Just checked out Qobuz. It offers me albums to buy. I try to listen to them, but it wants me to login. Nope. Moving on to one of the many places where I can listen without doing that.
Asking for a login before allowing preview of an album is like asking people for ID before they can access listening posts in a record store. Choosing stick over carrot implies the login is to improve *their* experience, not mine, by subjecting me to more DataFarming.
(1/?)
@strypey Qobuz offers samples of the first 20 seconds for each song wthout a login. Here is the "Album of the week" for example.
@phalanx
> Qobuz offers samples of the first 20 seconds for each song wthout a login
That's slightly less useless, but only slighty. Consider the posts I made yesterday about Roberta Fidora's song and the Brickwall Unlimited Inc track. The first 20 seconds of these are far from representative of the track as a whole.
@strypey Well, what do you propose? Listening to whole songs for everyone without any authentication?
@phalanx
> Listening to whole songs for everyone without any authentication
... is what BandCamp and most other music hosting platforms do. Some artists choose to use settings that only make some of the songs on an album available for preview, but that's still more useful than 20sec intros.
The key question is, how likely is anyone to pay for music they've never heard more than 20 seconds of? I never would and I suspect I'm not alone in this.
@strypey True, but how many major labels are available on Bandcamp? Or do you know any other "music hosting platform" with a catalogue comparable to Qobuz that offers full previews in a decent quality?
I just checked 7Digital and their previews are limited in the same way.
@phalanx
> Or do you know any other "music hosting platform" with a catalogue comparable to Qobuz that offers full previews in a decent quality?
I use YouTub for this, via NewPipe/ PipePipe (Android) or Invidio.us services (web). Also the SoulSeek music-sharing network is still a thing, and there are Free Code apps for it like Nicotine+ for GNU/Linux.
But even if I didn't object in principle to the demand to login, before accessing otherwise public works on a website, I'd still object to the requirement to create an account. It's time-consuming and I may never use it again, and it probably wants a bunch of personal details I don't necessarily want to give it.
(2/?)
If I could, for example, login using the email account of my choice, and all email providers ran an OpenID-style account verifier, maybe I'd be willing to login. If I wanted to minimise DataFarming opportunities, I could have an email account just for casual web browsing activities like this.
Or, what if I could use my fediverse account to login? Or a Libravatar account? What if all these accounts used a common protocol, so that any one of them could be accepted by sites as a login.
(3/3)
