schadenfreude spark
so protip, boys and girls: handing me something like nyuh is approximately like squirting an eyedropper of blood into a shark tank. it’s almost like the article is trying to mock the situation with context and timing, even though they are bound to some modicum of neutrality in journalism.
e.g. you write that they are opening an entirely free (ostensibly Free) music service and then the first quote happens: “This is the first really serious attempt to start monetizing online music in China.” okay, so you’re making it free and then you say you are going to monetize it. what?
tbqh i can’t tell if this is a mea culpa-turned-olive branch for google, so that they can ingratiate themselves to china’s insanely huge internet population and make up for the whole open access myth that got them on-and-off banned up to press time. (youtube went dark in china last week.) did they not learn that users revolt on you when you start charging for something that was once free? and that you have to come out of the gate with a salient paid model before you pitch it to users?
did you talk to twitter before this press release so you could brush up on your monetization doublespeak? jesus, apple? i bet they could teach you about how to make money from online music a lot more effectively than this.
and why don’t americans, or europeans, get free, sanctioned access to the entire western canon? because we haven’t systematized the process of piracy to the point where it is so flagrant and public that street vendors hawk it with impunity. other countries haven’t made the illegal commonplace enough that they have to accept the illegality of it and work within that framework - which somehow, by some absolutely baffling bizarro logic, means that by being more illegal, it makes being illegal okay.
i wonder when the majors will start to realize that the public has skinned them alive. it will probably be an amusing day.
