I find it challenging to apply Idagio for the simple reason of my current inability to appreciate the genre, and by extension, the service itself. At $14.26/month, it's steep just for someone to hold my hand to fjord the classical currents. I have an idea I might roll out to become better, like have a Vivaldi week, another one on Medieval times, but ultimately, I must ask if I'm willing to commit to the daily hours of listening into 2022 for in 2021, large segments were earmarked for audiobooks. Would I be further enchanced instead by swinging the monthly subscription toward a fine-tuned target of personal development? There comes a point we gotta narrow our scope and drive that Pareto into the sunset!

Honestly, it's just hard to drop $171 to use this in the next year especially in a context where I just paid under $15 for a year's worth of secure email! Furthermore, I paid a whopping 27 cents to host this website for September. Domain renewal notwithstanding, forget about the price of a coffee per DAY: literally for a single cup of Starbucks, I'm on pace to host this website for an ENTIRE YEAR!

The virtual world ought to be far cheaper than it is. It's just shared rackspace for not just 5 people sharing the same light bulb above, not just 10 people in the same room, or even a high school graduation's worth with all the fading names and sharp faces therein. rather it's scalable to BILLIONS—admittedly, a challenging number to conceptualize, but for each person who connects to the Internet through whatever device, they could run a web server on that same device using the same power they already use—the wealth of a decentralized platform! In fact, on some level, most folks run a handful of web servers at home, even if they are oblivious to the IoT nature of it. So, why is the Internet SO expensive when it comes to content? It's not the hardware or its operation...

...I suppose this is the part where I say that the invisible hand of the market says a streaming service should be $5-$15/month—YET, the supply is limitless, isn't it? So, where's the equilibrium? Yep, basically sitting right there on $0.

I get the gym model: plop down the cash and bada-bing, bada-boom, there's higher quality equipment, paid with real-world dollars that I might otherwise be fiscally locked apart from its access. Plus, there's maintenance of the equipment and space for it! It's a downsized example of the power of network effects. Network effects is the draw of Facebook and also why when I ran a private server of World of Warcraft, the game's mesmerization evaporated.

And at absolutely nobody's surprise, this is the power of a distributed platform like torrent for sharing content, that if just one person copies a file to 100 people, and in turn, those 100 copy to another 100 each, there's only got to be four iterations of the sequence to share a single file to the entire world, or 100^5 = 10,000,000,000. Pretty easy to visualize, not unlike that ol' Kevin Bacon game. And yes, if you're wondering, I'm just a couple of jumps from IRONMAN:

1. Me
2. Jeff Mullen - UFC Judge & my karate instructor for a couple of semesters back in college
3. Joe Rogan - UFC color commentator & podcast host
4. Robert Downey, Jr.

Shoot to Thrill!

At any rate, it costs little time or resources for the individual in context to the compounding power of a network. So, why does a streaming service cost so much?

Does it have to do with all the little payouts that occur before I'm stuck with the bill? I just checked out the commodity price of coffee which puts it at about $1.92 for a lb of unprocessed coffee. So with a 12 oz retail bag, its coffee bean input costs roughly $1.44. Now, somewhere along the way, the Black Rifle Coffee Company enlists it into BUD/S, making its price ramp up to $15.99 for me to shell out. All I got to say is that Murdered Out dark roast better be able to overthrow a third-world dictatorship!

Of course, like coffee, what we pay for with streaming media is not for the costs associated with the content itself. Episodes of ST:TOS, ST:TNG, ST:DS9 and ST:VOY have long since been paid, not unlike all the content by Vivaldi and Mozart that have since fallen out of copyright that are free. Rather, factors to be considered include the metadata and being locked into a centralized model, things that are largely immaterial to our enjoyment of the content. While in context of all those years when I managed the id3 tags of my MP3s, it's a service I appreciate, but I just can't see it adding THAT much cost to the user—not in terms of factors over production costs, ESPECIALLY as its charged irrespective to actual customer use! I mean, I get it, it's a Chinese buffet, but that's at least in limited supply...well, Jell-O notwithstanding.

No, of course it's all about the profit—somebody's profit as it relates to licensing as some of these streaming services come off like an independent convenience store held sway by the marginal gasoline market. But, an inexplicable (for me anyway) profit that seems to use today's network effects to compound profit while jabbing a clipboard into its subscribers hands with a 90s model.

All that aside, it's my basic take on every hospital parking lot I've ever seen: those BMW's aren't gonna pay for themselves.

It's a weird transition, isn't it, this matter-to-energy conversion of goods to services? I once spent money and had something; now, I spend money and have nothing. It's unsettling.