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Comment by curun1r | Hacker News Reader

Try Googling "Better than Free" and you'll find the answer to your question.

The three most important reasons, for me, are:

- immediacy/ease of use: It just works and I can find what I want easily. I value my time at roughly $200/hr, so it's easy to justify ~$10/mo if it saves me even 3 minutes of my time.

- availability: I don't need to have terabytes of local storage because I can just stream whatever I want, whenever I want.

- patronage: This is the most important thing for me...I want to pay for content. I think the industry has, by and large, behaved like spoiled toddlers for the better part of 2 decades now, but that doesn't make it right to not pay them for their work. And I think I'll get better content if I pay for the things I like.

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$200 an hour? Holy shit, where do you work that it's even worth going in?

In all seriousness unless you're stupendously rich surely that's an overestimate by roughly an order of magnitude? You'd pay me a hundred bucks to drive you home in half an hour instead of taking the hour-long bus?

$50 at his rate. And wouldn't he have to pay less, say $45, to come out ahead on the transaction?

I, too, am curious where GP works.

I work at what used to be a startup until it was acquired by a large company. I arrived at that number by dividing my annual comp by 2000 (40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year) and then rounding down to the nearest hundred. It's probably still a bit high because my comp will drop a bit in two years when I stop vesting my retention bonus.

In retrospect, I wish I'd chosen a number that others would relate to a little better. At $50/hr, an $8.99 Netflix subscription is still paid for in just over 10 minutes of free time, which is just as illustrative of the point I was trying to make.

Perhaps that's how much he values his free time.

Butbutbut, it would be free time if he didn't go in to work.

Re: Patronage.

You're aware artists get ~$0 from streaming services right? Huge names like Radiohead make maybe $100/month from Spotify and the like. Unless you're huge, you're probably getting pennies, if that.

Buy the album, go to a show, get a t-shirt. That's patronage. Don't hand your money over to a record company exec, filtered through a middle man, and pretend you're helping the artist.

Perhaps, but that's true for streaming audio...I don't really do that much. When I do, it's mostly SomaFM, who I've supported over the years. For streaming video, artists are getting compensated, though Hollywood accounting is likely screwing them to some extent. But they've opted into to that system and there's no real way for me to otherwise compensate that they'd make much more.

You're considerably understating the money artists make from Spotify and the like.

But even if those numbers were true, the fact remains that's how the artists have chosen to make their music available to you. You have no right whatsoever to work around that.

Are you conscious of the fact that you've just lost $10 or $20 while writing this comment?

I think "spent" rather than "lost" would be more appropriate - time spent sharing and discussing ideas isn't a total waste.

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