Did it ever go away?
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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Not in the slightest. Even with the last decade of 'pfft, why pirate when we have Spotify?!1' dialogues, music piracy never slowed down for a moment.
Never left
"when pigs fly: the death of oink, the birth of dissent, and a brief history of record industry suicide"
Look it up if you haven't read it, I never miss an opportunity to post it but it looks like the original demonbaby host is now offline. There are mirrors though.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Last year, over 17 billion visits were made to music piracy websites around the world, first reported by Wired.
We’ve come a long way since Napster, but people are once again using the internet to illegally download their favorite songs in a major way.
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.
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.
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.
Google has hardline policies against copyright infringement in its terms of service but seems to let these music piracy sites scootch by.
The original article contains 379 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Always has been
Bandcamp ftw
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.
more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Noobs...
I used to DJ on Second Life and it was always a treat to hear someone else DJing and they play music that was obviously ripped from YouTube. Because they were too lazy to cut off the parts when the channel would ask for subscribers, play different sounds and they'd even rip off music video versions.
The other thing with Spotify is that it bullies you into it's subcription. Limited Skips. Ad bombardment (ads are still on podcasts so why even pay a subscription?). The app on mobile is abysmally slow with connection issues.
I really miss iTunes circa 2007 (I think?) before it got enshittified. I had it running on a Windows machine with my carefully-curated music library until the machine died. I got the music files off but had to reinstall iTunes and by that time it was a bloated piece of crap. I haven't found the equivalent since!
Yah, and before that SoundJam, an indy app which Apple bought and re-skinned into iTunes.
At the time it was all wonderful and intuitive. Drag and drop everything, beautifully curated collections, simple and dependable, and sitting right there on your hard drive / iPod so you always had everything.
Now it's all a sewer of bullshit, annoying and alienating to use, it makes music a miserable experience. They wonder why people don't want to pay for it. And use the law to beat us over the head until we submit to our own misery.
We really gotta update consumer laws for the digital age so there's a reasonable balance between corporations and consumers again.
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Family sharing is the way to go for me.