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.
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.
First you're gonna have to teach them how file systems work since they've spent a life saving everything to Google Drive or OneDrive and using a search term to find their files.
I'm continually astonished how I thought grunt-work IT jobs would fade away as my generation and younger aged into the workforce becoming ever more technologically literate. Then the iPhone my rich friends bought in highschool became the new standard for interfaces.
Now I'm helping people several years younger and much older than me navigate the machines they use for their jobs.
Yeah funny, right? I thought the same thing. It'd just be the older people and the younger would be more technically literate. But companies started abstracting a lot of things now and it's both the older and younger that struggle with IT literacy.
I think thin clients with VDIs will be the future and both make this stuff even more abstracted for users and also bring in the age of subscribing to workstations. At work, it'll start by just plopping stuff in your documents folder or personal folder or whatever and/or the desktop. They'll live on a network share and the VDIs will revert to snapshots to be 'fresh' every time but the users won't really know that. Their stuff will be plopped down like it is local every time and 'follow' them from VDI to VDI.
Then I think this will push to the home market and instead of spending a lot of money up front, you just get a cheap thin client, probably eventually a small little box with USB ports and mini-DP or whatever. You'll then pay for the tiers you want. Want just a workstation to check mail on and do 'web apps' type stuff? $5 with a whole 5GB of personal space or whatever. Then there'll be "productivity tiers" with pretty much the same stuff but more CPU, RAM and a small amount of vGPU allocated and you can install programs with something like 500 GB of personal space. There'll be a "pro" version with more of everything and a "gamer" version with a lot of everything probably costing something like $30/$40 a month starting out per device.
And of course eventually, you'll be getting ads to "keep the prices increases down" and then that won't matter anymore and you'll be given the option to pay for ad-free add-ons, time on the workstation and so-on. Prices will raise nearly every year. Thin clients will turn into all-in-ones and be basically tablets where you buy based on screen sizes and probably able to wireless connect more displays.
Technology in computing will become more abstracted and IT's specialists will shrink once again because actual tech literacy will decrease.
I think the only reason it hasn't started yet is due to Internet throughput availability but that's quickly changing.
A boring dystopia indeed.
your post made me shudder, how bout we stop this?
lets burn things, at least make it an interesting dystopia
The main issue to solve is kids not having access to a computer at home, whether it be lack of incentive or money. Most people don't even own a laptop anymore, so the only computer time they get is in a school setting.
Once the majority of schools have a system in place for most homework to be done on a PC, then there may be some creative ways to incentivise more PC adoption... again. It's like we've gone back to the early 90s again where only kids who were really interested in computing knew anything about it.
I think the solutions comes not from adopting older tech, but making newer tech fairer and freer. As in not locking down phones and tablets as much as they do.
Because eventually the form factor of mobiles will replace say laptops and PCs, but they are essentially just regular computers but limited on purpose to be dumber and less open. Android is Linux ffs!
What do they have if not a laptop? How would they even do homework? What about coursework at uni? Applying for jobs?
iPad / tablet, and applying for jobs can easily be done on a phone. My wife works at a high school - half the kids can't even use a mouse properly,and don't understand minimizing a window etc.
She had to teach someone what the enter button did yesterday..... They were using space bar to get to a new line. I shit you not.
My school has a program where they lend students laptops free of charge, along with 13gb of data to use with. The generosity is kind of abused at times, but it's still really nice to have.
Thats the exact reason I just donated my old pc to my sisters kids as a "practice computer", encouraging them to go rummaging around.
What woke me up was all these 20-somethings in our uni having trouble using computers. Damn, how can you get through our secondary education in our country and not know how to use a normal Windows pc?
I'm convinced primary education as a system is engineered to teach you how to be a patriotic, service-consuming, rentable employee first and foremost. (Humans As A Service?) Secondary education just levels that up so you require more expensive proprietary tool licenses for the potential privilege of doing more complicated jobs. (Funny how all the critical-thinking specialties are derided for not making tons and tons of money.)
Thank God for the good teachers that inspired us in spite of all the odds against us (and them).
It also blows my mind how much schools and universities are struggling for funding, but take the bait and use hyper-proprietary black-box commercial software for everything from OSs to coursework. Professors outside of CompSci will be shocked and confused to see a student using Linux, and courses love to use stupid niche features of Microsoft Office so your LibreOffice work won't be good enough.
Do everything on a tablet (that might even be provided by the school)
That brief, magical moment in time of about 2 decades in the "home computer revolution" of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, where you had to be an actual geek to be able to effectively use a computer are gone. That's how we all got trained. By being forced to learn if we wanted to do anything. Now, it's one-button instant gratification.
The eternal September.
I think the same thing happened with cars too. Certain generation knows how to fix stuff, but they’re completely lost with modern cars where you can’t do anything without a computer plugged in.
Partially yeah, but atleast Google Drive and Onedrive still have folders to sort and share more than one file, which sometimes gets the kids to actually use those features.
What also killed the basic understanding of PCs, is the way in which everything is now done "in-Browser". No longer do you need to open Word to edit a document, nor do you need to open Photoshop. It's all done in the browser, and if you want to simply "save" a document, well, just don't close the tab and you're golden.
My RAM is screaming.
Just download more.
you wouldn't download a RAM
What about a EWE?
Of course!
smacks forehead
Take a guess on why people still complain about RAM in the current days of 16Gb being one of the cheapest options
I mean I have 64 GB but I'm not wasting it on browser tabs. I've got people at work who never close anything, they'll have 15 tabs, 28 PDFs and 7 Excel spreadsheets open 24/7 because it takes them an hour to remember where they saved them otherwise.
Literally me when I hear them complain about their slow computer:
We open the two Excel "programs" that are the basic tools we need to do our job and RAM usage is at 10gb already.
Our laptops have 16gb of RAM and we need to open even more excel tools and web pages and pdfs...
Unused RAM is wasted RAM, though. Your computer will know when to free it up for more important stuff.
Yeah the real takeaway is it's not necessarily the kids fault that they don't know these systems deeply as much as it is the fault of OS and app developers taking the path of least resistance and building everything around the stupidest users and their mistakes. It doesn't leave a lot of room for the growth and development of Power Users when everything is locked down and obfuscated to protect the user from themselves.
When I was a kid there was an air of "anyone can do this" and I had friends who were only 15 were getting hired to build whole websites for $20 an hour when minimum wage was $5.15 an hour. Now there's an air of "only professionals who are trained can do this" which doesn't exactly make kids feel like they can just jump in feet first.
The biggest crime is in my opinion that Android as an OS was made without allowing the user root access unless they jump through a bunch of hoops. Even if it comes at the cost of a bricked phone, kids should be allowed to experiment with their devices.
Also, from my experience basic graphic design is the newest version of this. The amount of praise I get for understanding basic color theory, as well as not to use JPGs, or Comic Sans for everything is wild.
To be fair to the basic graphic design point: When I was in high school they were busy killing art programs, and that was in the 90's. It's kind of hard to know that kind of stuff when it straight isn't being taught. Honestly, very similar to the computer stuff, so much of it just isn't taught anymore, and it's leaving a lot of kids with degraded knowledge of the subjects they're pursuing.
Man, I searched desperately for formal art training in school. The best they had was some "how to draw" book that at least kept me on track practicing every day. The colleges accessible to me have had "art" programs that are more the stuffy turtleneck gallery sort of stuff, and not anything practical, so I'm sad higher-ed didn't work out either.
I'm proud none of this stopped me so far, but dang I wonder if those kids who got to take art classes and have mentoring art teachers around art peers know just how dang lucky they've had it...
Dang now I wanna watch "Blue Period" again...
That's overly charitable. The developers aren't doing it just to cater to idiots; they're doing it because taking away users' power and turning it into a platform strictly to consume content instead of creating things for themselves gives big tech companies more opportunities to extract money from them.
This is exactly why I'd shut down any of that ridiculous "Kids just know computers these days" crap.
"No, Phyllis, just because 6-year-old-Timmy can crust up your iPad with boogers to consume endless dopamine-pumping content doesn't mean he has any idea what is happening behind that screen. At all."
I remember my kids crying the first time they lost their school assignments using Microsoft Office at home. They’d only ever used Google docs and no one taught them to save. They also had no idea what the save icon is or represented (floppy disk).
> my kids
> no one taught them
That was kind of your job m8
I prefer the school of hard knocks. Do you think they know what a save button is now?
This comment made me cackle with evil glee.
I worked for a public library and one of the worst things was, despite CONSTANTLY reminding people that when their computer time ran out, the machine would delete EVERYTHING and restart itself, I'd always get some dope who would gasp in horror at closing time when the script ran.
"What happened!? It's just..g...gone?!"
"Did you bring a USB? Email it to yourself? Send it to the print queue yet?"
"No, I was just about to finish it!"
"...There is literally nothing I can do about this."
"But it was 6 pages and due tomorrow and--"
One dude literally asked me: "Can't you.....hack it or something!?"
It's physically painful.
As a cultured collector of memes, one of the most annoying things ever is downloading images to my phone from the internet with filenames like "124fdgklhhr24.jpeg" and if I don't separately navigate to it, hold down to rename it, move it manually to where I want it for later, it just falls into the endless "Download" folder.
I think this behavior is encouraged precisely so people don't understand directories, fill up their phones with random nonsense, and then happily subscribe to "cloud storage" when it's constantly pushed at them.
I don't normally use a phone to search for memes, but have a similar situation with game screenshots. But I solve it by just occasionally going through folders and sorting them instead of doing so on the spot. Adding metadata to MP3s, however, happens just like what you described, just because I don't like leaving tracks without album art.
We start with Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems. 🥲
This sort of thing is why my kids are getting Raspberry Pis as their first computers.
Indeed! I introduced my kids to this through the example of our in-house Plex server, and it worked really well.
First they "get it" because Plex works like the streaming services they're used to and they think "oh neat mom can do that too."
Then they like it more because I show them how its streaming we can control ourselves - streaming home movies and pics really impresses this upon them.
And then they see that there's no magic to where the content comes from -- it's a digital file on Plex just as it is on Netflix.
Voila. Free thinkers for life.
If I ever do have children, this is one of the things I want to teach them.
Hopefully, it turns into an important memory for them.
Learning about technology from their parents' and how it isn't magic.
This makes me sad. I had so much fun growing up learning about compression and encoding, ripping, tagging, spectral analysis. Listening to 24/96 vinyl FLACs on my parents old stereo with my pinky up. Hanging out with a bunch of 40-year olds on IRC. Good times, man
Heh, now we're the 40-olds on IRC.
I am Gen Z, and my whole social life is on IRC. So weird to be around so many people who were online since before my parents even had a computer...
TimeSquirrel slaps gila around a bit with a large trout.
I do all those things except I have my own stereo, not my parents
Get your kids a real computer. Show them how to move files around. Show your 7 year old how to manually install a Minecraft skin. Show your teens how to turn an mp3 into a ringtone. Show them the actual practical uses for understanding how a computer works, and what a "file" actually is. You're giving them tools to save money, make better decisions, and actually control their experience.
No worries. They'll reinvent the wheel eventually.
No, they’ll think the corporate dystopia they’ve grown up into is normal. They don’t know that corporations tried and failed to stop people from owning and using VCRs. They think it’s their duty to sit and watch ads from their favorite creators like passive cows.
This is a pretty bleak outlook on the intelligence of kids
It's an outlook developed by watching the peers I grew up around and the things that they accepted and didn't question because it was just "normal" by the time they were children.
For example, a lot of kids in my generation grew up with Cable Television, but by the time I was a kid, cable had lost it's initial "we're better than broadcast because we don't have ads" and people just accepted the ads. Most people never knew there was a "time before" when there weren't any ads, and because of their lack of knowledge of it ever being any different, they never had reason to question why cable television needed ads now when previously it had not.
Once things become a societal "norm," the people who grow up around that norm tend not to question it simply because they have never known anything else. It's not meant to be an indictment on the youth as much as the obvious "you can't know what you don't know." If they don't ever know it was ever any different, how can they expected to do anything but accept how things are? Especially when the adults around them don't kick up a fuss and keep paying for Netflix when they keep getting screwed. They are learning that this is normal behavior and that it's normal to get screwed by a company and just keep paying for it.
Wait, did the pitch for cable TV at one point really include that there were no ads?
Yes, it could be argued it was the pitch, much like Netflix originally was. It's actually kind of wild how the streaming services are literally following the same path as cable television.
Here's a New York Times article from 1981 about it:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html
Also, I'll just point out that people in here not knowing about this literally proves my point that if the changeover happened before you were born/early in your childhood, you'll just accept the change as "the norm" because you never knew anything different and had no reasons to question it. It's not about the intelligence of any generation of kids, it's just an inherent part of not knowing what happened before you were born, which is something every human experiences. It takes dedicated effort to find out that "the norm" isn't "the norm," for anyone. Also, on the flip, we're not particularly special for figuring out "the norm" isn't "the norm."
Wow, I had no idea. I didn't even really know that cable was at one time the fancy premium version of TV.
One thing I think we can say though is that a big part of why Netflix was disruptive was the promise of watching uninterrupted-- No ads. So even though folks thought "of course cable has ads, that's the norm," they also flocked to services that provided ad-free alternatives.
I'm always surprised when I see someone just sit through a YouTube ad or something, instead of beating their chest and screaming "WHERE uBLOCK? HOW ADS?" which alarms the neighbors but they're used to it at this point (which is what I do)... But it's encouraging that people still voted with their feet by dropping cable as soon as a less extractive experience emerged. It gives me hope that the endgame of enshittification is irrelevance.
Have you ever seen cable TV abbreviated "CATV?" That's because the original original pitch for it was as "Community Antenna TV," wherein it would receive local over-the-air broadcasts and then send them over a wire to folks who couldn't receive them properly because they lived behind a mountain or whatever.
The second pitch was getting original content on cable-only channels, but because your subscription was helping pay to license it (unlike the over-the-air channels, which they -- at least initially -- got for free), they would be ad-free.
Of course, nowadays cable companies have been made to pay retransmission fees to broadcast TV networks and cable-only channels are showing ads too, so both content sources are double-dipping revenue streams.
(Side note: that link is to a site trying to sell some kind of service, so ignore the last part of the page -- the explanations at the beginning of it are quite good, though.)
Wow TIL. The double-dipping is pretty sketchy, but not at all surprising. It seems hubristic for Netflix to court the same concepts... I guess cable/network TV probably thought they were untouchable so they could squeeze the consumer, then Netflix happens... Now Netflix thinks it's untouchable and it can squeeze the consumer. Hmm, seems familiar.
It is, but it's also true. Kids in schools have problem saving files in correct format in the correct places. Almost like your average grandma. Most kids dont even have computer, they do everything on their phones.
I mean, I get it, why bother with PCs or laptops, these things are heavy and too complicated. You can take, edit and share pictures from your phone, browse web, listen to music, chat with friends.
But IT literacy goes to hell.
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.
And Bandcamp Friday is today.
For those who are unfamiliar with both Bandcamp and Bandcamp Friday, can you ELI5?
You can buy music without DRM on Bandcamp, and on Bandcamp Friday a larger share goes directly to the creator. It's a great way to support your favorite artists.
They waive the 20% fee on bandcamp friday, all money goes to the artist.
Don't use shady sites. Use yt-dlp.
but yt audio quality is terrible.
So are the bluetooth speakers and ear buds that most people use to listen to music these days.
LDAC codec seems enough for me to tell the difference for music i know in high-rez, and I don't like it.
I do have good quality android player and wired, but pointless to use with Spotify.
Heretic! Nothing that my Lord and Savior Apple bestows upon the unwashed is less than divine!
That's why we gotta give them the chance for good audio!
fair point.
yt-dlp can use your browser cookies for YT premium and therefore YT music. That's 256kBit/s AAC, it's okay.
Most people can't tell the difference between low bitrate vs high bitrate. Usually just confirmation bias.
Have you truly tested whether you can? I don't mean playing each side by side and seeing whether you can tell the difference, but actually testing yourself in a way that you don't know which is being played (like having someone else play it for you).
Maybe you can't, what headphones/avr setup do you have?
- typed on a vacuum tube keyboard
Then use a Spotify downloader. I had one but forgot the name of it.
is there an android version?
If you use the NewPipe android app to watch youtube, you can download directly from there, as video or audio, in a selection of formats.
Or you could use some app like InnerTune and listen to YouTube Music content without ads.
Or you could install YTDLnis and (optionally) ReVanced, then click the download icon in the video box and you can download it in any other format.
... I didn't even realize. that's amazing. thank you!
Seal is a yt-dlp frontend
I wasn't aware of that. That's neat. It can be found on F-Droid and Droid-ify.
It's like a kiss from a rose on the grave.
hell yes. thank you.
It's a Python command line program, so yes. I use Termux (a Linux terminal emulator), and I installed
yt-dlpusingpip, a package manager for Python. I also haveffmpegfor command line video editing on my phone.I have it setup such that when I click "Share" on a URL from Firefox or YouTube, and I choose Termux as the receiving app, I am presented with a menu that let's me choose if I want the video saved to a normal folder or a hidden folder (for reasons), or if I want to download just the audio and save it to an MP3. yt-dlp can download from much more than just YouTube.
The script is just a bash script with a specific name in a specific folder that Termux knows to invoke when sent a URL. You can do anything you want with such a script.
Only get Termux from F-Droid or Droid-ify. Not from the Play Store. The Play Store version is way out of date.
Like the other person said, Newpipe can also download from YouTube. It's a YouTube front-end that scrapes the public HTML website for YouTube. You can also download that from F-Droid or Droid-ify.
Oh, and another person mentioned Seal, which is a yt-dlp front-end for Android. It's pretty great! I just installed it. As usual, it's on F-Droid and Droid-ify.
Pretty sure revanced has a download option too.
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.
A radio station is a small selection of music curated by an individual and meant for the masses.
Modern music streaming has dynamically curated music from a nearly infinite source, it's really not the same.
Spotify tried to shove Doja Cat at me the other day. I have never ever EVER listened to anything that would even remotely suggest I would like Doja Cat. It may be infinite but there is still someone behind the scenes pushing particular songs and artists.
If you don't like the artist, then block them. It's not that hard. I blocked Travis Scott after he got those people killed at his concert and I haven't seen a single thing with him since.
Gen Xer here....
It didn't use to be this bad. The FCC (and ftc) dropped the bag (regulatory capture), letting clear channel gobble up stations.
When I was a kid had a couple great local stations back in the day. One was a highschool station that local bands could send in cassette tapes and they would play them on Tuesdays. They had a Mosh Monday curated by local metalhead kids/young adults (there was vocational training at the radio station in evening classes).
Even the commercial channels were better. Not great or anything, but they had a lot more variety.
Sucks to have your radio stations. Mine rotates crap through all the time.
Funny story, when I started doing curation, I wanted to get a good list to start from. I looked at the API for Jack FM because I kind of like their mix.
I knew that there was going to be a substantial amount of repetition because you hear the same stuff a lot. Turns out there API doesn't have any limits on it. If you talk to the iHeartRadio API and ask it for 20,000 of the last played songs it'll give them to you.
I went back 3 years. Their entire roster was 600 songs. As I started pulling my own curation together from their list I noticed some things were absent. I noticed that some of the things that were on the same album and were arguably better songs weren't in the curation list. My guess is that whatever catalog they were licensed to pull from they only had a certain number of top hits. A lot of the stuff was the b side of the singles, It was probably a cost savings scenario.
Later on I decided I wanted some other collections to pull from so I started pulling serious XM stations and my local radio stations. Unfortunately for this phase of the date I had to collect for a long period of time so I don't have years of history. My local radio station had 6,000 unique songs played over the period of 1 and 3/4 years. Which I never would have guessed because again you just hear the same stuff over and over but it's confirmation bias.
Obviously it's nothing like the catalog Spotify has where you might hear two new things to every old thing. But there was a fair amount of discovery there. The whole concept of adding pop as it comes in you know.
That's Pandora... Eventually everything like this gets boring if you are interested in music instead of musak.
I get it though. Some people really aren't that interested in music and just want some background noise. That's probably even the majority of people, but I'm not sure it's entirely an age thing.
i love going through my music library at times, it's a treat. and yeah, gen-x. strange breakdown....
This makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the insight!
I'm just here pondering. Might be as wrong as anyone.
Man, your comment reminded me of mp3.com back in the early days of digital music.
It had a lot of up and coming bands on it. And it allowed users the ability to create their own curated 'radio stations'. You could compile hours of music from those artists and share it with the rest of the user base. And other users could recommend songs for inclusion in your station (which also helped you discover new bands).
I created a station that was getting some decent listening numbers, and I got some good recommendations from listeners (sometimes self-promotion, but that's okay).
Then one day it was all gone. Probably related to the backlash from the record industry caused by Napster (even though, I think, mp3.com had acquired rights from those artists?). Sad times.
That's what music streaming fused with social media should be about.
Inflation being a major cause is definitely on my mind, too. For the past decade basically everything has experimented with becoming a subscription service, and if people aren't doing so hot on their monthly budgets they're going to start looking for things to cut.
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
All of those things are 100% legitimate criticisms, I want to add that the UX experience has become more and more horrible. They've regressed terribly in most aspects of their apps, wether PC or Mobile. Absolutely unbelievable, this is the thing I see from Google search where marketing takes over from engineering/customer needs/market reality/I don't know what. Stop shoving shit into the services. You beat piracy for a minute, you can keep that lead, you're slowly losing it.
Honestly, if this was any other product this would be unacceptable. It'd be like all books went back to only black and white, all movies were only 480p, all music was only mono.
They keep trying to reinvent the library UI, as does Apple. But neither will ever be able to top the way the iOS music app was organized, pre-Apple-music. Every attempt to innovate has been worse
The fact that they changed the default library view from playlists to a random mix of playlist, artists, albums and podcasts without the option to choose just one category is baffling. I'm all for user options, but not by taking user choice away
Like making it impossible to just "play all songs" of a given artist. Seems like it would be simple.
This is an issue I've been noticing across more and more apps and operating systems. It seems like there's no developers out there even willing to consider how their software operates under non-ideal conditions.
It's not developers, it's management. We know how to make it better, but that's extra complexity. Meaning extra developer time (higher cost and longer turn around) to better support a small fraction of normal use, added on every time that part of the system is changed
It's more profitable and faster to say "forget those users" now that they're a smaller and smaller part of the customer base
I'm paying for a family plan, for my family and two friends. The day this plan goes away, or they actively prevent sharing like this, I'm done paying for music. All alternative services are considerably more expensive, and also have a much more limited library. My favorite artists get less than pennies on a dollar from this anyway. No wonder they have to sell 85$ hoodies at concerts
I got caught in a crazy loop of Spotify resetting my password once a week. they offered no help except telling me my 40 char generated password was not secure enough. so I cancelled and deleted the account. the seas are a much more friendly place.
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 get your anger, but if they no longer have the license to play the song, they cannot allow you to play it, even if the file is on your device. I don't find it scummy in the least. You didn't own the file, you were renting it from Spotify.
Whatever you say lawyer, now he's a pirate, nobody cares about the technicality.
Yeah, I get what you are saying, but then it's imho dishonest Marketing, and the user expected something different when they signed up for the paid service. I think "renting" movies, tv shows or music is not something the user expects.
If they would advertise it as "pay us 20 Dollarinos a month, and you can listen to your favorite music for as long as we allow it and don't take it away from you!" they surely would never be popular...
But that's what they advertise. Everybody knows that streaming music from Spotify doesn't mean owning the music there.
Well if i would ask my boomer-parents or non-technical people, they would tell me that spotify is just like collecting CDs, and that you keep the stuff you paid for.
That's fair, but at least they could say something like "you can download our songs for as long as we allow it" and not "you can download your favourite songs and listen to them any time, anywhere" when that is only partially true, since, if someone has a playlist downloaded (still talking about personal experience) and they go offline for a long period of time, they can no longer play the songs and are required to get an internet connection only for spotify to audit and say "yeah you still have a valid subscription, you can still listen offline". It's not truly offline if I have to connect to the internet every once in a while.
Again, it's completely fair, but they could at least tell more than half-truths
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
I think what you're describing is Songza and it was great as a service. 8Tracks has been pretty decent as well.
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.
I remember that app! Can't think of the name.
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.
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.
It is still available. My collection of some 20,000 digital vinyl tracks are streamable for me. Google is evil, but that is nice.
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.
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.
Sad about what happened to Pitchfork.
what happened to pitchfork?
Got sold to GQ and it's assumed that'll kill it off.
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.
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.
Plex is not great for privacy or ownership these days. Jellyfin or Kodi are much better.
Does their music player compare to Plexamp at all?
Best alternative to plexamp I've found is Symfonium. It supports plex, jellyfin, subsonic and possibly others.
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.
Just what I've been looking for, it supports offline playing!
And to buy music!
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.
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.
Yeah, that is true for video steaming, but not music. Spotify has almost every song on the planet, and with a family account it's very cheap. Unless you only listen to a very small music library it's vastly cheaper than buying all the music
Until a contract negotiation with UMG goes south and they lose half the catalog overnight. See what's happening on tiktok right now for a good example of this.
I understand the convenience draw, but I'm not a fan of continually paying for content that can disappear at any moment.
Well if that happens, then there's always piracy. But until then. I'll use my family account. Because I don't have the resources to download all the songs that my other 4 family member likes.
Or, since I cannot download each and every song they like, I'll turn to another form of piracy. Revanced yt music.
I do use streaming (although for free) to find new tracks. But I cannot imagine having my PRIMARY collection there, mostly because it's so locked-down. You can't use it on a dumb MP3 player, you can't use a player application of your choice, etc.
Their android app is total garbage and frustrates me to no end. I'm seriously considering just going back to pirating my music just because I hate spotifys music app..
I'm surprised everyone didn't realize it right from the beginning before things got to this point. Better late then never, I - suppose.
My theory is that it's just the fact that there is always a new generation of people around the corner who haven't learned the lesson of how capitalists work. Therefore, there is always a market vulnerable to being swindled. They can keep using the same tactics, there's always a delay in people figuring out the grift, then by the time they do there's a new group of suckers ready to fall for it.
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!
Every few years I just create a new folder of the artists that I actively listen to and keep the older stuff out of my library but still in storage.
Sounds better than my method of having the first ten-fifteen years of collecting arranged neatly by artist names in folders labeled alphabetically followed by a few different folders labeled by the year I downloaded (not the year of release), a few genre folders, and a a few, uhh, folders sorted by how I acquired the music torrented or through Soulseekqt. Yeah, mine is a complete mess. Pulsar player for Android makes it incredibly easy to sort through stuff anyway. I did conveniently fail to put a lot of the stuff I rarely listen to on my current phone anyway. I'm not too egregiously awful. I do at least listen to everything I download at least once or twice. I had a friend in the 00s who just downloaded everything whether he listened or not. Yeah, I'll keep comparing myself to his 20+ year old standard of digital hording.
I lost mine several times - I didn't always use to have backups. Two were on MP3 players that stopped working. One was on an old smartphone, which worked but which I just didn't bother copying most of the data from. Once I just wiped it accidentally. In hindsight - I don't mind, that would've got cleaned up anyway.
I kinda wish I'd lost mine once or twice.
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.
Artists have never made much on sales anyway. Go to shows.
“It’s my understanding that I had over 80 million streams on Spotify this year, So, if I’m doing the math right that means I earned $12. Enough to get myself a nice sandwich at a restaurant. So, from the bottom of my heart, thanks for your support, and thanks for the sandwich.” - Weird Al
buy swag from their web presence if you are old and your ears can't do live shows no more.
Noise attenuating earbuds are a game changer, haven't gone home with ringing ears since I started using them.
Ticketmaster has kicked in the doors of the chat, and secured every exit with burly goons.
Fucking dirtbags. They were recently forced to lump all their fees into the ticket price so their new tactic is to tack on fake taxes when purchasing tickets. I recently bought some for a festival through a ticketmaster subsidiary (to a venue owned by ticketmaster) and they charged me $33 in taxes on the purchase. The thing is, I live in Oregon where we don't have any sales tax. I wrote both them and the promoter asking about it and they gave me some bullshit excuse about them being "state and local taxes" (venue is in rural Washington) even though that's not how it works when it comes to purchases nor are there any local taxes in that area. The rate they charged me doesn't even match the WA sales tax rate.
This is still making them a significant amount of money regardless of Ticketmaster.
No they don't. I don't have a problem with let me listen to this to see if I should buy it. That's totally understandable. People who just do it to get everything free is what I have a problem with. If you really like the work find a way to support them because those numbers open doors to bigger opportunities.
Totally agree on the show's and I've seen some big name artists at small shows randomly. Also some really good merchandise.
This is the way.
Seems like advances exited long before piracy was a significant thing. Though I'm sure piracy does contribute to the imbalance like you describe.
I don't mind paying artists for work that I like. Hell, I've bought much of my collection 3 times now: LP, cassette, CD. I never bought MP3s - just ripped them myself. All my CDs are in storage, which is dark, cool, and dry.
I'm pretty sure the distributors kept most of that money.
And that's where the bulk of the problem lies: the power brokers that have always tried to control production and distribution.
And that goes back a long way. I know I'm being repetitive, but Payola has been around a long time, and rather indicative of the state of media production. It's not like these ideas left just because someone got busted... They just learned new ways to accomplish the same goals of controlling the media marketplace without getting caught.
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
I was going to say that this is where I disagreed with the OP. It is 100% about price and has absolutely nothing to do with bloat or hostile design. As I wouldn't consider Spotify's design or Apple Music's design choice bad. If anything they are popular because of their design choice.
If people cared about bloat they wouldn't be on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. The rest of the consuming world lives in a pretty concerning place financially. Anyone who thinks it has to do with the design of the apps is either missing the point and not looking at the rest of the shit going on in the world or blatantly wants to believe Apple bad and FOSS good and I have found that to be a part of what I call the Lemmy mentality.
Paying for spotify, was google music before. Current "experience" is bad, I hate pop-ups to try to upsell me something I don't want or features I don't care. It happens too much and I'm considering switching to self host.
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.
Do you know if there is anything that locks up to this that will automatically download the music they recommend?
It would be cool to have an app where if you like the track, you give it a thumbs up, but if you don't you give it a thumbs down and the track is deleted automatically
Not that I'm aware of but I never looked into this.
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.
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 anyone who's a music enthusiast, having the files makes more sense. Poweramp is a way better experience than Spotify or YT Music. I loved being able to set the EQ on an album or song basis.
That said, YT Music comes with YT premium, and I'm lazy, so I do that for now. I also haven't got much of a commute right now, so I don't listen to music near as much.
PowerAmp is the only thing I found that could replace Google Music in my heart!
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.
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-LINKIt also totally doesn't work on other music websites like bandcamp.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.
Avoid Spotify dl. Easily installed and after insted from the command line by typing spotdl
Thesome 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.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
-f 140is AAC, please don't do that.-f 251is better since it's Opus, the best versatile lossy codec so far.I'll try that out. Thanks for the heads up.
I fucking love my selfhosted flac collection! 250gb and growing
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.
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.
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.
Wow, this is my exact setup. Except I have auxio exclusively for audiobooks to keep them away from my random shuffle.
Ah yes, a man of culture
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 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.
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
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 🤷🏻♂️
Agreed. I'm a frequent sailor of the high seas with TV and movies but I actually pay for a Spotify family plan because it's so convenient and I love the features they have like being able to use my phone app to cast music to any available nearby source or having a party and allowing multiple people to input songs to a shared playlist. I do encounter frequent bugs with all their updates but that hasn't risen above the level of mild annoyance yet.
Pirating music is such a pain in the ass these days since there is no standard naming conventions like with TV and movies and there can be multiple sources for the same song (single, album, compilation album, web rip, etc) so even tools like Lidarr don't make it easy and most public/private torrent trackers are pretty sparse when it comes to music outside of the most mainstream of mainstream albums.
Things haven't changed much since the days of Limewire and Kazaa in that regard. I remember when System of a Down did that Zelda song! 😂
That one got properly labeled when I was going through a "add all the data" phase. The Rabbit Joint turns out to be the ones that made it, but that singer did sound a lot like Serj.
I haven't enjoyed possessing music since my phone replaced my ipod. Maybe I didn't try hard enough, but the seamless* updating of my library and playlists on iTunes and iPod was great. The poor format of the music I did pirate off limewire wasn't as big a deal - partly from the smooth UI of iTunes, partly due to lower music acquisition. I say seamless* because it was problematic when my iPods got full, having to cull the library, but I do beleive it was simple enough to drag selections and individual playlists.
But now what? I don't have a program to load my pc and phone, I never liked what I found for music management on windows, as you said formatting isn't consistent on torrents, and my phones fill with pictures faster than music. So, in comes Spotify. Anything I want on a whim, shared playlists, I do enjoy not storing music myself, the social aspect of public playlists, and an option to store things offline. It's similar reasons Netflix curtailed my pirating. But, as a warning to Spotify, if music streaming services break up content like Netflix, I won't wait to cancel my subscription. That'll be my push to start whatever suggestions I imagine I'll get here in the replies
I mean, you just have to learn everything mp3 formats and go pass the What.cd test and you're good.
What.cd shut down almost a decade ago.
Spotify was OK back when I used it after Google Music died. YouTube Music's algorithm sucked so I used Spotify for about a year. Then I installed Plex for movies and TV but also found it was also great at streaming music. PlexAmp gives me access to a good suggestion algorithm. I made the decision to give them my $$ instead. Now with lidarr+scripts I can have any music I want with almost zero effort. Plus, as the OP said, I get the fun little side hobby of music curation.
I'm curious about where you find your music. When I looked into an indexer for music ~3 years ago, it was slim pickings. I recently found that there a method to download from Spotify, but haven't had a chance to try it out
Not sure if you mean find recommendations of new stuff to listen to, or the download source? Recommendations from Last.fm Download source is currently Deezer. Lidarr+ scripts has a bit of a learning curve https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts
Man piracy is so complex nowadays with this script and Plex stuff, all I know is downloading .flac of albums from rutracker haha no docker container home server required
I second this. Once I see plex and lidar and self hosting . My attention wanders. Then snap back and my mind says "torrents, got it. Thanks"
Torrents are all well and good until you want an album from more than a couple of years ago.
My current workflow. Find a band that I like. Add it to lidarr. Wait 10min. All of their albums are in Plex and can be streamed from anywhere in the world.
Even the Spotify downloaders are meh. I get so many errors on the few I've tried.
If you get any good recommendations, let me know.
Really? Their made-for-you playlists are nowhere near as good as they used to be. The discover playlist is now ass. Radio plays the same 20 songs over and over and over again.
Right now the app is suggesting a Classical Piano playlist to me. I have never listened to classical piano. Ever. Most recently I’ve listened to Tool, Rage Against the Machine and a 90’s metal playlist (I’m on a 90’s kick). Why on earth would it think I want classical piano?
Proof! https://imgur.com/gallery/e0N5sE3
"Radio plays the same 20 songs over and over and over again. "
So just like traditional radio stations then. ☹️
I swear, we are stuck in a loop where shitty solutions just get reinvented over and over again. And most times when sometime comes up with a genuine improvement, those in power say "oh no no no! That won't do!" and kill it. I'm Gen-X and it's been this way all my life. And probably for many generations before that too.
Yeah I've been using Spotify for about 15 years now, since i first had to pretend I was German to access it. It along with Steam have always been the only two services I'm happy to pay for with zero issues.
As far as my experience has gone, nothing has changed for the worse in all that time.
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
Napster was not great for discovery. These were the days of 56k modems. Even with 128k mp3s it took a while to download a song. Idk, maybe I used it differently, but Napster was definitely a “look for specific song” application.
Discovery came later with Kazaa and DC++ and the beginnings of broadband.
The way I remember "discovery" working on Napster was when someone incorrectly labeled unrelated music as by an artist you searched for. Wow, new music!
Once you found the song and started downloading it you had plenty of time to browse the rest of the library of the person you were downloading from. That could lead to finding stuff you never heard of that you would like. The only catch was that you couldn't listen to it immediately, but you could Google what you found to get an idea of what it was and go from there.
Google was not really popular in 99-01, nor did modems have the bandwidth to do two things at once effectively. How would you “get an idea”? Streaming audio barely existed outside of some RealPlayer things.
If your comment was about Kazaa, I’d agree. It’s about Napster which puts it about 5 years off imo.
What are you saying OP? You don't want video and paid, exclusive podcasts on your streaming service? /s
What you don't want to pay for the streaming service that brings you Joe Rogan and his disinformation? Why not?
I found some of my favourite bands by downloading mislabelled songs on limewire.
The strange bit is, even in the 80s,I was paying waaaay more than that per year for records and tapes.
It's only the fact that someone suggested I had to pay them a subscription that causes me to download illegally
Don't fucking tell me I need to keep paying every year for something I don't own, I'm not buttoned up the back
I'm kinda waiting for this bad boy to come out so I can put into it all the songs I legally acquired all these years...
Qobuz ... check it out
how does qobuz pay artists? does it much at all?
For streaming they pay out the most of anybody last I checked.
For DRM free purchases I'm not sure, but it's almost certain the lions share goes to the record labels and then goes to the artist (or directly to the artist if there's no "record label").
Songs disappearing, pushing podcasts, and raising prices. That's why I went back to buying music. I salute the sailors
The apps is definitely a part of it for me. One if my friends got YouTube Premium, and since he has 3 profiles he can attach to it, hrs letting me use it. It's nice for the ad free videos on my TV. But it also comes with YouTube Music. It's honestly kind of annoying at times.
Like yesterday I wanted to listen to an album by a band, and they only have like 2 of 3 albums. The one I wanted to listen to is the one they didn't have. So I had to make a Playlist by finding videos of the songs.
And thats for a band that's not super underground. I listen to a lot of grindcore and black metal, and a lot of that isn't even on there.
And when you download things, you can only have it organized by albums. I can't organize it by band and then have all the albums.
It's also sometimes slow to load up stuff I've downloaded.
Over all its not the greatest experience. I'm currently looking at getting a mobile game device for my emulators so I can free up space on my phone, and then I'm thinking about just going back to having all the music on files on there and using an music player app. And like you said, I can have it organized how I want and customize things a bit more. Especially since I no longer have Comcast, so I can use Soulseek again.
@HipHoboHarold @flintheart_glomgold
Yes, I have noticed a trend of homelab hobbyists going back to something like this:
I don't endorse piracy for ethical reasons, but I get why this is trending up:
-Increasingly aggressive pricing models
-Service quality and content accessibility going down
Really makes it hard for consumers...
Just a small tip with yt music if you are not aware, you can upload your own mp3s (50k files iirc). It's the main reason I use it since so much dnb is missing from all the streaming platforms.
Oh shit. I didn't know that. Might be able to get some other albums on there then. Thanks for the heads up.
No problems, it's the only reason I stuck to yt music when Google play music died.
What DnB artists/tracks are we talking about here?
A large portion of the metalheadz back catalogue is missing, and also an absolute shitload of jungle is absent
It's a whole torrent of alternatives, that's for sure.
I doubt spotify's small price increase mattered as much as the big increase in overall living expenses. If the choice is between paying for services like spotify or paying rent, then it is a lot easier to pirate music than housing.
i'm a big fan of music streaming, the way i listen to music only really works with a discovery algorithm. but the way streaming services and labels have been unnecesarily fucking over the customer as well as the artist is getting ridiculous.
qobuzz could be a possible alternative, with them providing FLACs and/or CD quality tracks to purchase and download, but also having a subscription plan. they say more money is going to the artist. the only thing missing is the algorithm.
go ahead, tell me i'm "corrupted by capitalism" or whatever. this is the way i want to do it. there's no point in building up a collection worth hundreds and thousands of euros now, apart from FLACs being gigantic files and taking up all of the storage on my phone. plus i would cut myself off from being able to discover good artists the way i'm used to.
People have been listening to music without an algorithm for hundreds of years. Even digitally, algorithms for discovery are fairly new. What’s so different about how you listen to music?
The problem
isn'tis 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.
OK so they didn't find the other sites. Good good
Yeah.... How many times does the lesson need to be learned? The worse deal the consumer is given, the more likely they'll just pirate instead. This is in both price and usability/frustration level.
I still remember when Sirius/xm was actually popular. Ad free good quality radio where you could tune in to specialized stuff for a good price.You could generally get it for around $6/7 per mo/device. At the time I was going to buy a new stereo head just for better navigation of my flash drive with my music (I was already off of burned discs). But Sirius/xm was so cheap and it had an added bonus of some discovery and stuff that why bother? I'll just primarily use that!
The prices raised a couple of bucks and commercials for their top 10 channels but they are very quick.
Then prices raised and it was commercials for every channel and so on. I cancelled when it was $18/mo/device with commercials everywhere long enough that it wasn't as bad but close enough to being as bad as radio, except I'm paying for it. My friends told me "yeah but you just call them when your time is up and they'll always make it like $12/mo/device for the first year and sometimes if you complain after it runs out they'll do it the second year too.
But why bother when by then you had great alternatives like Pandora and then Spotify and so-on. You get the same experience as Sirius/xm but it is free. Don't want ads? It's just a few bucks a month!
Now streaming music is going down the same road that every popular service of everything always does. Worse experience and ad revenue. The price point for the pay options rise and won't atop. It won't be but maybe a decade until you can't pay for no ads. You'll pay to be able to pick exactly what you want to play and to decrease ad time I'm sure.
In the background as the deal gets worse and there is no alternative offering a good deal with a good consumer experience then piracy rises. It always does. Companies will always complain piracy hurts them and the artists but all they have to do is be more reasonable.
100% this
So what is the best way to actually own music? I miss having a physical file I could put wherever and listen to anywhere, but haven't resorted to pirating anything since limewire
Bandcamp first, if you can pay for what you want and then, surprisingly, still Soulseek.
I started using Soulseek nearly 20 years ago. Throughout my life I have seen p2p sharing platforms disappear one by one. But Soulseek? I'm amazed every day that I use it and discover that it's still alive. It is the eternal soldier that continues the fight to this day.
Amusingly there are a few search terms which come up blank, but just throw in alternative key words and all is fine. I discovered this when searching Franz Ferdinand came up with none of their music!
Bandcamp was sold off. I stopped buying off them on that day.
For obtaining music, I check Bandcamp, then Amazon (they have drm free mp3s of most music and cds for everything else), then the artist site if available, then finally I look in the seas.
As for the best way to store and play the music back, I’ve put everything on my Jellyfin instance and then stream the media to my devices. On iOS, FinAmp is a decent music player for this setup.
I'm not even able to put music on my watch unless it's a mp3, so paying to stream music is out of the question.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It all sounds the same coming out of someone's shitty Bluetooth speaker.
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!
Nicotine+ is the way to go for this.
Always has been
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.
Fuck YouTube rips. V0 for life!
I'm in the process of replacing all my mp3 (including a lot of V0 and 320) with FLAC. I know that most of the time I can't tell the difference, but I did some testing and in some scenarios with some music I could tell. And, at the size of music files, disk is cheap.
To me, using FLAC files is like using a bay leaf in cooking. You can't always tell the difference, but you can always FEEL the difference.
Great analogy
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.
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.
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!
Winamp hasn't changed. In this instance, I consider that a good thing
Winamp hasn't changed, but Foobar2000 and its plugins have only got better over the years.
Does it still really whip the llamas ass?
It sure does.
To this day
I can’t ever remember a time that iTunes as a music player wasn’t a shitty product, especially on windows.
At my last job all the default company phones where iPhones. So all the windows laptops had iTunes pre-installed by IT on them.
Having refused apple products due to poverty and being forced to use a Mac desktop at a previous job (clusterfuck) I had not seen it in years.
It's one of the the most poorly designed, confusing dumpster fires of a program around. The company of "it just works" my ass.
I swear it was like 4 different uninstalls to get rid of it. Only to restart and see another mysterious program appear. I have gotten malware that was easier to get rid of.
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.
I was in the same boat as you about 5 years ago - I had been stubbornly using iTunes, but it was so slow and the store was just an annoyance, it was getting in the way of me actually listening to my music. I ended up choosing MusicBee over Winamp or foobar2000 because it has all the library management stuff (even a sync to mobile device function) and a great interface right out of the box.
Family sharing is the way to go for me.
Did it ever go away?
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.
Me, still using youtube-mp3 website
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