Paid Subscriptions

[Marcos Moragues Coll]

Why not give the ability to host sessions of any length and with any free or paying member, including all benefits of higher bitrates for every one taking part, recordings etc as part of the Platinum plan? Including lessons, it is ridiculous to require students to become paying members for music lessons.

That way I would be willing to pay the extra fee for that plan.

The more I think about it, the more I think this whole payment idea has not been thought about much. My guess is that if they go this path the whole thing will die soon.

Who am I to say. But you will certainly loose me as a customer, if you stick to this. And I am very willing to be a paying customer, even with the Platinum plan, if this gives me hosting capability.

I completely agree with you.

Im a member of jamkazam for more that 10 years. Almost from the beginning when they started. And I was very happy about how they were doing things. But now it seems to me that they are going to fast and they are not thinking clearly about the paying subscriptions.

It is impossible and ridiculous to make your students buy their gear, pay for a subscription and then also pay for the lesson. It becomes too expensive for the students and no one will be interested. 

They have to do it like you said:
If I have a Platinum plan, or any other paid plan, I should be able to host a session with free members and on that session they should be able to use al the privileges I have as a platinum member. Otherwise this all thing have no sense.

The boys in Zoom they doit like that, of course!!! it is very logical to me that it have to work like that. I am very surprised that jamkazam is not doing it this way too.

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I have to say, if it is true that all participants have to get the higher plans to use them, that seems a little overambitious. Why not do it like zoom, where the host needs to have the account, but the participants can then take part for free.

The whole idea of a growing community gets defeated that way. It was difficult enough to get colleagues to invest into the equipment needed and set it all up, now one also has to persuade them to pay monthly fees. That's not going to work, you are cutting off your user base that way.

I am not against paying for the service, but I don't think this has much of a future, if indeed it works like this.

Zoom is different from JK in one critical way. In Zoom the host is hosting and managing and presenting (or allowing presentations) while everyone else essentially observes. In a JK jam, everyone is actively engaged in playing: it's more of a collaboration than a presentation. That takes more resources than being a passive participant on Zoom. I think we're going to find out that a Gold or Platinum user can start sessions of any length and manage them (just like Zoom), lower-tier users are going to be able to join those sessions but will be limited in the number of hours per month (or per session for basic users). So they'll be able to join a session, but once their time runs out they'll be bumped. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

I do hope that there will be some sort of group plan though, where a Platinum user can start a session and others can pay maybe $5 per month and be allowed to play with their "group leader" (and other group members) for as much time as needed. That would work for band practice, choir practice, and lots of other group activities.

I'm also wondering about the teaching/learning tiers. I don't mind having to be a Platinum subscriber to teach, but it doesn't seem reasonable (or enforceable) to ask a student to be a Gold member if they're only there for a lesson once a week. Perhaps my $5 per month "group" suggestion would work for this purpose as well: we could establish a group for our students and they could pay for that tier or more if they chose.

Cindy Harris
Pittsburgh, PA

Other than being "bumped", the fact that lower tier participants will be limited in their audio stream bitrate would likely affect everyones listening quality.

I forgot to point a very important thing!!
Students should be able to join the lesson session for free, and be able, during that session, to use all the benefits the hoost of the session have in his subscription.
otherwise, why I have to pay that subscription for? it does make any sense!!