Yes, that it’s common across platforms doesn’t make it likeable by the way, I still think it’s pretty bad and value at checkout should be fixed at checkout and that’s that. I pay 5€, the price of a stream is this, period. And I get that we’d be limiting to a small number of currency, hell I’d prefer “dollars” over credits that says it all. If there’s a money crash we’re fucked anyway, with credits or currency, because the money still has to go out of the platform to the performers.
OK so it’s a legal issue.
Then could we peg the credits on the dollar please? 1 credit = 1$
(I find it funny by the way because operating cash balances on behalf of users is exactly what we do… like that is exactly the service we provide)
Sorry, I meant that it’s common since platforms (financial regulations aside) don’t want to turn into speculative currency markets, escrow services, or deal with money laundering schemes.
How is it protecting us from this btw? (real question) if someone wants to create 100 accounts, buy however many credits they want, and then get them back as artists by only playing a specific number of songs a lot for example. How does credit vs dollars prevent money laundering schemes? What’s that layer doing against it?
Btw, this relates to a deeper thing about the nature of our service which is that we absolutely are a “music dedicated bank account” with a sets on laws on how the money must be spent according to our music listening patterns. Which is I guess why I don’t get a lot of the remarks because to me that’s exactly the service we’ve always provided.
I’m a conservative on this point. I look forward to developing something like credits as a means of exchange within the co-op between members and between co-ops. We may be years away but I think it would be unwise to strip this out of our current processes.
As an international service (as long as there are independent national currencies) there will always be complications around value exchange. Having its own system gives the co-op flexibility around policies of reward and patterns of practice.
Yes, I know it’s an idea I never really liked so that’s why I think there’s a lot of going back and forth here. “Credits as a means of exchange on the platform” doesn’t sound at all enticing or desirable to me, verifiable credentials were far more interesting as a means of exchange to me for a lot of reasons.
I should add I’m fine with whatever comes up, you all seem to have very good reasons to do this, personally I really dislike it and always have for all the reasons mentionned above, but if legally, technically we can’t really do it, and if there’s no majority desire for it, I don’t mind let’s go with that.
We display prices in euros in our own site. We could easily put text up for an approximate conversion, but it is the card issuer, and their fx commission that determines what is actually paid.
The new stripe hosted checkout won’t make much of a difference, but it will at least be a more standard-looking checkout process.
We could set up Stripe to do the conversion at their day rate when customers present in non Euro currency, but I suspect that would be expensive for them and for us.
The truly international option is to support different settlement currencies, but that requires that bank accounts are opened for each.
Is there still nothing that can relatively simply be done on the ‘representational layer’ (is that the correct term), whereby everything still use credits but I can see my credit balance in my preferred currency.
Like a UX selector where I can choose between, for example: Credits, USD, GBP, EUR.
The credits are always 100% accurate (noting above comments about decimal points) and those that want to track credits can, whereas currencies are tracked across an internally set stable exchange rate, no fluctuations, just something reasonable and sensible until such a time as that exchange rate is too way off to be usable at which point it is tinkered with. Maybe it gets reviewed every month or two.
I’m not talking anything deceitful but a little ‘?’ link about currencies spells out that Resonate accounts in credits and the currency display is an approximation to help you track your spending.
This might be less of an issue if the interface didn’t show how many credits you have (to four decimal places even!) so often. Certainly on the “top up” screen it should show exactly what your current credit balance is, but perhaps everywhere else, the app could just show a color indicator & status description. Green/“OK” is >10 credits, yellow/“low” is 1-10 credits, red/“top up!” is <1 credit. That’s all I’d need to see for a lot of use cases, and it removes the need to think about currency or precise numbers entirely.
I just read this very interesting thread.
I personally am not bothered by the “credits” approach. Once I spent money my money is gone, to me I clearly do not own money anymore, but “something else”, and credits sounds good to me to describe this, which gives me the right to listen to music.
But I just wanted to quickly react to this just to raise a warning (in my opinion) :
I might be considered as too much “rational” by many, but clearly the first thing I tried to understand when discovering Resonate was “how the math works here ? how much credit do I consume when listening the first time ? the second time ?” etc.
And I can understand that some might not care about this and are ok to use the service without thinking about it.
But I think that if you don’t allow full transparency on this for those interested, then it’s harder to gain trust from them.
I think it’s a quite classic and not easy problem : how to simplify the system so that most users (even those not making much effort) easily familiarize with it, without obfuscating how it work ?
That’s what the credit system reminded me of (and not in a positive way) when I first joined the site. I would prefer currency credits as well. However, after skimming through this thread I realize that there are some problems on the implementation site associated with this approach. So I do understand if those prove to be too much of a hurdle.
, I was hopeful this proposal would go very differently haha