6 ms·

I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. An

by KMnO4 2y ago

I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies. But now, most people I know are back to pirating because it doesn’t require an eclectic taste to find that you need 6 different streaming services to meet your needs. The film industry was so close, and dropped that ball.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
> I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. What do you think the biggest category is, by every measure, on YouTube? There are lots of distribution and payment mechanics changes over the years across creative industries. So it's very hard to generalize. But strictly in terms of piracy, there are more than enough non-monetized audio uploads on YouTube to say, music piracy is alive and well.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  YouTube's Content ID systems ensures that the vast majority of uploads pay royalties to the performer. Those royalties may be miniscule, but they are paid.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Sure. I too have heard many “performers” celebrate the effectiveness of content ID. They all talk about how that was the end of piracy. Thats exactly how they put it: “Content ID ended piracy.”
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Implementation detail. What matters is the UX: think of a song, search for it, there it is on YouTube. Open the link and it plays. No payment needed, for a long time not even an account. The platform itself was pretty inobtrusive for most of its lifetime; it's gotten quite bad recently, but for most of those who care enough to do something about it, uBlock Origin clears out the UX of all the bullshit. Pirates couldn't possibly beat that if they tried. But it only exists because of an accident of history: YouTube got big on pirated content early enough and fast enough they could transition to "content id" instead of getting sued to oblivion.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      YouTube's UX is a huge reason why I use it for music as much as I do. And not even pirated music but indie releases, etc. The recommendation algorithm isn't all too terrible on some days. But I do prefer more navigable and preservable systems. At least yt-dl still works for the time being.
romwell 2y ago
>I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. Do you know any single person who travels outside of 4G coverage? Because the $5/$10 mo doesn't do much for you in a National or State Park in the US two hours away from a major city.
- xxpor 2y ago
  Spotify has supported downloads for over a decade.
- function_seven 2y ago
  I'm outside coverage areas all the time. I download my music to the phone and it still works.
- dopp0 2y ago
  if it's just travelling: most streaming services allow downloading music so you can listen offline for some time (ie spotify)
- squeaky-clean 2y ago
  You can download music on Spotify / Apple Music / YT Music far more easily than pirating it. And you only have to connect to their servers once every 30 days. You don't even need a 4G connection for that, it's just a few kilobytes exchanged to renew the offline period.
  - romwell 2y ago
    >And you only have to connect to their servers once every 30 days. You don't even need a 4G connection for that, it's just a few kilobytes exchanged to renew the offline period. So, if I have a playlist in Spotify to listen to on long hikes, I will find out that I can't play it when I get to the hike (unless I use Spotify all the time, or think about this crap in advance). Thanks, I understand that I can jump through hoops to make it work. But an MP3 works 100% of the time, every time, without any of that crap, or thinking; I copy the file to a memory file once, and that's it. No passwords, no accounts, no internet, no logging in. Many bands I listen to have Bandcamp/SoundCloud accounts, which offer DRM-free audio downloads. I use that when it's an option - and it pays the artists orders of magnitude more than Spotify ever will. If I have a CD from a local show, I will rip that. Otherwise, I am not going to make my life more inconvenient for the sake of a major artist getting $0.000002 from my Spotify subscription. I'll pirate their work.
lazystar 2y ago
> It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. How do you know for certain that the classic 1960's song youre listening to on a streaming service is the exact same song that was played in the 1960's? There's a trust issue that comes with streaming platforms.
- burnished 2y ago
  Not in the way you're trying to imply, ie broadly recognized as a concern
  - lazystar 2y ago
    eh. Back in 2017, Gorillaz released "Hallelujah Money" via youtube. A week later, the song was altered because it had used a clip from Spongebob at the end of the song. The physical album was released a few months later, and contained the new version without the spongebob clip. I pirated the song the day it was released, so I still have the artist's original version. Ever since then, I've always wondered how we can trust that streaming platforms with a monopoly on a service, will provide unaltered versions of an artist's work.
    - foobarian 2y ago
      Not only can't you trust them not to alter the works, you can't even trust them to keep the work available in perpetuity. Video is especially bad with this, with shows and movies randomly getting pulled and/or switching streaming platforms.
    - 2024 2y ago
      It's the artist who altered the song, not the streaming service. I've never heard of a (legal) streaming service that edits the songs submitted to its platform outside of YouTube (which can mute sections of videos that contain copyrighted audio)
    - lancesells 2y ago
      They've been changing album covers and songs since at least the 70s. This isn't anything new or recent, except streaming makes it a lot more convenient while also getting artists out of hot legal water like the Gorillaz change. I'm not here to defend streaming services (vampires), but changes are coming from the artist and not the service. Youtube didn't take out the spongebob sample in the Gorillaz song. Obligatory billy woods + kenny segal's Spongebob: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83F4JpVu61k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83F4JpVu61k
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
It's everything I can do to police the subscriptions that my wife and children think we should have. How you people don't have subscription fatigue I'll never know... it's like having debt standing over your head, but even with a thousand year mortgage I would make some progress in paying it off. Subscriptions? It's there forever. Even worse, sometimes the payment goes up. There is no convenience in subscriptions, just some sort of pathology akin to recreational heroin, where it lulls you into a narcotic coma, death just waiting a few years down the road. > And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies. There was never any such time. There was a time when Netflix had a catalog of a few thousand movies. My Plex server has 6700, and I'm not even hardcore. I estimate that were I to get every new release, and work backwards through previous years to 1995 or so, I'd need storage for at least 30,000 movies just for English language titles. Television is an order of magnitude larger still, and that's if I stay away from reality tv shows. Organizing these would become a burden... if lumped all into the same library, a person might have trouble paging through all the movies that started with S just to find what they were looking for (already started to become an issue at about 5000). I'll need to start saving up for the two synology expansion bays that my nas supports.
- glitchc 2y ago
  Most definitely with you on feeling the fatigue. Whenever my family asks for a new subscription, my response is to ask which one to cut to make room.
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago
  We just cancelled all our streaming services - there's just too many and most of them we don't watch for months at a time. The deal for us now is, if there's something we want to watch, we will enable that service for a month or two, then cancel it. So only one at a time, and often none. We haven't noticed any loss of entertainment. We have a plex server with loads of great stuff on it, and satellite TV (Freeview) for general TV watching.
  - philjohn 2y ago
    Also avoids the "Hmmm, I can't think of something more interesting or productive to do, let's scroll through $streaming_service and find something that might interest me"
anjel 2y ago
Ahem
einpoklum 2y ago
> It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. 1. It's not unlimited access, it's access over the Internet. Which one doesn't have always and everywhere. 2. It's absolutely not every recording ever created; pretty sure it's not even half. 3. It's convenient, but not too convenient, because access, arrangement, playback GUI etc. is controlled, to a great extent, but the relevant service. 4. For most people in the world, this is not affordable. The median per-capita income in 2023 was ~2920 USD [1]; and you're asking for, say, 7.5 USD/month = 90 USD per year, or nearly 5% of one's income. No can do. 5. Even in richer countries - this stuff adds up! After a year at 90 USD - you don't accumulate any music you can then hear. So, you need to pay that sum for your entire life, let's say ages 15 to 95, e.g. 90 * 80 = 7,200 USD for music. Not cheap. [1]: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/ https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/
- jorvi 2y ago
  > It's not unlimited access, it's access over the Internet. Which one doesn't have always and everywhere. - flip on airplane mode - tap on Spotify - tap one of my playlists - tap ▶ - music starts coming out of my headphones I guess I must be imagining the soundwaves
  - vel0city 2y ago
    TBF I've had the opposite experience due to forgetting to download those playlists ahead of time.
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  > 4. For most people in the world, this is not affordable. The median per-capita income in 2023 was ~2920 USD [1]; and you're asking for, say, 7.5 USD/month = 90 USD per year, or nearly 5% of one's income. No can do. Most subscription services adjust the service prices to what specific markets can stomach. Spotify in the US costs $11.99/month, but it's $5.86/month (23.99 PLN) in Poland.
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  I was going to comment but you saved me the bother of going into the details - yes, across the board. Knowing "not a single person who pirates music anymore" is no reflection on music(al) pirates - maybe for some reason the piraters tend to end up in different circles than the kind of people who think spotify has "nearly every record ever created". On top of what you said in your reply above, I also (partially) blame spotify for the fact that when you ask people what music they like now, a lot of people are quite likely to say "oh, everything!".
JohnFen 2y ago
> unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. Not nearly enough. A large swath of music I enjoy is simply not available via streaming at all. And what is there can disappear or be altered at any time.
bowsamic 2y ago
> I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore Really? That's surprising to me. A lot of people I know are basically dependent on Soulseek
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  Hadn't heard of that, having a little investigate now, cheers!
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
While streaming services and the record companies seem to have things mostly sorted out, there's still a very, very large collection of rare music that you won't find anywhere. There were sites like what.cd or waffles and probably a few more that were a treasure trove of archived music, ranging from demos to rare releases to obscure casette tape black metal to concert bootlegs. The biggest collection of hard or otherwise impossible to find material. And it was taken down, because the record companies or artists couldn't stand it. I hope there's data hoarders out there that have the collection. I hope the work continues out of sight.
- austhrow743 2y ago
  Redacted is the spiritual successor to What. Not sure how much of What's collection made it over but Redacted's is larger. What when it closed: Torrents: 2,588,359 Releases: 1,066,026 Artists: 884,432 "Perfect" FLACs: 863,944 Redacted now: Torrents: 3,225,076 Releases: 1,675,757 Artists: 1,253,924 "Perfect" FLACs: 2,023,560
kristianp 2y ago
> you need 6 different streaming services to meet your needs It's worse: the movie you want to watch might only be on pay per view on google movies, even though it was on Netflix last year.

by KMnO4 2y ago

doctorpangloss 2y ago

> I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. What do you think the biggest category is, by every measure, on YouTube? There are lots of distribution and payment mechanics changes over the years across creative industries. So it's very hard to generalize. But strictly in terms of piracy, there are more than enough non-monetized audio uploads on YouTube to say, music piracy is alive and well.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
YouTube's Content ID systems ensures that the vast majority of uploads pay royalties to the performer. Those royalties may be miniscule, but they are paid.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  Sure. I too have heard many “performers” celebrate the effectiveness of content ID. They all talk about how that was the end of piracy. Thats exactly how they put it: “Content ID ended piracy.”
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Implementation detail. What matters is the UX: think of a song, search for it, there it is on YouTube. Open the link and it plays. No payment needed, for a long time not even an account. The platform itself was pretty inobtrusive for most of its lifetime; it's gotten quite bad recently, but for most of those who care enough to do something about it, uBlock Origin clears out the UX of all the bullshit. Pirates couldn't possibly beat that if they tried. But it only exists because of an accident of history: YouTube got big on pirated content early enough and fast enough they could transition to "content id" instead of getting sued to oblivion.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    YouTube's UX is a huge reason why I use it for music as much as I do. And not even pirated music but indie releases, etc. The recommendation algorithm isn't all too terrible on some days. But I do prefer more navigable and preservable systems. At least yt-dl still works for the time being.

romwell 2y ago

>I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. Do you know any single person who travels outside of 4G coverage? Because the $5/$10 mo doesn't do much for you in a National or State Park in the US two hours away from a major city.

xxpor 2y ago
Spotify has supported downloads for over a decade.
function_seven 2y ago
I'm outside coverage areas all the time. I download my music to the phone and it still works.
dopp0 2y ago
if it's just travelling: most streaming services allow downloading music so you can listen offline for some time (ie spotify)
squeaky-clean 2y ago
You can download music on Spotify / Apple Music / YT Music far more easily than pirating it. And you only have to connect to their servers once every 30 days. You don't even need a 4G connection for that, it's just a few kilobytes exchanged to renew the offline period.
- romwell 2y ago
  >And you only have to connect to their servers once every 30 days. You don't even need a 4G connection for that, it's just a few kilobytes exchanged to renew the offline period. So, if I have a playlist in Spotify to listen to on long hikes, I will find out that I can't play it when I get to the hike (unless I use Spotify all the time, or think about this crap in advance). Thanks, I understand that I can jump through hoops to make it work. But an MP3 works 100% of the time, every time, without any of that crap, or thinking; I copy the file to a memory file once, and that's it. No passwords, no accounts, no internet, no logging in. Many bands I listen to have Bandcamp/SoundCloud accounts, which offer DRM-free audio downloads. I use that when it's an option - and it pays the artists orders of magnitude more than Spotify ever will. If I have a CD from a local show, I will rip that. Otherwise, I am not going to make my life more inconvenient for the sake of a major artist getting $0.000002 from my Spotify subscription. I'll pirate their work.

lazystar 2y ago

> It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. How do you know for certain that the classic 1960's song youre listening to on a streaming service is the exact same song that was played in the 1960's? There's a trust issue that comes with streaming platforms.

burnished 2y ago
Not in the way you're trying to imply, ie broadly recognized as a concern
- lazystar 2y ago
  eh. Back in 2017, Gorillaz released "Hallelujah Money" via youtube. A week later, the song was altered because it had used a clip from Spongebob at the end of the song. The physical album was released a few months later, and contained the new version without the spongebob clip. I pirated the song the day it was released, so I still have the artist's original version. Ever since then, I've always wondered how we can trust that streaming platforms with a monopoly on a service, will provide unaltered versions of an artist's work.
  - foobarian 2y ago
    Not only can't you trust them not to alter the works, you can't even trust them to keep the work available in perpetuity. Video is especially bad with this, with shows and movies randomly getting pulled and/or switching streaming platforms.
  - 2024 2y ago
    It's the artist who altered the song, not the streaming service. I've never heard of a (legal) streaming service that edits the songs submitted to its platform outside of YouTube (which can mute sections of videos that contain copyrighted audio)
  - lancesells 2y ago
    They've been changing album covers and songs since at least the 70s. This isn't anything new or recent, except streaming makes it a lot more convenient while also getting artists out of hot legal water like the Gorillaz change. I'm not here to defend streaming services (vampires), but changes are coming from the artist and not the service. Youtube didn't take out the spongebob sample in the Gorillaz song. Obligatory billy woods + kenny segal's Spongebob: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83F4JpVu61k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83F4JpVu61k

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

It's everything I can do to police the subscriptions that my wife and children think we should have. How you people don't have subscription fatigue I'll never know... it's like having debt standing over your head, but even with a thousand year mortgage I would make some progress in paying it off. Subscriptions? It's there forever. Even worse, sometimes the payment goes up. There is no convenience in subscriptions, just some sort of pathology akin to recreational heroin, where it lulls you into a narcotic coma, death just waiting a few years down the road. > And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies. There was never any such time. There was a time when Netflix had a catalog of a few thousand movies. My Plex server has 6700, and I'm not even hardcore. I estimate that were I to get every new release, and work backwards through previous years to 1995 or so, I'd need storage for at least 30,000 movies just for English language titles. Television is an order of magnitude larger still, and that's if I stay away from reality tv shows. Organizing these would become a burden... if lumped all into the same library, a person might have trouble paging through all the movies that started with S just to find what they were looking for (already started to become an issue at about 5000). I'll need to start saving up for the two synology expansion bays that my nas supports.

glitchc 2y ago
Most definitely with you on feeling the fatigue. Whenever my family asks for a new subscription, my response is to ask which one to cut to make room.
MattPalmer1086 2y ago
We just cancelled all our streaming services - there's just too many and most of them we don't watch for months at a time. The deal for us now is, if there's something we want to watch, we will enable that service for a month or two, then cancel it. So only one at a time, and often none. We haven't noticed any loss of entertainment. We have a plex server with loads of great stuff on it, and satellite TV (Freeview) for general TV watching.
- philjohn 2y ago
  Also avoids the "Hmmm, I can't think of something more interesting or productive to do, let's scroll through $streaming_service and find something that might interest me"

anjel 2y ago

Ahem

einpoklum 2y ago

> It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. 1. It's not unlimited access, it's access over the Internet. Which one doesn't have always and everywhere. 2. It's absolutely not every recording ever created; pretty sure it's not even half. 3. It's convenient, but not too convenient, because access, arrangement, playback GUI etc. is controlled, to a great extent, but the relevant service. 4. For most people in the world, this is not affordable. The median per-capita income in 2023 was ~2920 USD [1]; and you're asking for, say, 7.5 USD/month = 90 USD per year, or nearly 5% of one's income. No can do. 5. Even in richer countries - this stuff adds up! After a year at 90 USD - you don't accumulate any music you can then hear. So, you need to pay that sum for your entire life, let's say ages 15 to 95, e.g. 90 * 80 = 7,200 USD for music. Not cheap. [1]: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/ https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/

jorvi 2y ago
> It's not unlimited access, it's access over the Internet. Which one doesn't have always and everywhere. - flip on airplane mode - tap on Spotify - tap one of my playlists - tap ▶ - music starts coming out of my headphones I guess I must be imagining the soundwaves
- vel0city 2y ago
  TBF I've had the opposite experience due to forgetting to download those playlists ahead of time.
Kwpolska 2y ago
> 4. For most people in the world, this is not affordable. The median per-capita income in 2023 was ~2920 USD [1]; and you're asking for, say, 7.5 USD/month = 90 USD per year, or nearly 5% of one's income. No can do. Most subscription services adjust the service prices to what specific markets can stomach. Spotify in the US costs $11.99/month, but it's $5.86/month (23.99 PLN) in Poland.
sourcepluck 2y ago
I was going to comment but you saved me the bother of going into the details - yes, across the board. Knowing "not a single person who pirates music anymore" is no reflection on music(al) pirates - maybe for some reason the piraters tend to end up in different circles than the kind of people who think spotify has "nearly every record ever created". On top of what you said in your reply above, I also (partially) blame spotify for the fact that when you ask people what music they like now, a lot of people are quite likely to say "oh, everything!".

JohnFen 2y ago

> unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. Not nearly enough. A large swath of music I enjoy is simply not available via streaming at all. And what is there can disappear or be altered at any time.

bowsamic 2y ago

> I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore Really? That's surprising to me. A lot of people I know are basically dependent on Soulseek

sourcepluck 2y ago
Hadn't heard of that, having a little investigate now, cheers!

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

While streaming services and the record companies seem to have things mostly sorted out, there's still a very, very large collection of rare music that you won't find anywhere. There were sites like what.cd or waffles and probably a few more that were a treasure trove of archived music, ranging from demos to rare releases to obscure casette tape black metal to concert bootlegs. The biggest collection of hard or otherwise impossible to find material. And it was taken down, because the record companies or artists couldn't stand it. I hope there's data hoarders out there that have the collection. I hope the work continues out of sight.

austhrow743 2y ago
Redacted is the spiritual successor to What. Not sure how much of What's collection made it over but Redacted's is larger. What when it closed: Torrents: 2,588,359 Releases: 1,066,026 Artists: 884,432 "Perfect" FLACs: 863,944 Redacted now: Torrents: 3,225,076 Releases: 1,675,757 Artists: 1,253,924 "Perfect" FLACs: 2,023,560

kristianp 2y ago

> you need 6 different streaming services to meet your needs It's worse: the movie you want to watch might only be on pay per view on google movies, even though it was on Netflix last year.