy an album is kind of different.

The option is never removed, anyone can go purchase the music/album.

It's there when you listen on bandcamp, it's not there in the player. It's removed from the listening experience in this app, and made further obscure by not linking out. Are we actually gonna argue whether a "music player focused on streaming" that touts removing everything else, isn't doing the thing it's doing?

A music player goal is to play music, not purchase stuff. What if the music has already been purchased but not available on that particular local device?

iTunes/Apple Music (where you can literally pay per track), Spotify (pay for streaming access and some other stuff), bandcamp itself (the web page is the player. purchases are also available within android app), are all music players where you can buy music and stuff, with decades of history. iTunes goal was literally to purchase music and play it, all in the same player program, and that's been released over two decades ago. Countless web platforms of different scales offer buying music (album or track by track) and function as a player as well. Amazon still sells mp3s in that way, and Amazon Music website is both a music store and a music player. There's a long history and wide variety of platforms with a goal of both purchasing and playing music, all within the same surface, be it an app or a web page.

What's next, arguing that these aren't actually "music players"? that paying for streaming access to music isn't actually paying for music?

There's just a variety of music players with different goals. Some players' goals are to prevent people from buying music or even discovering that they can pay for music. Again, with bandcamp it's not even removing bad third party ads or anything, it's just removing a purchase option, when it very often doesn't even prevent you from listening to music for free anyway, or sometimes even just downloading some music for free.

Not providing a feature since day 1 != removing

That project is many years old. Apparently they added bandcamp support somewhere in 2020, and then continued to not "provide" any clue that music could be bought there. They could do something, but clearly supporting artists, or rather, letting other people support artists and not getting in the way of that support, is not in their interests even on better music platforms.

> beggar artist that is playing in the street

They are called "buskers". I disagree that buskers are beggars given that they are trying to earn money by providing entertainment.

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