I want you to sit and think to yourself: how many subscription services do you have? Are they media subscriptions, meal subscriptions, service subscriptions, or something else?
For me, I utilize 34 different subscription services, 31 of which I personally pay for. There are three services that my parents foot the bill for: Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Peacock.
Some of these subscriptions are completely for convenience or goodwill, such as streaming services, premium versions of apps, and Patreon. However, there is one subscription I have that is not a convenience item, but instead, a business necessity and industry standard for my career.
The Adobe Creative Cloud (or the Adobe Suite, as I’ve found that these names are used interchangeably by the employers in my field).
Ah, yes, the Adobe Creative Cloud. The all-encompassing media toolkit that runs at a solid $59.99 a month if you agree to an annual contract or $659.88 a year if you’d rather just pay up front and save $60. If you agree to the annual contract, be cautious, as Adobe makes it deceptively hard to cancel and aren’t upfront about the terms and conditions.
For more information about the issues with Adobe’s annual terms, see the below X (formerly Twitter) thread from Deceptive Patterns, an organization that fights against deceptive design practices. This thread is from February 2022, but it is still relevant and accurate as of April 30, 2024. They’re able to give a more in-depth and understandable overview of the issue than I currently can.
So, let’s say that you don’t want to commit to an annual contract because of your financial situation or desire to avoid a potential contract breach? Then the Adobe Suite will run you an easy $89.99 a month.
There are some creatives in the field who are lucky enough to receive this high-ticket, industry standard toolkit for free through their employer, but there are many of us who are working on a freelance basis, footing the bills for ourselves. For those of us who are just entering the field, our freelancing rates are likely to be less than a professional who has been in the field for 25 years, which means we’re barely covering the costs of our necessary equipment.
Now, I am all for students being trained on the industry standard. In college, the industry standard should absolutely be what institutions are teaching their students to utilize. Students are going into significant debt for their education and deserve to be taught how to use top-of-the-line programs.
What feels like a kick in the teeth, though, is finding out the sheer cost of a program that you may have to foot the bill for after you graduate.
There used to be a point in time where Adobe products weren’t a subscription service, and instead it was a single purchase. These single purchases weren’t cheap, but they came with standard application support from Adobe, and could be used for multiple years without a needed upgrade.
With that being said, limiting a consumer’s ability to outright purchase a product comes off as predatory to me.
I don’t want you to get confused as I do believe in the subscription model. When products that were formerly available as a one-time purchase to become subscription only is where my problem lies.
When you think about it, the modern format of most subscription services is merely a rental service. The second that I stop paying for my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, or a myriad of the other subscriptions I have, I then lose access to projects I’ve been working on and the ability to watch something that I’ve only partially finished viewing.
When it comes to media, such as film, TV, and music, streaming services are at the whims of licensing agreements as to what they offer to their subscribers. Not only this, but as we’ve phased physical media out in our society, services and their associated production companies are able to create and destroy as much media as they could possibly want, never to be seen again.
Loss of media isn’t a new thing, however, with archival nonprofit The Film Foundation reporting that, “Film archivists have estimated that half of all American films made before 1950 and more than 90 percent of films made before 1929 are lost forever.”
To me, it makes sense that we’ve lost large amounts of media from that time frame, as preservation methods weren’t the best, and archive maintenance wasn’t always a priority.
Unfortunately, we reached a point in time where production companies are releasing direct to streaming services, usually with an exclusivity clause, and it seems as though that when these licensing contracts expire, they are not renewed with the original service, nor are they released to stream elsewhere, and can only be directly purchased as a digital rental.
I’ll admit that a direct purchase is better than seeing the outright disappearance of a film or tv show. What scares me is the fact that a studio may easily see that they received enough money during the initial streaming contract and may decide that with the waning popularity of the film or tv show warrants no release elsewhere, even in the form of a paid digital rental, thus standing the chance of being yet another piece of lost media.
At least with the release of physical copies, those who wish to keep that piece of media forever will have the opportunity to do so. I acknowledge the fact that producing physical copies comes at a cost, but if a company runs a pre-order, they have the exact number of copies that need to be produced with limited excess, therefore earning a profit.
I could go on and on about this subject and how it impacts every form of media, but for brevity’s sake, I’m going to end it here. The short of it is that as consumers, we should be able to downright own the media and software that we wish to own, and the option to do so should always be available.
