| Sorry for my mistaken suggestion about Music Unlimited; I accidentally canceled my subscription |
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Monday, March 9th, 2015 03:12:17 GMT |
News |
Today (Sunday, March 8th), I found out my Music Unlimited subscription unintentionally expired. I manually canceled it sometime in the few days before I was due to be charged on March 7th or 8th, and found out at 10:42 PM EDT (I might as well be exact, since my web browser history enables me to :-) ) that I'm now considered a non-subscriber, despite what this Sony FAQ page says:
I guess my mistake was, not realizing that I wouldn't be charged if I left my subscription active. Shouldn't have unsubscribed manually.
Sorry for suggesting that idea - I hope it didn't inconvenience anyone else.
I'm going to call customer support tomorrow to see if I can get my account reactivated.
(Addition, March 10, 2015, 10:39 PM: Unfortunately, customer support was unable to do anything. I was sent in circles and told to call various different numbers, and no one was able to help in the end. Oh, well. At least that will motivate me to try doing something with the MN Open API from MediaNet, sooner than I would have if I still had a music service.)
In addition to posting this news here, I've also edited my original blog post about Music Unlimited closing.If you have an active Music Unlimited subscription at the end of February 2015, you will be able to continue listening until the end of March, and you will not be charged during the month of March. Music Unlimited subscriptions will automatically expire on March 29 and will not renew again.
| Spotify is nice to use again; thoughts on alternatives |
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Wednesday, March 11th, 2015 08:05:11 GMT |
News |
I just tried Spotify again for the first time in a while, and their web player is no longer horrendously slow in my web browser.
So, I guess either Spotify fixed something, or maybe it's faster now because I recently totally switched to Lighthouse 64 Puppy Linux 6.02 Beta 2.
I guess Spotify might even be nice enough now for me to subscribe - but, mostly because of my bad financial circumstances, I'm not going to.
Besides, it would be so cool if I could figure out how to make my own music service using the MN Open API from MediaNet. I wonder if there's a way for me to make money from that without compromising my ideals about libre software and copyleft? Ideas are welcome at The Eryss.Com Forum.
My uncertainty about that is one of the top reasons I'm reluctant to go ahead with it. It's likely to be a lot of work and take a lot longer than I wish it would, for possibly very little reward. On the other hand, I guess there might be no harm in fooling around for a couple weeks or so trying to code up something cool. (I'm not quite ready to begin, though, because I haven't fully made myself at home with Lighthouse 64 Puppy Linux yet - that's still in progress.)
I've read that the so-called royalties most musicians get from streaming music tend to be depressingly tiny and nowhere near enough to live on. So, perhaps a music site which does a lot more to encourage purchases and tipping might really help musicians out.
I wish there was a payment service which didn't have any fees at all, whose top goal was to help people rather than to make money. But, creating something like that would probably be a lot more difficult than creating a music service, so I don't think I feel up to it. But, someone should definitely create one.
Paying musicians more per stream would also probably be good - though I wonder if it's even financially possible, given that the average price for a streaming music subscription is probably around $9.99 per month for unlimited streaming.
But, even if the price per stream were higher, I think it still would suck for musicians that musicians probably have to just blindly trust (or hope) that streaming music companies are being honest about how many times the musicians' music got streamed.
If I were a musician trying to make a living from music, I'd much rather have potential buyers and tippers sent to my own website which I control, so then I wouldn't be in the position of having to just blindly believe (or hope) that various middleman websites are being honest about my quantity of sales or streams.
But, perhaps I might end up just going back to collecting legally free MP3s (or even FLAC files - FLAC being a lossless audio format) from sites like Bandcamp or VGRemix.com.
Or maybe I'll return to collecting legally free MIDIs, a hobby I acquired back in the olden days when I had only slow dialup internet, since MIDIs were some of the only music files small enough to enable me to download a lot of decent-sounding music in a reasonable amount of time.
Maybe somehow I'll be able to figure out (or maybe someone will tell me?) how to make MIDIs sound really great in Linux. I have thousands of MIDIs already, and it would be nice to be able to listen to them again without having to use one of my old Windows computers to have decent audio quality.
Maybe what would be best would be a streaming music site which tries a lot harder than existing streaming music sites to help out musicians, perhaps by providing a lot of external links to musicians' own official websites, so people can go there and buy things and/or send tips directly to the musicians they love.
Spotify still has a free (as in price) version, and I believe the audio quality is better than YouTube's, at least.
Donations and microdonations and purchases of goods (still none available yet) and services (somewhat available, but please don't expect quick responses) are welcome.