Music Piracy Is Back in a Big Way

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 619 points – 5 months ago

Music Piracy Is Back in a Big Way—Especially From YouTube

Visits to music piracy websites went up more than 13 percent last year, a new report says. The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.

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But we'll still need a proper place to support our favorite creators (where the artists actually receive some of the money). I wonder where people will migrate next.

Audius.co

Haven't heard about that one, thank you for the heads-up.

First impressions:

From top 10 artists i follow:
- 5/10 have profile and uploaded at least one song on Bandcamp.
- 3/10 have an account on Audius (possibility to donate).
- 1/10 has uploaded at least one song on Audius.
One MUST upload a profile picture to create an account.
- About 1/3 of proposed artists during account creation have uploaded <5 songs, most seem to be remix and cover artists.
- Didn't figure out how to search for artists during account creation, ended up choosing 2/3 artists I've never heard of.
Not immediately apparent whether I can download bought music to a lossless format.
Not sure how to buy album or individual song at first glance.
LOTS of remixes and covers, not so much original songs (this is both good and bad).
Nice that you can donate arbitrary amount without buying anything, in case you already got the music from... other places...
- I didn't find anyplace where "$AUDIO" is explained, how much the artist receives, or what you receive if anything.

Less relevant observations:

weird pause/play button, sometimes there's just a loading wheel spinning where it's supposed to be, not really functional.
Slightly intrusive, had to disable some plugins (Javascript (obviously it's playing music) and fingerprinting (cloudflare?)) for the site to load. Not relevant to music, but just a general observation since we're in the piracy community.

Not much going on by now, but it probably just needs some time to grow and assimilate the likely soon-to-be-migrating Bandcamp user base. I'll keep an eye on it, and probably revisit it once more artists have migrated to it.

Thanks for the detailed obesrvation! Yeah unfortunately it still has some technical issues and shortcomings but imo this platform has some great potential.