Technology

If y'all got kids, don't forget to teach them how MP3's and actual media files work, I see many young people nowadays don't even realize you can locally store your own music in a portable device-agnostic format. They're beginning to get used to the idea of not owning anything.

Look, it's on it's last legs, but Bandcamp and Bandcamp Fridays still exist.

Reasonable cost, money goes directly to the artist, and you get high quality FLACs with no DRM to keep permanently.

I pirate a lot, but I also spend a lot of money at Bandcamp trying to get money directly in the hands of the artists I enjoy.

Don't use shady sites. Use yt-dlp.

I have a slightly different suggestion.

Inflation is crap and the first thing to go are subscriptions that raise their prices when people are already hurting. If you want retention, keep your prices locked when users are having bad times and you're raking in record profits.

I think curation is great too, but I also think age plays a lot into individual views. A bunch of the younger guys at work were saying how they didn't want playlists and they didn't want to listen to an album, they just wanted to hit a button that knew their tastes musically and would give them a mix of familiar likes and new discoveries. The proceeded to describe a radio station to me, sans commercials. They were hot on all the music streaming and though I was crazy for wanting to spend time sorting through music.

Looking at a Spotify by age graph, the boomers dig it (because it's easy?), Gen-Z and the Younger Millennials dig it, Gen X has less than half the uptake of the other groups.

We were mixing our own tapes in our tweens and teens. We wired ourselves to find music, copy it and play it in the specific order we want.

or at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

One of the main reasons I still pay for Spotify is because it is very cheap in my country, specially when splitting a family plan. However I noticed that the user experience has gone downhill over the past years.

I remember when I could seamlessly switch playback devices, from my car to my phone, to my computer and them a Chromecast almost instantaneously. Now I'm lucky if my devices recognise each other even if they are on the same network.

And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable because it tries yo grab online content first before checking whatever is downloaded. Time and time again I have to put my phone on aeroplane mode just for the main menu to load, it is so frustrating and this didn't happen some 5-6 years ago

Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is "no longer in your library."

this is exceptionally true from my experience with Spotify. I had downloaded a playlist that had a specific song. One day I went to play my locally downloaded playlist only to glance over it and see that the song was unavailable. I had the song downloaded. In my device and it still removed the song. No warnings, no nothing. Ever since, I downloaded everything locally and completely ditched Spotify. Fuck this scummy behaviour

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?

Never left, baby! Although ripping from YouTube should be a last resort. And even then, use a proper tool like Yt-dlp.

It's taken longer than I expected, but more and more people are realising streaming services as a model are not good, by any measure.

They cost more in the long run, you are made powerless as a consumer (perpetually increasing costs and removing your favourite content), and you can't even get 'everything at the convenience of your fingertips' cause the market is fragmented and they remove things periodically. You own nothing and pay more. Absolutely stupid model that deserves to die.

Piracy creates an endless loop of artists taking advances and eventually losing royalties. That's just what I've seen growing up in the music /film/ TV industry and briefly working in both. Screw labels and Spotify but go support artists and actually buy stuff.

It never left. My MP3 collection is getting kinda disgusting at this point. I really should delete a bunch of it, but you never know when I'm going to want to listen to that album I downloaded 15 years ago and haven't gotten into yet!

The problem isn't price. People just don't want to pay for a bad experience.

It's all about the price for me cause I live in a 3rd world country. Even if their service improves, I will not hesitate for a second to pirate stuff. I'll just use the money i save to pay the internet bill instead of availing a monthly sub

Sheesh, kids have it so easy now... Back in my day, we had to set sail along the Atlantic trade routes looking for ships full of the latest wax cylinders out of Europe and Asia. Didn't have anything to play them on but at least we owned our collections.

Never a bad time to plug ListenBrainz. ListenBrainz logs what you listen so you can keep track of what you hear and it helps you get recommendations and insights into your listening habits. It's not specifically for music pirates but it is compatible with music piracy. You can submit listens from all kinds of sources, youtube, spotify, but also local files (pirated or not). ListenBrainz is FOSS and publishes all their data on a open license, for the benefit of everyone.

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.

If I download music, I have access to a larger music library, the ability to change the pitch, speed, and equalizer of the music, and the freedom to choose the player that I want. Can't do that with a streaming service.

I try to support artists if I can still download the music in a DRM-free file. Just this week I made a purchase, and late last year I bought an album and a midi file to support two artists.

And this is for personal listening. I make sure to follow royalty laws and attribute the artist when the music ends up in something I publish to the Internet.

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).

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

Over 20 years ago, the internet was revolutionized through free music file sharing. Today, Napster’s legacy lives on through websites that rip YouTube’s audio.

Is this guy a boomer or a zoomer? It sure seems like he doesn't know that what made Napster great wasn't really the downloading so much as how it facilitated discovering new music. Looking through other people's collections while the thing you came for downloaded was amazing.

Edit: I looked it up, Zoomer

I wanna know what is so different from my experience with Spotify. Because as far as enshittification goes, it hasn't really changed since I first began using it almost a decade ago aside from the price going up a little last year. I mean, I constantly see people saying it has ads even with premium but I have not once ever heard a single ad for anything, even for Spotify's own services on the platform, that was put there by Spotify and not simply already in a podcast that would be there from any source of listening to said podcast.

Maybe it's because most of the artists I like are fuckin dead so their shit never gets removed 🤷🏻‍♂️

What are you saying OP? You don't want video and paid, exclusive podcasts on your streaming service? /s