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But you can't, and won't, listen to it all.
How does the subscription economy benefit me?
- Thread starter mrochester
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But you can't, and won't, listen to it all.
Caporegime
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Phones are not subscription. They’re finance surely?
I remember the good old days when my only subscription was Shoot magazine at 50p a week
Now it’s Microsoft, Sky, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and adobe.
I remember the good old days when my only subscription was Shoot magazine at 50p a week
Now it’s Microsoft, Sky, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and adobe.
Don't subscribe to it then if you're not going to listen to more than £20 worth of albums.
Soldato
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my argument is that circumstances in life have this funny habit of changing relatively quickly, although i guess it's the choice we all have to make in terms of how confident we feel that there's no change on the horizon.
personally i'd rather try and retain as much freedom as possible.
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That's why I said in my first post that it's designed to extract more money out of you.
Caporegime
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I find most sim contracts to be too cheap to worry about when your locking yourself into an expensive phone purchase. Mines like £4 for 1500 minutes, unlimited texts and 4GB data. Don’t need any more allowances or any cheaper than that.
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My mortgage already has me for another 25 years, a 2 year contract for my mobile is a breeze.
Caporegime
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I recently upgraded my work mobiles from 2GB data per month to 32GB data per month for the same monthly cost. The business owns all the handsets anyway so that didn't matter.
Now I can listen to Spotify (subscription) more without worrying about pre-downloading songs, so I get more value out of that now.
It works for some things and not for others. I didn't find the Xbox game pass very useful because they are mainly older games.
Soldato
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thing is a mortgage is a necessary evil, a phone contract is not, little things add up and all that.
Caporegime
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Shareholders of big companies likes to see a consistent and increasing income and profit. On a regular company who manufacture anything will get your ups and downs, a peak during new product launch, seasonal peaks but with a subscription model they get a constant guarantee income, with more people signing up they get increased income.
How does it benefit you? They couldn’t care less.
How does it benefit you? They couldn’t care less.
I'm fine with it being an option but not the only option there needs to be choice:
It isn't always an advantage - if I'm using some software for a certain purpose and it covers my needs then unless there are critical security updates then updates aren't necessarily an advantage especially if it means software needs to regularly "phone home" for activation purposes, etc. the last thing I need is an update either removing a feature I'm relying on and/or changing around how things work significantly disrupting my "workflow" and also if I'm travelling, etc. I don't want to find out I can't use some software because it "needs" to update or authenticate and I either don't have access to the internet at that point and/or I just don't need the extra hassle.
It scares me actually a bit how naive and/or short sighted people are even though it might seem a fairly trivial thing - when you give up control eventually you give up freedom and increasingly companies are more and more taking the mick and intruding more and more into and getting more control over every day life and for the most part people lack the vision to see the dangers and if it comes to it will only wake up when it is too late.
It isn't always an advantage - if I'm using some software for a certain purpose and it covers my needs then unless there are critical security updates then updates aren't necessarily an advantage especially if it means software needs to regularly "phone home" for activation purposes, etc. the last thing I need is an update either removing a feature I'm relying on and/or changing around how things work significantly disrupting my "workflow" and also if I'm travelling, etc. I don't want to find out I can't use some software because it "needs" to update or authenticate and I either don't have access to the internet at that point and/or I just don't need the extra hassle.
It scares me actually a bit how naive and/or short sighted people are even though it might seem a fairly trivial thing - when you give up control eventually you give up freedom and increasingly companies are more and more taking the mick and intruding more and more into and getting more control over every day life and for the most part people lack the vision to see the dangers and if it comes to it will only wake up when it is too late.
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I don't know, I think having a smartphone and wireless service is pretty essential these days.
Caporegime
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I don’t mind subscriptions that allow me access to a huge amount of content that is regularly updated. Currently we have Deezer, Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime. All of them are ok value for money and I much prefer the subscription model over paying for individual media items. Prime is the first to be dumped though I think as it’s content is lacking and price is going up.
I don’t even mind Office 365 as I make use of the cloud storage and Skype minutes.
Lightroom though is a joke. It’s not updated often, benefits of updating are minimal and I won’t be tied into their cloud service. I’ll move away at the end of my current subscription. The subscription model doesn’t work for an essentially static bit of software.
I don’t even mind Office 365 as I make use of the cloud storage and Skype minutes.
Lightroom though is a joke. It’s not updated often, benefits of updating are minimal and I won’t be tied into their cloud service. I’ll move away at the end of my current subscription. The subscription model doesn’t work for an essentially static bit of software.
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Soldato
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fair point, fair point.
depends, a smartphone yes, mobile internet yes, but that's not the same as getting the latest flagship model every 2 years when you can acheive the same fundamental functionality on older hardware. and there's the 1 month rolling contract for getting internet access.
hell i only upgraded my phone because the last one died, and i dont plan on changing again until this one dies.
Communism 101 - no private ownership. In the future there probably won't be money and you'll have to work to have access to everything. Don't work or get made unemployable for being a right wing nazi who believes in capitalism, go without. You heard it here first.
it often doesn't, it just allows you to remove the risk of ownership and perhaps have access to something quicker that you might not otherwise be able to afford
a music subscription service allows you access to many more songs than you'd otherwise buy, but then again for plenty of users I suspect they only ever listen to a small fraction of them and perhaps over time could have saved money by just buying the equivalent music in CD form - that removes some of the optionality of being able to listen to things on a whim, having access to your music everywhere etc..
likewise lots of people buy cars they couldn't always afford on PCP - in lots of cases it can work out worse than other options but in some cases people can get good deals etc..
which is what software companies love
when I worked for a company producing financial software we started making a fortune from subscription services, ASP/managed services solutions...
instead of flogging a license for 10 million and charing a million a year in maintenance and then try to sell upgrades later on we could instead lock the client in and charge more like 2-3 million a year for the licence and maintenance included - oh and if they wanted a team to monitor/manage the system for them around the clock then they could pay another million a year (which basically just paid for 4 analysts earning 30-50k each + a load of profit for the company)
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Yeah there are some benefits to that - I've been quite tempted and might do so recently to take out one of those offers on a fully loaded quite expensive vehicle for a year - maybe 2-3 depending on how I get on with it that I otherwise wouldn't want to put all that money on and the hassle of then selling, etc. as I've no interest in keeping it long term and it is outside of my affordability really but kind of fancy it for a while.
Well no, you're just stupid if you're subscribing to things you won't use. That doesn't make subscription models inherently bad.
Inherently bad in their own right no - if they are replacing choice though it is often bad. Personally I'd rather pay more and get what I wanted than make a saving but end up with something less than ideal/that I didn't want.