Is music piracy dying?
Most of the discussion and sources of content talk about movies and series. I’ve been recently looking for psy and techno music, finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold. It’s definitely been a while since I’ve looked for active torrent sites and it feels more barren than ever.
Spotify has basically nothing I've ever tried to actively listen to. It's also missing tracks of larger artists. It's also still subject to licensing which means what you have saved isn't guaranteed to be there forever (unless you're using a spotify downloader, I guess. I don't know why you would if you feel comfortable enough paying for it but not enough that you won't still download them?). Personally, to me it seems crazy to pay $10 a month for music I'm probably going to listen to for each month for the rest of my life? People always say it's great for discovery but I don't see how it's any better than any other avenue of finding new artists and releases. The convenience of an online app isn't very convenient for me, it being streamed is something that affects me on road trips and I'd need to have the foresight to download something, vs permanently having the songs on my phone (or a step further, microSD cards filled with music.) Like it was before? Just like Google Photos, if I can host my own photo backup on my computer why am I paying someone else an exorbitant fee? I can take this even further, I have Plex setup (and other music servers) and use Plexamp which is essentially my curated Spotify. Bonus: I have my core music on my phone, I have extra music streaming to me.
It also doesn't seem to be sustainable, each yeah Spotify operates at a loss while artists get very little payout from it. More than if you pirated from them, sure, but much less than if you just buy the album directly from their options be it physical or digital, or buy just one concert ticket and one merch item.
All this said, as with most things these are subjective case by case freedoms. Many get what they need from it and that's good enough and they're happy. Others just like to rip it all themselves and setup bubbleuPnP servers, and some probably are still just only playing CD's through their car that doesn't have AUX or bluetooth. If your decision to listen to an artist with the intent to give them your money, you probably should buy things from them instead of listening to them exclusively on Spotify you pay for. If your decision to listen to music is to just hear stuff, discovery, and it has even just 60% of a catalog of songs you'd listen to, the convenience is probably worth paying for. Especially given that technically the alternatives I've mentioned have an upfront cost of a computer and hard drives - for what it's worth only the cost of 2 years of Spotify and ~2 to 4 hours of setup time, but still a larger cost nonetheless.
That's worth it for some, they just prefer having it all physical/digitally stored and accessible for sampling and playback, the discovery and library probably aren't as deep as what they're looking for.
while artists get very little payout from it
This! I’ve seen people claim they like Spotify because it’s legal and you support the artist that way, but the actual money they get from each song-listening is comically miniscule compared to the profit from the traditional mediums (vinyl/CD).
It’s certainly alive and exists.
But access to music is easy and affordable. It’s more inconvenient for me to pirate it than just use a streaming service.
I also listen to a lot of independent artists and rather buy their stuff to support them.
When I was younger I had no income so pirating was how I got music. Now that I have income I buy records and subscribe to a streaming service.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years of pirating though is frequently the metadata for the classical music is a mess - relevant information such as conductor and orchestra performing are completely omitted, and these days I just don’t want to spend my free time fixing it. Plus, finding pirated lossless tracks remains a challenge, so I just pay my monthly bill and use Idagio.
As long as it works, it’s all good.
I was downloading videos from youtube with Safefrom(aka ssyoutube) until I discovered youtube-dl a few days ago
I actually built a stereo system that can play CDs recently and have stared buying used CDs to play on it.
I don’t really mind paying the equivalent of a drink or two from a vending machine for an album from a band that I like. And I get a neat physical thing that I can look at.
As the normies went to streaming it became more gatekept and toxic. I’m mainly familiar with the attitude of trades only or straight up selling tracks (eg groupbuys with kids paying thousands of dollars for some shitty Kanye mumble demo). The game didn’t used to be like that. The days of the blogs with mega/rapid share links are long gone
I mean you got all the stream rippers eg SlavArt which is super nice. Soulseek is still alright but getting taken over by traders. RED/OPS around but you can’t just waltz in and I’d argue they don’t compare to what.cd or even OinK. RuTracker still got stuff going on
But when you’re after actual rare stuff that you can’t just buy or stream it can be real tough nowadays. Scene archives can be nice but very hard to get access and it’s mostly mp3s.
The best thing good users can do is remain on the client for the long term, ensuring traders remain a small minority. The next best thing they can do is PM traders regularly with requests to share. Make their sessions a pain in the butt due to the private chat alert going off routinely. ‘Hey trader, please open up to non-buddies temporarily, even at a crippled speed. I’d like two items from you. You know Soulseek is a sharing platform, right?’ Some may realise the ridiculousness of their position and co-operate.
Don’t stoop to their level by blacklisting, either. They will take that as endorsement of their behaviour. (Set 20kb/s down if it makes you feel better.)
Music is hard to find on public trackers. RED and ORP are awesome private trackers that have basically anything you can think of. And if its not use the deezload telegram bot and send it a link to the song on deezer
Or you can you soulseek. That’s still very viable even today
finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold
Not if you’re on the right tracker(s)…really should try and get into RED and/or Orpheus.
I used yt-dl for downloading, but since I have a decent flat, I switched to just using yt music with adblocker or revanced.
What benefits do torrents of music provide over just downloading from yt?
Theoretically youtube doesn't offer as high a quality as flac or wav files do.
Practically for most people it probably doesn't matter
At some point I wrote a docker container (with some help from a friend) which regularly executes yt-dlp to download my youtube playlists to my media server.
I mostly do that because I have limited mobile data and want offline copies of music
Nah, not happening. I used to buy stuff from play music because they used to let u download the mp3, flac, etc. Then i would use it for an old android 4 phone wich i use as player.
But since they kill it im not doing that anymore, i refuse to suffer a netflix 2.o now with more tears for all the money u invested and watching how it evaporates because a suit tough it was something nobody watches even when it’s one of ur more popular shows, or worse, they block ur country and u end up in piracy once more.
If u wanna use the argument of “but we need to help the creators, bla, bla, bla”, dude if u really wanna help them donate them directly, be it music or series, it has been more than proven that they only recibe the bare minimum by conventional means.
Is that so?
…gif any names of these services? Just so I can avoid them, of course!
And009
Cevilia (they/she/…)
wolfshadowheart
JVT038
carson
Zink
genesis
LeHappStick
Gloop Tamer
hydra
ode
Slayer 🦊
SaltySalamander
M1k3y
TiredSpider
owweh
whodoctor11