We're Really Doing Subscription Services For Printer Ink Now? I Am So Fucking Over Everything Being A "Subscription Model" Now And It's Time We Fought Back

You're gonna think I'm crazy but I've been trying to embed this video I reposted in a blog a couple months ago and Big Printer Ink is in so tight with Elon and twitter that it refuses to let me. 

Wild. 

But that just means it's even more important that I stand up to the man and blog this.

Here is the video link to go and watch it - fuck you Big Printer Ink 

Seriously, what the fuck are we doing anymore?

(Sidebar - If I still worked in a law firm office like I did way back when, and was no longer able to print hundreds of flyers for my parties and bar events on the company dime, I would be fucking enraged by this. Hell, I haven't made a copy on a copy machine in longer than I can remember and this still enrages me. Where is a gif from Office Space when you need it?)

For me, it started with iTunes. Back in the day, I was dropping way too much money on songs. 89 cents a pop at first, then 99 cents, and eventually $1.29. A dollar-twenty-nine for one song. Total scam. Then a buddy showed me how to upload pirated MP3s into iTunes, sync them to my iPod, and later my iPhone. Magic. Before that, I was on Kazaa, and then the sketchy forums where people would upload entire albums to MediaFire and RapidShare. (Shout out realestniggas.com and tjsdjs.com—real ones know.)

But then something shifted. Apple rolled out this “Apple Music” thing- ten bucks a month, all the songs you want. The entire iTunes library. Pretty sweet deal, except for one tiny detail: you don’t actually own anything. You’re just renting. You can download songs to play offline, sure, but the second you stop paying, Apple cuts your water off like a pissed-off landlord. No more music for you. I didn’t like where it was headed then, and I hate it even more now.

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Same thing happened in other industries. Remember when razors were just razors? Then Dollar Shave Club popped up, and suddenly you’re on the hook every month. My guy Light Switch Lou was actually early on that wave- landed them as a big Barstool advertiser back in the day. (Sidebar- tangent here, but people really don’t realize how much Lou did for Barstool’s growth. Yeah, he’s a maniac, but he hustled his ass off. Kid went from banging on Tall Mo’s door in Philly, to throwing parties, to eventually selling ads with DirecTV and national brands out of the Milton office. He shared a desk with a squirrel living in the wall, by the way. Absolute grindset.

Lou was also yelling at me for years to invest in Anchor and Spotify, which I laughed at. Turns out he was right, Spotify bought Anchor, and now Lou’s probably retired on a beach somewhere while I’m still writing blogs and running bars. Good for him.)

Anyway. 

Spotify. 

That’s when it became normal for entire companies to exist purely on subscriptions. 

No product in your hand, nothing you own, just access. 

Think about how insane that would’ve sounded if you pitched it to people in my grandfather’s day. 

Back then, the only subscriptions he had were to the daily newspaper and Sports Illustrated. He could hold them, keep them, pass them down if he wanted. Now? We’re paying rent to listen to music, and the second your card declines, your playlist vanishes.

And the wildest part? Not only is everyone fine with it, but for younger people, it’s literally all they’ve ever known. They don’t even think twice.

And now it's literally evenything under the sun. Especially when it comes to anything related to entertainment. 

Fucking wild how we got here.

Somewhere Klaus Schwab smiles

p.s. - John Rich blogged this in July

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Right here -

He hit the main points of what a crock of shit this entire thing is, and nothing really new has happened, and nothing really set me off about subscriptions today- it's just that I've been living in a vortex the last two weeks completely cut off from the real world and whats going on so I'm going through old blogs I have sitting in drafts trying to clean them up and post them since I also haven't blogged anything in forever. I feel like a deadbeat, so prepare for a lot of random blogs the next couple of days. 

p.p.s.- if you don't know about Michael Bolton, Geto Boys, and Office Space, then I don't wanna know you