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.
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.
I stream natural gas, electricity, garbage pickup and internet. That’s all.
A good quality usenet server.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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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.
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
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.
Apple Music, music is the only media that I just can’t pirate.
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Apple Music is different because it uses ALAC not FLAC which actually sounds better, definitely a must-have service.
That’s only because Apple marketing makes you believe this. They are both lossless, up to 32 bits/sample and very high sample rates (FLAC allows even higher ones than ALAC afaik). The only “advantage” of ALAC is Apple ecosystem compatibility but that’s only for them to lock you in and make it harder for you to migrate.
It could sound better if they - for whatever reason - had access to better recordings, but that still doesn’t have anything to do with the codec.
ChatGPT, Midjourney, Copilot and Spotify. Considering swapping Spotify for YouTube.
Edit: forgot usenet, and some indexers.
Depending on how much you use ChatGPT, the API might be a better option. For me at least I’m spending about $3 a month using their API, while the ChatGPT subscription is… $23.80/m.
The only streaming service subscription I pay for is Dropout.tv.
I get Netflix for free. I get HBO Max for free. I used to get Spotify for free but gave up my spot in the family plan as I don’t use it often enough. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve used Netflix or HBO Max.
I replaced Audible with Audiobookshelf, and replaced Crunchyroll & Hulu with Plex + automations. No replacement for Spotify yet, I can use YouTube ReVanced to listen to a YouTube playlist while driving.
YouTube music ReVanced exist. I also use xManager for Spotify.
I’ve tried them all, but I’ve settled on family subscriptions of Spotify and Youtube Premium, and an amazon prime account that is only used for shipping.
I guess technically I have Plex Pass, but I bought a lifetime pass 10 years ago.
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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.
- Netflix with a friend.
- Netflix on my own after I had no interest in watching more but my friend did. He kept the account, I made a new one later on.
- Netflix + Prime. Watched very little on Prime. A bit on Netflix.
- Plex + Netflix/Prime. Started with a Raspi4 4gb running plex in docker
- Jellyfin + Netflix/Prime
- Jellyfin + Netflix. Ordered too much…
- Only Jellyfin
A timeline that shows how charging for inconvenience just drives us back to piracy.
