streaming

I bought a song on the iTunes store today

You may be thinking this is crazy in the age of streaming “all you can listen to” music, especially since I am subbed to Apple Music on the family plan (sharing with my partner). And maybe it is!

But I can only run Apple Music through a browser on Linux and my preferred media player on Windows, which is, er, Media Player, cannot “see” the DRM-addled streaming music downloads of Apple Music, so if I want to listen to something there, I have to provide a local copy, hence downloading a song from iTunes for the first time in years.

On the plus side, it’s DRM-free and fully portable, so I can move it around wherever I like, to any system I want, just like in the olden days of ten years ago.

A look at Netflix’s “casual viewing” (that is, most of Netflix)

This article is just all-around depressing: Casual Viewing

Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)

And:

Netflix’s “views” might look impressive on paper (even Sweet Girl, the TNM starring Jason Momoa as a vengeance-seeking survivalist whose MMA-trained daughter takes up his cause, was viewed 6.7 million times in the first half of 2024), but these figures remain a sham. To get to 6.7 million, Netflix first tallies the film’s “viewing hours,” the total amount of time that users have spent streaming the movie. Here, Netflix makes no distinction between users who watch Sweet Girl all the way through, those who watch less than two minutes, and those who watch just a few seconds thanks to autoplay, or skip around, or watch at 1.5x speed. All this distracted, piecemeal activity is rolled into Sweet Girl’s total viewing hours (12.3 million at last count), which the company then divides by the program’s runtime (110 minutes, or 1.83 hours) to produce those 6.7 million views. According to Netflix’s rubric, two users who watch the first half of Sweet Girl and close their laptops equal one full “view”—as do 110 users who each watch a single minute.

To compensate for reading this, here is a cat watching a TV with more attention than a typical Netflix subscriber:

I tried Spotify again

It’s the free version, since I’m still paying for Apple Music. And this is the first thing I saw:

First, I was terrified. Then I wondered if maybe McDonald’s had some kind of playlist (the song “Grease” immediately comes to mind), then I realized it’s just an ad, because you get ads in the free version.

I don’t like ads, I no longer like McRibs (I did when I was 14, proof that teens think they know everything while knowing very little), but I am curious to try out alternatives to Big Daddy Apple these days, so I’ll see how it goes.

EDIT: Mobile Syrup’s newsletter the following day had this: