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Music Piracy Is Back, Baby

"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.

Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."

The problem isn't price. People just don't want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: "people want to own their music." Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is "no longer in your library." Screw that.

virtueisdead ,

verifiable via personal experience

VampyreOfNazareth ,

Bandcamp ftw

Apollo2323 ,

Nicotine+ is the way to go for this.

damienallbran ,

God bless soulseek

buddascrayon ,

Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music.

Meanwhile I've been paying the same $4.99 for Pandora's simple commercial free service for the last 10 years. I can't select individual songs to play, it just plays random songs based on my channel choices, but it works fine for me. Anything I specifically want to listen to I'll just look up on YouTube.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

But YT audio quality is pretty shit most of the time. There’s plenty of sites that will strip the audio for you from a video and IIRC a couple browser plugins, too. I guess if you really want the song you’ll have it, but it’s not going to sound great.

sebinspace ,

I got ChatGPT to write a Python script that lets me choose between stripping the audio or taking the whole video from the highest quality of that video available.

NickwithaC ,
@NickwithaC@lemmy.world avatar

It all sounds the same coming out of someone's shitty Bluetooth speaker.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

We used to record shit off broadcast radio. DJ's talking up to the post, tiny little bit of static in the mix. Maybe even a crossfade into the next song if you're unlucky. We'd put it in the mixtapes and give copies of it to our friends. This copies would have about a 5 to 10% further degradation unless you have professional equipment.

There's plenty of people out there that'll enjoy relatively bad copies of music as long as it's not too complicated and free.

buddascrayon ,

You are saying things that audiophiles just cannot comprehend. The fact that most people just don't give a shit that the audio quality of a recording is sub par is mind boggling to them.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

A clear radio broadcast recorded on a decent analog cassette is pretty damn good compared to a ripped mp3 with a shitty bit rate, warbling and hissing.

I, too, recorded off the radio, or off CDs, onto mixtapes, not that this history has anything to do with what we’re talking about here.

I’m not an audiophile, but I can’t stand low-quality mp3 rips. If people are happy with those rips, great, but that doesn’t make them good copies which is the point of what I said. The fact that people settle for the low quality may just as well be a result of their inability, lack of knowledge, or just laziness on how to procure better copies rather than actually being happy with the quality.

fne8w2ah ,

Family sharing is the way to go for me.

JuanR ,

I used to do lots of piracy back in the days. I am so glad those days are behind me and have not been big on the scene. What would be some sites to avoid to not fall in the trap of being a criminal. I love giving companies all of my money and do not ever want to go back to my old ways. Please help me with a nice list of things to avoid.

XMRFrbgNBwQC6Hkd ,
@XMRFrbgNBwQC6Hkd@lemmy.world avatar

The some of the old music sites are still there. But I would avoid torrentgalaxy.to it has curated weekly albums of top playlists from Spotify, tiktok, etc that have all the new stuff updated every week, for your local playback displeasure. Only uncool people play locally stored music, all the cool kids stream. Do not go there.

rottingleaf ,

I personally carefully avoid ed2k, gnutella and soulseek, just like in the olden days. But you may also want to avoid YouTube with youtube-dl or YT search in QMPlay2.

gingernate ,

Avoid Spotify dl. Easily installed and after insted from the command line by typing spotdl

31337 ,

Thankfully, my ISP informs me if someone on my network shares movies on Bittorent without a VPN. Do ISPs typically do the same for music on the ed2k and gnutella networks?

rottingleaf ,

I don't know whether they detect it (technically no problem), but these are not widely used anymore. In USA maybe, but I live in Russia.

Smokeydope ,
@Smokeydope@lemmy.world avatar

Please for the love of god avoid buying a real mp3 player with a metal shell, become a linux nerd, install yt-dlp, and run this command in the terminal
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 -o "%(playlist_index)02d - %(title)s.%(ext)s" MUSIC-PLAYLIST-URL-LINK
It also totally doesn't work on other music websites like bandcamp.

ZiemekZ ,

Screw MP3, Opus is better.

mhague ,

youtube-dl -F url

That will list formats; get one of the audio only formats

youtube-dl -f 140 url

Bonus is that the script works for lots of sites. It can get movies from tubitv for example

ZiemekZ ,

-f 140 is AAC, please don't do that. -f 251 is better since it's Opus, the best versatile lossy codec so far.

mhague ,

I'll try that out. Thanks for the heads up.

Jknaraa ,

I found some of my favourite bands by downloading mislabelled songs on limewire.

banneryear1868 ,

Always has been

PanArab ,

Anghami is $2.99 per month or $24.99 per year. It is the only subscription service I use and I’m happy with it. $10.99 per month is excessive.

TopRamenBinLaden ,

Do they actually have the same selection as Spotify and Apple music? I checked their website, and it appears to be catered to Arabic listeners, but I saw one of the pictures at least has Taylor Swift on there. I listen to a lot of niche stuff, though, and I don't feel like downloading the app just to see if it's there. That is a good price if they have all of the same artists, though.

PanArab ,

Their international selection is small, if you primarily listen to English songs and podcasts it will not be sufficient. I think they still offer a free trial.

TopRamenBinLaden ,

Thanks for the response and info, I really appreciate it! I will definitely let some of my family know about Anghami, because some of them actually listen to Arabic music, unlike myself.

LSNLDN ,

If there was soulseek on an iOS app I think I’d go fully back to piracy. Never gotten over Apple Music ruining all my playlists, just want to go back to basics

mint_tamas ,

For me, it’s neither the price nor the quality of apps (idgaf, it plays music in the background). The thing that pushes me towards piracy is the same as for movies and TV shows: disappearing content. Because of content licensing deals, every piece of media is temporary on a service. I do rewatch movies from time to time and it’s infuriating if it’s gone (or rather would be, if I was still paying for any streaming service). This is especially true for music. My Spotify favorites list has a huge percentage of greyed out entries (and I’m pretty sure there are things that were outright deleted).

AVengefulAxolotl ,

I still use spotify as well. It works for me, i just found like 10 new songs last week. At the same time, last year i listened 2hrs/day on average.

BUT at the same time, every few months i export my whole playlists, just in case, using this site.

criticalimpact ,

I think it was maybe 4 or 5 years ago I started noticing the greying out in spotify
Minute that happened it was back to the high seas

Prethoryn , (edited )
@Prethoryn@lemmy.world avatar

The problem isn't is price. "People just don't want to pay for a bad their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: "people want to Own their music (reuters.com)." Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun."

Fixed the post for you. I am not trying to be an ass and stated this in a previous post but people's push to piracy is almost always to obtain what is believed to be what is becoming or is unobtainable. Price is and availability is almost always the driving force of piracy because price plays a part in availability.

I was all on board with the post until I saw, "people just don't want to pay for a bad software that is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is the user-hostile design." This to me is so far from the truth that I like to call statements like this the Lemmy or FOSS mentality that I see on here and it isn't meant to be insulting. I have defined it that way because I think Lemmy users get just as wrapped up in their own opinions and personal belief system that they forget they are also in a bubble and their opinions steer far off course to justify some personal idea or hope about what is actually pushing "mainstream" people to make choices that just aren't why average consumers are making choices.

People will 100% buy and use bad products user experience does only go so far though. I would say Spotify is as popular as it is because of its design as well as Apple Music. The features and design layout are what make their music services easier to use for most consumers that and they are popular services by word of mouth and are commonly used on the most popular devices because they are pre installed. Why have 5 music apps on an iPhone when Apple makes a music app that is already there. Point being design isn't the issue. The issue is competition, choice, and price. There really aren't a whole lot of options, popularity wise, outside of Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube music. These users aren't flocking to open source apps they are going straight to Piracy by ripping the content from YouTube directly and it is absolutely almost in direct relation with the increase in price increase. The "mainstream" user which I call the average consumer isn't worried about Spotify's design they want it to just function and play their music and be available and popular by design.

Oha ,
@Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz avatar

I fucking love my selfhosted flac collection! 250gb and growing

VOwOxel ,

I don't want to run a server for selfhosting, so I just have my library (about 300GB of mostly OPUS files)
On my pc and on a 512GB microSD card in my phone.

I use Foobar2000 on PC and Poweramp on Android.

banneryear1868 ,

Yeah sometimes with this self hosting stuff, it's like wow it organizes my music, lets me play it, makes it available to other devices... so does my operating system.

Allero ,

There's no need to run a server if you can do the same locally.

Server is useful when you have a lot of devices with limited memory, or want to take advantage of some specific functionality server software may offer.

PilferJynx ,

Wow, this is my exact setup. Except I have auxio exclusively for audiobooks to keep them away from my random shuffle.

ZiemekZ ,

OPUS files

Ah yes, a man of culture

BonesOfTheMoon ,

I wish we had Google Play Music again. It really was an excellent app and had flawless suggestions for me I always enjoyed, and truly the most intuitive mixes. Google is evil of course, but honestly one of the best features was the listing of bands playing near you in the upcoming weeks, I went to so many shows because I'd try their music via the GPM suggestions.

I listen to the Henry Rollins show on KCRW to try to get into new music but despite my appreciation of him I find his music tastes repetitive. How many weeks in a row can I listen to the Jesus and Mary Chain?

SmoothIsFast ,

I used to use Google Play music back in the day. It was also nice to upload your own music and then be able to stream it anywhere.

Now I use Plex with Plexamp which works almost as well.

kalpol ,

Plex is not great for privacy or ownership these days. Jellyfin or Kodi are much better.

lickmygiggle ,

Does their music player compare to Plexamp at all?

ChillPill ,
@ChillPill@lemmy.world avatar

Best alternative to plexamp I've found is Symfonium. It supports plex, jellyfin, subsonic and possibly others.

zbyte64 ,
@zbyte64@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Just what I've been looking for, it supports offline playing!

thoughts3rased ,

Oh my god you've literally just recommended me a dream app. PlexAmp has so many annoying usability issues and symfonium seems to have solved all of them, I can't thank you enough.

SmoothIsFast ,

Thanks!

BonesOfTheMoon ,

And to buy music!

reagansrottencorpse ,

The fun part is, before it was Google play music it was another service by another company that I can't even remember now. Google bought it, then fiddled with it for a few years before shit canning it.

I miss the original app, it was wonderful for just throwing music on based on your mood.

Wh33lz ,

I just always figured they canned it once they bought YouTube and started YouTube Music.
I never got into Google Play music, but I use YouTube music, and it don't do everything I am seeing Google play music did.

BonesOfTheMoon ,

I remember that app! Can't think of the name.

smallfry ,
@smallfry@lemdro.id avatar

I think what you're describing is Songza and it was great as a service. 8Tracks has been pretty decent as well.

Tier1BuildABear ,
@Tier1BuildABear@lemmy.world avatar

I don't listen to nearly as much music these days, YouTube music is so ass, I really miss gpm. YouTube can't even get notifications right, like I get a notification that a band I like released a new album or something so I tap it........ and it just fuckin opens the home page of the app??? EVERY SINGLE TIME. How do you fuck up even the most basic feature of the notifications?!?!

The "radio" always brings me back to the same shit that's playing on the actual radio, regardless of me playing the radio based off of bluegrass or fuckin clown techno idfk it will play imagine dragons and blinding lights shit eventually, guaranteed. The algorithms are actually dumpster fires.

Probably around 60% of the roughly 20,000 songs I uploaded (I think that was the limit) didn't get transferred over and are just gone. Thanks Google.

Also even though the notifications don't work, it is nice to know when your favorite artists release something new. Gpm was great about this, ytm seems to think I want the hottest vevo shit

Also who the fuck ever thought it was a good idea to use the music video versions for songs instead of the song version, when we're in the music app, should be fired into the sun. They're probably the same person that originally synced your video and music "histories," skewing your YouTube algorithm entirely so your homepage would suggest nothing but music videos

Seriously, what a shitshow of an app, but that's where most of Google is headed these days

BonesOfTheMoon ,

I still use it because I will not give Spotify money, and Apple Music is SUPER Caucasian and repetitive, I still like YTM the best, but it is way shitty. I hate the video function.

cheesymoonshadow ,
@cheesymoonshadow@lemmings.world avatar

I still use YTM (don't judge me 😛) and it actually defaults to the audio version instead of the video version. They just give you an option to switch to video if you wanted to.

vithigar ,

Also who the fuck ever thought it was a good idea to use the music video versions for songs instead of the song version, when we're in the music app, should be fired into the sun.

Agreed, this is infuriating. I'm in the music app, searching for a piece of music by it's exact name and artist, and I know that it's available on YouTube Music.

Here's a lyric video uploaded to some random asshole's YouTube channel. Or maybe you want this awful cover version from this other asshole on YouTube. Oh, my mistake, you wanted it as performed by the actual band? That you included in your search? How about this phone camera recording of a live show.

It's compete garbage. Made even worse when you're searching by voice command while driving and can't just quickly correct bad results by looking through the list yourself.

Carol2852 ,
@Carol2852@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

But it is a good example of inconvenience. One day they decided well, we're closing shop. And that made it pretty clear for users that they didn't own the music.

BonesOfTheMoon ,

I bought a lot of music through Artist Hub. It kind of was the best of both worlds for me, I'd try an album streaming, love it and buy it.

cheesymoonshadow ,
@cheesymoonshadow@lemmings.world avatar

Google lets you download your music files that you previously uploaded. The method isn't intuitive but it's not difficult. I don't know if the option is still offered but I would guess it is since they still have YouTube Music.

I used to have a big CD collection. Ripped it all off the CDs and uploaded the files to GPM. I was able to download it all.

jaemo ,

It is still available. My collection of some 20,000 digital vinyl tracks are streamable for me. Google is evil, but that is nice.

bytheclouds ,

I never liked suggestions/radios on any streaming platform - GPM, Apple, Deezer, Spotify, they're all shit.

I use streaming platforms solely for checking out new music that picked my interest on sites like RYM, albumoftheyear, anydecentmusic, Quietus, Picthfork, etc. If I like what I hear, I acquire it either on Bandcamp or on Soulseek and into Plex it goes.

BonesOfTheMoon ,

Sad about what happened to Pitchfork.

hardcoreufo ,

what happened to pitchfork?

BonesOfTheMoon ,

Got sold to GQ and it's assumed that'll kill it off.

hardcoreufo ,

Ahh got it. I don't use it as regularly as I did 10-20 years ago but I'd still miss it being around.

bufalo1973 ,
@bufalo1973@lemmy.ml avatar

Have you used Jamendo radios?

bytheclouds ,

No, I don't think so. Should I? I have a vague memory about seeing Jamendo in Rhythmbox when it shipped in Ubuntu by default. It was a long time ago, I didn't even know it was still a thing.

bufalo1973 ,
@bufalo1973@lemmy.ml avatar

It still works. No famous groups in there but it works.

rglullis ,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

I wish we had Google Play Music again.

Not exactly Google Music, but I recently started working on a Funkwhale instance where people can have up to 250GB of space for their personal music collection and where I am planning to have a store front for musicians who'd like to sell/promote their own songs as well. 29€/year if you go to https://communick.com/packages/access. Sounds reasonable?

BonesOfTheMoon ,

It does but I can't seem to get into Funkwhale, I've tried a few times!

rglullis ,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

What do you mean? Are you talking about the software in general or that can't login into my instance specifically?

BonesOfTheMoon ,

The app doesn't allow me to login.

buddascrayon ,

I wish we had Google Play Music again.

I liked the fact that I could take my Google survey money and buy albums on that service. It's pretty irksome that they cancelled it.

BonesOfTheMoon ,

Loved that part! I bought many records that way. And when we went to YouTube music one of the records I bought disappeared from my uploaded music too.

buddascrayon ,

And when we went to YouTube music one of the records I bought disappeared from my uploaded music too.

Yeah, that's why I made sure to download every single album I bought. Digital rights are a joke.

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