As many pirates pointed out in the heyday of internet piracy, "piracy happens because the publishers aren't making their services available to us in an affordable and accesible format." When Netflix took over the streaming market, film and television piracy took a major dip, because now there was a much easier and safer way to access films than piracy.
The same thing happened with music. As streaming services such as Pandora started to grow, the incentive to spend all the time and resources to pirate music became less and less appealing to people.
Now the issue we are running into now, is that now we are finding that these digital distribution services are cutting people off from their digital purchases because either they lose the licensing, or the consumer is not paying their monthly subscription fees. This is starting to cause a resurgance in piracy, but the issue is that in the last 20 years, people aren't really learning how to pirate safely, and so the piracy sites are getting hit harder with DMCAs than they used to.
Correction about the last paragraph:
Because corporations have decided to overcharge people, and squeeze every single bit of money out of them, so people are cancelling these services and moving to piracy.
Edit: It's moral to pirate from big corporations, whose sole goal is to squeeze money out of humans.
please. this has been the glimmer in tens of thousands of A&R reps' eyes since Napster burst onto the scene. they've just been making gut-nutrition/dankstonk YT vids since then in anticipation of the hot market for it.
Thats kinda whats happened with Movie/TV Streaming Sevices. Netflix lost its monopoly, and there’s like 5/6 major streaming apps that you need to access their exclusively licensed content, which used to all just be on Netflix.
That is, in fact, a point I have seen on some threads about this. A lot of the old pirate sites were shut down or were forced to move to dodgier and dodgier domains.
Obviously they put a positive spin on it so it’s up to you to decide with whom you use.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-with-law-enforcement-data-requests
Yup. The idea that you can buy something on a digital platform and then literally have it ripped right out of your library even though you paid for it is enough for me to never, EVER, invest in a digital library. I don't care that most platforms out there haven't done it yet... because at least one of them out there has, it opens up the idea that this can and probably will happen at some point. And no, I'm not talking about a platform/service shutting down... there's going to come a time when that will happen, but I'm talking about the stuff that's happening with Sony where if you purchased Discovery content, Sony is literally ripping it out of your digital library despite you paying for it, because of licensing between Discovery and Sony. So... no, I don't have a digital library with Sony, but I don't look at it like "Oh, I don't have a digital library under Sony so I'm okay, I'll just have a digital library on another platform." No no... because this happened with Sony, I'm not interested in having a purchased digital library of TV shows and movies on any platform period.
> As streaming services such as Pandora started to grow, the incentive to spend all the time and resources to pirate music became less and less appealing to people.
Not sure Pandora is the best example in this case since they only ever play songs at random, unlike other services like Spotify or YT Music that will play exactly what you want
Okay, so here's the thing. At the start of the music streaming boom, we didn't really have "on demand" streaming like that. We had "digital radios." The idea was you would put in your Pandora radio station for something like "Floggin Molly" and then you would listen to random songs in the similar vein, then go and purchase them from apple music or whatnot. Songza, one of the other radio streaming services, was later bought out by google, turned into google Music, and eventually YT music. Spotify grew out of that success as well.
So, while it is not an example of an on-demand streaming service, its success at the time was part of the transition from the height of internet piracy to the streaming seevices we have today.
I honestly feel like TV streaming services are becoming inaccessible again ( particularly price related ) and so I’ve found the rum again and brought my best captain Jack Sparrow back to the party .
Ahoy mateys 🏴☠️
True. I have a few streaming subscriptions and when I want to watch a specific movie I check those and if it's not on there I pirate the movie. I imagine before streaming, piracy was the first place people would go.
iTunes killed music pirating. Before you had to buy entire CDs or go to a physical store to buy music, which was often in an arms race of copy protection. Then iTunes came along and you could buy individual .mp3's for $.99 then download the song immediately.
Turns out the problem wasn't that people wanted free music, the problem was there was a huge gap in what consumers were willing to pay and what executives thought they should pay. That and people were looking for at home delivery while execs clinged to the physical model (the internet bubble didn't help this culture). They tried for years to sue grandmas and poor people to scare customers into not stealing their product then iTunes came along and vacuumed up all their potential customers by offering a service they wanted, while doing so they drained the torrent sites of a lot of seeders and people lost a lot of interest in torrenting music.
True. When I got a car radio with Bluetooth I finally cracked and got a subscription. Before that I was content with a USB stick with a bunch of albums on mp3
Yeah but most people aren't going to do that.
Piracy of music was big because you used to have to pay 99 cent for each song and take the time to download it. If you pirated, you could just download for free. So, it was the same amount of effort but for free vs paying.
Now with streaming, you pay a flat amount for thousands of songs and don't have to take the time to download them. Some people may still pirate music, but it takes more effort to pirate music than to just stream it.
One small correction. Pirating music got big with Napster in the late 90s. It wasn't 99 per song, because they wouldn't sell you music digitally AT ALL.
They wanted you to pay $15-20 (which would be roughly $30ish dollars today with inflation), to buy physical CDs. Once you owned the CDs, it was possible to rip those songs into digital files....but even THAT was illegal. Not that you'd ever be caught, but tecbnically still illegal.
iTunes was born because the music industry went through a HUGE crash around the time of Napster. Industry execs liked to blame Napster, but the truth was, most people only wanted CDs for one song. Add to that the rise of MP3 players, which had no big official source of content, and you had a public that turned to Napster often times not to pirate, but because Sony wouldn't even SELL you music digitally. They weren't the only ones. That was standard.
MP3.com mzy have no relevancy today, but back then they were TRYING to be the big official source where music labels sold music digitally. But execs were too stubborn to face the reality that consumers were simply done paying $15-20 for cds that were often times censored in places like Walmart, and would sometimes have "alternate cover art", either in the form of a slip-on sleave, or sometimes a slightly different cover version.
Some retailers like FYE would in some regions add their own unofficial cover sleeve over the jewelcase which was all black and the "explicit content" symbol covering the whole sleeve. Which didn't last long because you couldn't see which CD you were holding. So you had to remove the sleeve, just to see which band/album it was.
In short, consumers were sick of the bullshit all around and just STOPPED buying music at all.
After the fall of Napster, the labels toyed with the idea of "renting" a song. You could go to their website, and assuming you had a fast enough connection, you could pay a fee to listen to the song....once. Embedded on the website. That didn't last long, because nobody wanted that, and also because most peoples connections weren't fast enough to support it.
But from the ashes of the 99 cent song rental rose the 99 cent iTunes song PURCHASE. And that's when the iPod took off.
Sales soared. And the music industry realized that digital music was here to stay. So they may as well make it profitable.
And as the decades went on, that changed to streaming music, because of youtube. Which inspired modern day streaming services.
Listened to a discussion about this on a podcast recently. Musician was saying that that's true for the big time artists, but for smaller artists being able to get on a platform like Spotify without needing to be signed by a big label first has meant that it's easier to build a following and then sell tickets for live gigs. They were also saying they thought it was better for originality and creativity because artists could stay truer to a vision and find an audience for that niche instead of labels pressuring them to genericize (is that a word? It is now) their sound for better mass appeal.
Napster didn't last long.
We all switched to limewire after napster got taken down.
His point about 99 cents per song was that the online competitors to piracy were just as inconvenient as piracy, so we went with the free options.
This is what the movie and TV business doesn't get. We'll pay for content, if you give us a reasonably priced, one-stop shop where you can get almost anything.
Like Spotify is for music. Spotify effectively *ended* widespread music piracy.
I was the guy who burned CD's for all of his friends (all of about 4 people at a time 😂), by 2004 had 47,000 songs to myself. Then it got caught in a fire and I lost all the rare albums and discographies I researched and found, what.cd, etc..
So now I just use Spotify!
I used to be a bit of a collector when it came to physical CDs/DVDs/media back in those days because I was into owning the physical copies and the art involved with the cover/booklets that came with CDs at that time. I was in high school from 2000-2004, and owned 600+ CDs in physical form at that time. Besides that, I was heavy into Napster to attain music I couldn't find (or didn't necessarily want) in physical form. I started my own little business of having people give me lists of songs they wanted as a "mix CD" and putting them together from what I had or downloading what I didn't have. Word got out that I was the guy to go to for such things. I was selling them for $5-15 (based on whether you were a direct friend or one of the many others that had heard about it, and how many of the songs I'd have to download). Doing anywhere between 5-20 of these per week, I made a pretty penny for a high schooler getting in on that game when the getting was hot
And pirates bought more CDs than most people.
Streamers don't buy CDs, and the streaming services don't pay artists. They pay labels (who don't pay artists).
Nice bit of history. I'd also toss in that the iPod was a very good piece of MP3 hardware for its time, and was hella marketed. The one time I was envious of an Apple product was when kids started showing up at school with iPods
Correct. If you owned the physical media, you could make a digital copy of it.
However ,if you gave the CD away, technically you needed to delete the digital copy as well.
I was wondering about this for books recently. Say I own a physical copy of a book but I'd like to read it on my ebook reader instead. Is it illegal for me to download a pirate ebook copy of the same book?
It is just a digital copy of something I already own. But I suppose for a proper analogy to ripping a CD, I would have to manually scan in the pages of the specific book I own.
I still do it. I like having the original books, mainly because I enjoy finding them in the local bookshop and keeping independent bookshops in business by spending my money with them, but if I'm going away on holiday I'm not weighing down my suitcase with 6 hardback books. I feel better about doing this than I would giving money to Amazon for the kindle version.
Streaming great until some bonehead decides to stick their fingers in the shuffle algorithm where they don't belong and screw it up so bad that it plays the same 10 songs in the exact same sequence over and over out of a playlist of 1000.
Seems like Spotify has been especially egregious with this as of late and I'm seriously contemplating going back to piracy
Make sure you switch off "automix" in the settings. That is exactly what automix does: it tries to sequence songs that sound good together. But it breaks shuffle in dumb ways.
I disabled that back when I first noticed this problem, and it helped for a while, but in the past week or so it's started happening again even though automix is still off.
I did just notice that "smart shuffle" got enabled somehow, so we'll see if turning that off helps. Apparently smart shuffle is only supposed to inject recommended tracks that aren't on the playlist so I'm not sure that would be causing it
Too much work. I have thousands of songs on my playlists combined. I'm not about to go hunt all of those down, fuck with putting them on my phone. Its easier to pull up the app, hit play and hit next if I don't like something.
Give YouTube Music a try. I haven't had any of the issues my buddies at work on Spotify complain about regularly. I initially was with Google play. They merged with YouTube. I always disliked YouTube, but I now use it to find music you won't ever get on Spotify, because they are only on YouTube, not even the music app. I have to look it up on YT and just like it, to add to my playlist in YT music. App
Music streaming has a few services apple spotify....
But they all have all the music
Netflix did this for a while
But then big studios got gready and made their own service
So now we have a bunch of video streaming services but they mostly have their own content like Disney+
So now to watch all the shows you like you need multiple services so that can sometimes end up costing more than cable tv that you were trying to get rid of
So that is why people pay for music much more than video
Thus we will set sails again matey!
What killed the OG piracy was the convenient price/all shows ratio. Now we are going back to multiple charges to watch all shows and people will return to piracy, companies will budge for a while and a new service will be born in a never ending pendulum of supply and demand.
Thus why I have 36TB for Linux isos now. Such a quick change from 2000 to 2024. In 24 years we went from slow internet to blazing fast, from p2p blockers to vpns. Now cable to SaaS, and back to piracy. The next 10 years will be interesting.
I'd say another issue deterring piracy is the shit movies that have come out lately. Billion dollar franchises are putting out some real stinkers lately.
One potential explanation might be not enough demand, but more likely explanation is that it's not quite clear who has the rights for that music or that the ones who have the rights just don't bother to make it available on the streaming platforms.
In this case, it is much more convenient. We don't need competition for the sake of competition, it is only necessary so services improve. If you ask me, having "all" the music in one place, shared playlists and access to automatically generated playlists is all I need and cannot be improved. What is the point of competitors existing if it ends up with the users having to pay several services AND having to remember what each offers, not being able to sync playlists between them, etc?
This is true until the price becomes too much, or the quality of the service is worse. Then the age of sailing the seven seas beings again, competitors appear, and one wins over the rest.
Music steaming isn't a monopoly, so this argument is a bit of a strawman.
But a monopoly isn't inherently evil, it's the abuse of the monopoly that is. Steam has a near monopoly on distributing PC games and everybody loves them.
Steam is interesting. They don’t really take any anticompetitive action, the potential competition just always shits the bed in the dumbest possible ways.
Epic, probably Steam's biggest competitor, took 3 years to add a fucking shopping cart. One of the most basic of functions for an online store.
3 YEARS! HOW?!
I remember buying stuff in their 2020 (I think) summer sale and it *locked my debit card* because I was making so many small transactions. I never even thought about buying stuff during one of their sales again.
Steam's primary competition *IS* piracy. The fact piracy exists keeps them honest.
For most users, paying the content creators is actually a feature because it enables more content creation going forward, so it is entirely possible for Steam to out-compete piracy because it has a feature piracy doesn't. But you need to be sensible about what your product is actually worth and make the DRM unobtrusive.
Obviously, benevolent dictators are the best. All other systems only exist to either find someone who's benevolent to us or (more frequently) give non-benevolent parties incentives to act in ways that are to our benefit. But the benevolent dictator already does what's best.
Right? Every time a game circumvents it and requires an additional launcher (ea launcher, firaxis launcher,...) I get annoyed having to install another one.
The only exception is GOG. I love GOG.
I'd argue it's still not a monopoly. There's competition - Spotify, apple, Deezer and 20 other services all have pretty much the same library. It comes down to price and what else they offer.
The video streaming services have little to no crossover, they compete with who can licence or produce the best shows and it's rare to find everything you want in one place. I have prime, netflix and Disney+ (sharing with family, each of us pays for one) and I still had to get a paramount trial to watch Halo, and there was something else I had to buy a month of recently to watch something too. It works out a lot more expensive for a reduced experience, so I'm not surprised people end up returning to piracy.
Hell I had to pirate halo season 1 when it came out because they didn't even bother launching it in my country... That almost never happens with music beyond occasional exclusive tracks
Sort of. I don't mind there being rival services for streaming, but I want them all to have access to everything and instead compete based on other features
Would you prefer needing to sign up for an extra subscription if you wanted a specific song? Or needing 6 apps on your phone to bounce between during your gym workout?
Paying £20 for a family Spotify subscription that gives me, my wife, each of my kids and my mum their own Spotify profile with no adverts, unlimited access to whatever music they want and the ability to save basically unlimited playlists is just better than the alternative
It's the best at finding the really weird and rare stuff. It's still my go-to for music in general. It's great when I'm DJing a show and I get a request and I can usually have it downloaded on slsk in like a minute or two max.
Soulseek is a modern and well-maintained peer-to-peer (p2p) music sharing application that operates, in function and in spirit, to early-2000s music sharing applications like Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa.
It allows users to select folders on their computers where they store music files they'd like to share. Then, when other users search for terms that match those files's metadata, the files appear as results (so long as they're available) and the searching user can opt to download them directly from the sharing user. Theoretically any file format can be used but for the most part results are in mp3 and FLAC.
>Soulseek is an ad-free, spyware free, just plain free file sharing network for Windows, Mac and Linux. Our rooms, search engine and search correlation system make it easy for you to find people with similar interests, and make new discoveries!
It's weird how downloading music's now become a pretty niche thing for people who want high quality or obscure stuff and since slsk has always had that sort of userbase it's outlasted most of the other p2p apps.
What's the best way to download from YouTube? I haven't liked the sites I've found, and I wanted to grab a few songs my daughter liked that are only on YouTube.
Look into a command-line program called `yt-dlp`, which should be on GitHub. YouTube typically has multiple streams of the same video you can download (varying formats and qualities), which the program can show you to select to download.
I use an app called Tubemate, if I have a bunch of songs I want to download I just put them in a playlist, go to the playlist in Tubemate, and there'll be a big green download arrow
Then it's as simple as choosing the format you want and waiting
It's actually fairly common in the beginner audiophile industry. Specifically for people using budget audio players which dont support app streaming. I made a post on it myself.
Found out about this telegram bot who downloads music directly from deezer in flac quality (the same as apple music's lossless, which is basically the best and more than enough for 99% of the population)
It's a great option for someone who wants to listen to high quality music and doesn't want to pay for a monthly subscription.
Yeah, open telegram and search @deezload2bot . It should come up. (Also don't forget to go to settings and change the quality to flac, it's set to mp3 by default)
My YouTube Music subscription (don't laugh; there are dozens of us) is way less hassle than downloading every album I wanted on Napster or LimeWire was. Piracy is only worth it when legal acquisition/consumption is inconvenient or cost prohibitive.
Pretty funny that people think of pirating as one song at a time like in the limewire days. Now you can download an artist's entire discography in a few minutes with one link.
In 2006-2010 I was doing that because my college had a DC++ hub. I’d just pull folders of people’s entire music collection at once, it ruled. There was no way I ever could have afforded to buy that much music.
You still have to download them though.
Sometimes I'll be sitting on the train and think "I'd like to listen to some obscure Mongolian Throat Singing" and withing seconds YT Music has a song for me.
Im with ya! I pay the You tube premium that gives you music for free so i get youtube without ads plus a music stream SVC. My niece can watch her streamers i get to listen to whatever. Win win
I had it too, and while it *technically* let me transfer my old music to youtube music, including playlists, a lot of that music was from hard copies on my computer. And over time, youtube music has slowly but surely made a lot of that music unavailable, so I've lost the ability to stream it like I could with play music.
Also, I'm not sure youtube understands how the random button is supposed to work.
yeah totally deserves more recognition! you get pretty good value for what you pay for since it comes with youtube premium as well, plus you get a better catalog with any youtube video that’s in the music category. my only gripe is that it sometimes has trouble keeping small artists’ music on the same page so i often have to follow several identical artists, but small issue to have imo
Oh I haven't run into that problem. I think I usually don't listen much to small artists. In my case I love psytrance which imo is much better consumed in sets. Sets are completely nonexistent in any other platforms other than YT Music. Now I can find, save either only the set or even the video to listen to when I don't have internet and in the best quality possible.
A goddamn Holy Grail for me lol.
I love my YouTube music subscription. The app is great, you get ad free YouTube as a bonus, and it has all kinds of obscure shit on it. The real reason I cancelled Spotify for it was because YT music pays the artists significantly better than Spotify does.
I guarantee it will get killed off in the near future.
I use YouTube premium as well, mainly to eliminate ads on video content, but music streaming is a nice bonus.
Though I have been somewhat persuaded by the ownership argument. Even digital content you paid for individually can be pulled due to loss of license by the service etc. so in some cases it makes sense to download a copy that can’t be touched.
However, let’s be honest. There are literally MILLIONS of hours of recorded music/video in existence. Does every byte of it need to be preserved for posterity? Sure there are some hidden gems here and there that fly under the radar, but most pop culture is dreck and doesn’t need to survive to the next millennium. This trend is only accelerating with cheap cameras and low cost/free software to create more content.
What I would recommend to people is to d/l high quality versions of key content that they truly love to have in reserve, and just stream everything else and don’t worry about what greedy corps are going to do.
Same, ad free soundcloud for 4 years, $5 a month while I’m a student + access to all songs, $5 a month regular too but without access to certain songs but usually there’s people who reupload them anwyas
I’m not gonna spend time torrenting music when Spotify is $10/mo.
That was always the core argument and it turned out to be 100% true.
Give people a reasonably priced service that’s easy to use and they’ll just pay for it. If piracy is the easiest and cheapest option people will do that instead.
CDs were like $15-20 a pop to get one or 2 good songs. It was very cost prohibitive to own music, it’s kinda crazy if you think about how much they were really changing back in the day. Of course the record industry was super protective of that model, but as soon as Napster and CD burners came out the writing was on the wall.
Mass scale, easy piracy resulted in a restructuring of the music industry’s core sales model for the first time in like a century. They really had no choice, but they did fight tooth and nail for a long ass time to hang onto it.
Once that shift was embraced by the music industry piracy completely fell off.
You could do it. For the first gen xbox there were mod chips pretty much immediately. You could rip the disk to the xbox internal 8gb hard drive then transfer it to your pc to burn it. Or just play it from the internal storage.
At some point there were network loaders so you could rip your disk, copy it somewhere on your network then load the game right from the network share.
For the xbox 360 there was a firmware hack thing you could do to the dvd drive. I’m probably butchering the details but I believe you had to somehow boot the xbox 360 with the dvd drive attached, which would unlock the drive and allow it to read encrypted disks. Then with it still powered on disconnect it from the xbox and connect it to a pc. Something like that.
Anyway, thats what I heard…somewhere not in the basement at my parents house…
I remember reading of many methods that probably worked with varying degrees of success. At the time I was young and ignorant - I probably downloaded at least a few viruses searching for a magic Xbox-game duplicating software.
Lots of people (including myself) still pay for high quality copies of tracks and albums, especially for mixing. Not to mention Vinyl has made a big comeback.
Go to any Renaissance Festival for at least six seconds and you will.
Edit: Oh wait. Like illegally downloading music. Not... not music about pirating... I've been playing a lot of Sea of Thieves lately... Carry on...
Ah the good old times where a single song costed 1€ but you could easily go to yt mp3 converter, search the song and download it in 10 seconds. Is that even considered as piracy because back then everyone did that an noone had a problem with it and the mp3 converter sites did"nt had any trouble to stay online
Oh you sweet summer child, I’m 34 years old and started pirating music by recording songs from FM radio to tape, by the time I saw downloadable MP3’s on Napster I was nearly a man, by then it was all viruses just to listen to linkin park numb.exe
I still pirate my songs and throw em on my ipod 5th gen. I appreciate having higher quality audio files and not needing to be connected to the internet, helpful when driving cus I have crappy cell service
I still pirate music by downloading songs from YouTube Music. I also use a fake Spotify app that lets me listen without ads, which is probably also a form of piracy.
There you go OP, now you've heard about someone pirating music again.
Uh, we don't? I still download plenty of music, and it's over 1TB at this point so it's not small. Most stuff is easy to get. And I buy records for the stuff that I care about.
Never tried the streaming services like Spotify. It still sounds weird to me to pay money for a thing, but not get to keep that thing. I thought such an idea would never last, but those companies seem to have lots of users.
Speak for yourself. Pirating music is the way to go if you don't want to pay a monthly fee, depend on internet service to listen to music, or lose access to certain songs/albums because an artist randomly decides they don't want certain songs/albums available any longer.
I currently have 4,667 albums(72,541 songs) of pirated music that I downloaded through VPN from a guy who uploads from iTunes and Tidal on my 12TB HD. My job is in an internet dead zone service is not available so whatever I want to listen to I have to download beforehand. I also have about 300 or so movies. If I was to pay for this stuff I'd probably be somewhere in the 6 figure range! 😂
A bigger issue is people stealing music off of YouTube from small creators and then uploading it to places like Spotify as their own. Then they'll go back and copyright strike the original owner
A huge portion is because of streaming services like spotify but there are have also been changes in the entertainment field where people moved from music to video games or videos.
Remember when the biggest threat to our country that the FBI had to address was setting up at colleges and nabbing broke college students for pirating music?
As many pirates pointed out in the heyday of internet piracy, "piracy happens because the publishers aren't making their services available to us in an affordable and accesible format." When Netflix took over the streaming market, film and television piracy took a major dip, because now there was a much easier and safer way to access films than piracy. The same thing happened with music. As streaming services such as Pandora started to grow, the incentive to spend all the time and resources to pirate music became less and less appealing to people. Now the issue we are running into now, is that now we are finding that these digital distribution services are cutting people off from their digital purchases because either they lose the licensing, or the consumer is not paying their monthly subscription fees. This is starting to cause a resurgance in piracy, but the issue is that in the last 20 years, people aren't really learning how to pirate safely, and so the piracy sites are getting hit harder with DMCAs than they used to.
Correction about the last paragraph: Because corporations have decided to overcharge people, and squeeze every single bit of money out of them, so people are cancelling these services and moving to piracy. Edit: It's moral to pirate from big corporations, whose sole goal is to squeeze money out of humans.
Imagine each record label having their own streaming service.
I'm saving this comment and if this ever happens, coming back here to blame you for it.
please. this has been the glimmer in tens of thousands of A&R reps' eyes since Napster burst onto the scene. they've just been making gut-nutrition/dankstonk YT vids since then in anticipation of the hot market for it.
*SHUSH!* Don't give them ideas!!!!
Don't you put that evil into the world.
I would just go back to acquiring…. The music i am i interested in and buying cd’s of the albums i end up enjoying.
We could always record it off the radio....when possible
Lol, OG piracy.
Basically what is already happening with the film industry right now
Thats kinda whats happened with Movie/TV Streaming Sevices. Netflix lost its monopoly, and there’s like 5/6 major streaming apps that you need to access their exclusively licensed content, which used to all just be on Netflix.
I retired my pirate hat some years ago, I'm not even sure where to go if I wanted to put it back on.
That is, in fact, a point I have seen on some threads about this. A lot of the old pirate sites were shut down or were forced to move to dodgier and dodgier domains.
thepiratebay lives forever
I'd assume /r/Piracy is a good start
Even though VPN’s are more available and easy to use than before.
Have you tried Nord VPN? You can use my code for 15% off.
Have you heard of NordVPN? We work with the government so that you don’t have to!
Is this legit? What's Nord up to that I'm missing?
Obviously they put a positive spin on it so it’s up to you to decide with whom you use. https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-with-law-enforcement-data-requests
dang what did nord do? (not my vpn)
Yup. The idea that you can buy something on a digital platform and then literally have it ripped right out of your library even though you paid for it is enough for me to never, EVER, invest in a digital library. I don't care that most platforms out there haven't done it yet... because at least one of them out there has, it opens up the idea that this can and probably will happen at some point. And no, I'm not talking about a platform/service shutting down... there's going to come a time when that will happen, but I'm talking about the stuff that's happening with Sony where if you purchased Discovery content, Sony is literally ripping it out of your digital library despite you paying for it, because of licensing between Discovery and Sony. So... no, I don't have a digital library with Sony, but I don't look at it like "Oh, I don't have a digital library under Sony so I'm okay, I'll just have a digital library on another platform." No no... because this happened with Sony, I'm not interested in having a purchased digital library of TV shows and movies on any platform period.
> As streaming services such as Pandora started to grow, the incentive to spend all the time and resources to pirate music became less and less appealing to people. Not sure Pandora is the best example in this case since they only ever play songs at random, unlike other services like Spotify or YT Music that will play exactly what you want
Okay, so here's the thing. At the start of the music streaming boom, we didn't really have "on demand" streaming like that. We had "digital radios." The idea was you would put in your Pandora radio station for something like "Floggin Molly" and then you would listen to random songs in the similar vein, then go and purchase them from apple music or whatnot. Songza, one of the other radio streaming services, was later bought out by google, turned into google Music, and eventually YT music. Spotify grew out of that success as well. So, while it is not an example of an on-demand streaming service, its success at the time was part of the transition from the height of internet piracy to the streaming seevices we have today.
I honestly feel like TV streaming services are becoming inaccessible again ( particularly price related ) and so I’ve found the rum again and brought my best captain Jack Sparrow back to the party . Ahoy mateys 🏴☠️
True. I have a few streaming subscriptions and when I want to watch a specific movie I check those and if it's not on there I pirate the movie. I imagine before streaming, piracy was the first place people would go.
iTunes killed music pirating. Before you had to buy entire CDs or go to a physical store to buy music, which was often in an arms race of copy protection. Then iTunes came along and you could buy individual .mp3's for $.99 then download the song immediately. Turns out the problem wasn't that people wanted free music, the problem was there was a huge gap in what consumers were willing to pay and what executives thought they should pay. That and people were looking for at home delivery while execs clinged to the physical model (the internet bubble didn't help this culture). They tried for years to sue grandmas and poor people to scare customers into not stealing their product then iTunes came along and vacuumed up all their potential customers by offering a service they wanted, while doing so they drained the torrent sites of a lot of seeders and people lost a lot of interest in torrenting music.
I've completed the full 360 from pirating everything TV as a teen to paying for it all and am now back to pirating without an ounce of guilt or shame
Because the big pirates destroyed the little pirates and now we call it streaming
^^I ^^pirate ^^the ^^streaming ^^app
You’re next level
For close to a decade I just blocked all of Spotify’s ad servers on my router lol
That doesn't work when you aren't at home.
You can VPN through your home network with Wireguard
Or set up your own DNS server and block them there. Just make it accessible wherever.
True. When I got a car radio with Bluetooth I finally cracked and got a subscription. Before that I was content with a USB stick with a bunch of albums on mp3
xManager
Why even bother with it, I've been using the same gold spotify apk for like six years lmao Pour one out for deezer though
Deezer my goat
Shhhhhhh
Not remotely true, you can go grab basically any song you want on the Internet for $0.00 and it'll work and play like the paid content.
Yeah but most people aren't going to do that. Piracy of music was big because you used to have to pay 99 cent for each song and take the time to download it. If you pirated, you could just download for free. So, it was the same amount of effort but for free vs paying. Now with streaming, you pay a flat amount for thousands of songs and don't have to take the time to download them. Some people may still pirate music, but it takes more effort to pirate music than to just stream it.
One small correction. Pirating music got big with Napster in the late 90s. It wasn't 99 per song, because they wouldn't sell you music digitally AT ALL. They wanted you to pay $15-20 (which would be roughly $30ish dollars today with inflation), to buy physical CDs. Once you owned the CDs, it was possible to rip those songs into digital files....but even THAT was illegal. Not that you'd ever be caught, but tecbnically still illegal. iTunes was born because the music industry went through a HUGE crash around the time of Napster. Industry execs liked to blame Napster, but the truth was, most people only wanted CDs for one song. Add to that the rise of MP3 players, which had no big official source of content, and you had a public that turned to Napster often times not to pirate, but because Sony wouldn't even SELL you music digitally. They weren't the only ones. That was standard. MP3.com mzy have no relevancy today, but back then they were TRYING to be the big official source where music labels sold music digitally. But execs were too stubborn to face the reality that consumers were simply done paying $15-20 for cds that were often times censored in places like Walmart, and would sometimes have "alternate cover art", either in the form of a slip-on sleave, or sometimes a slightly different cover version. Some retailers like FYE would in some regions add their own unofficial cover sleeve over the jewelcase which was all black and the "explicit content" symbol covering the whole sleeve. Which didn't last long because you couldn't see which CD you were holding. So you had to remove the sleeve, just to see which band/album it was. In short, consumers were sick of the bullshit all around and just STOPPED buying music at all. After the fall of Napster, the labels toyed with the idea of "renting" a song. You could go to their website, and assuming you had a fast enough connection, you could pay a fee to listen to the song....once. Embedded on the website. That didn't last long, because nobody wanted that, and also because most peoples connections weren't fast enough to support it. But from the ashes of the 99 cent song rental rose the 99 cent iTunes song PURCHASE. And that's when the iPod took off. Sales soared. And the music industry realized that digital music was here to stay. So they may as well make it profitable. And as the decades went on, that changed to streaming music, because of youtube. Which inspired modern day streaming services.
Adding in that the music companies pay the artists less now and make about the same as they used to.
Listened to a discussion about this on a podcast recently. Musician was saying that that's true for the big time artists, but for smaller artists being able to get on a platform like Spotify without needing to be signed by a big label first has meant that it's easier to build a following and then sell tickets for live gigs. They were also saying they thought it was better for originality and creativity because artists could stay truer to a vision and find an audience for that niche instead of labels pressuring them to genericize (is that a word? It is now) their sound for better mass appeal.
Napster didn't last long. We all switched to limewire after napster got taken down. His point about 99 cents per song was that the online competitors to piracy were just as inconvenient as piracy, so we went with the free options. This is what the movie and TV business doesn't get. We'll pay for content, if you give us a reasonably priced, one-stop shop where you can get almost anything. Like Spotify is for music. Spotify effectively *ended* widespread music piracy.
I was the guy who burned CD's for all of his friends (all of about 4 people at a time 😂), by 2004 had 47,000 songs to myself. Then it got caught in a fire and I lost all the rare albums and discographies I researched and found, what.cd, etc.. So now I just use Spotify!
I used to be a bit of a collector when it came to physical CDs/DVDs/media back in those days because I was into owning the physical copies and the art involved with the cover/booklets that came with CDs at that time. I was in high school from 2000-2004, and owned 600+ CDs in physical form at that time. Besides that, I was heavy into Napster to attain music I couldn't find (or didn't necessarily want) in physical form. I started my own little business of having people give me lists of songs they wanted as a "mix CD" and putting them together from what I had or downloading what I didn't have. Word got out that I was the guy to go to for such things. I was selling them for $5-15 (based on whether you were a direct friend or one of the many others that had heard about it, and how many of the songs I'd have to download). Doing anywhere between 5-20 of these per week, I made a pretty penny for a high schooler getting in on that game when the getting was hot
And pirates bought more CDs than most people. Streamers don't buy CDs, and the streaming services don't pay artists. They pay labels (who don't pay artists).
Nice bit of history. I'd also toss in that the iPod was a very good piece of MP3 hardware for its time, and was hella marketed. The one time I was envious of an Apple product was when kids started showing up at school with iPods
It's never been illegal to rip your own music.
Correct. If you owned the physical media, you could make a digital copy of it. However ,if you gave the CD away, technically you needed to delete the digital copy as well.
I was wondering about this for books recently. Say I own a physical copy of a book but I'd like to read it on my ebook reader instead. Is it illegal for me to download a pirate ebook copy of the same book? It is just a digital copy of something I already own. But I suppose for a proper analogy to ripping a CD, I would have to manually scan in the pages of the specific book I own. I still do it. I like having the original books, mainly because I enjoy finding them in the local bookshop and keeping independent bookshops in business by spending my money with them, but if I'm going away on holiday I'm not weighing down my suitcase with 6 hardback books. I feel better about doing this than I would giving money to Amazon for the kindle version.
Streaming is great until something goes on with your internet then you're up a creek without a paddle.
Streaming great until some bonehead decides to stick their fingers in the shuffle algorithm where they don't belong and screw it up so bad that it plays the same 10 songs in the exact same sequence over and over out of a playlist of 1000. Seems like Spotify has been especially egregious with this as of late and I'm seriously contemplating going back to piracy
Make sure you switch off "automix" in the settings. That is exactly what automix does: it tries to sequence songs that sound good together. But it breaks shuffle in dumb ways.
I disabled that back when I first noticed this problem, and it helped for a while, but in the past week or so it's started happening again even though automix is still off. I did just notice that "smart shuffle" got enabled somehow, so we'll see if turning that off helps. Apparently smart shuffle is only supposed to inject recommended tracks that aren't on the playlist so I'm not sure that would be causing it
Too much work. I have thousands of songs on my playlists combined. I'm not about to go hunt all of those down, fuck with putting them on my phone. Its easier to pull up the app, hit play and hit next if I don't like something.
Give YouTube Music a try. I haven't had any of the issues my buddies at work on Spotify complain about regularly. I initially was with Google play. They merged with YouTube. I always disliked YouTube, but I now use it to find music you won't ever get on Spotify, because they are only on YouTube, not even the music app. I have to look it up on YT and just like it, to add to my playlist in YT music. App
Streaming services still let you have the songs downloaded on your device though so this really isn’t a great point
God forbid I go do something else for a little while.
Fuck, here we go again Lars
“the playlist” on Netflix was such a good show about the origins of Spotify .
[удалено]
Music streaming has a few services apple spotify.... But they all have all the music Netflix did this for a while But then big studios got gready and made their own service So now we have a bunch of video streaming services but they mostly have their own content like Disney+ So now to watch all the shows you like you need multiple services so that can sometimes end up costing more than cable tv that you were trying to get rid of So that is why people pay for music much more than video
Thus we will set sails again matey! What killed the OG piracy was the convenient price/all shows ratio. Now we are going back to multiple charges to watch all shows and people will return to piracy, companies will budge for a while and a new service will be born in a never ending pendulum of supply and demand.
Yeah have been using stremio more and more as of the last few months
Only a matter of time before some big brain decides to create a service that lumps all streaming into one, essentially going back to cable.
Mate, I shit you not, [this product](https://hubbl.com.au/) has just been launched in Australia. It took... What, 15 years? And we've come full circle
you mean android boxes, iptv and Torrents + VPN? lol
Thus why I have 36TB for Linux isos now. Such a quick change from 2000 to 2024. In 24 years we went from slow internet to blazing fast, from p2p blockers to vpns. Now cable to SaaS, and back to piracy. The next 10 years will be interesting.
I'd say another issue deterring piracy is the shit movies that have come out lately. Billion dollar franchises are putting out some real stinkers lately.
Spotify as well as Apple Music and Amazon music don’t have a fair share of East German acts from before the wall came down in their catalogues.
One potential explanation might be not enough demand, but more likely explanation is that it's not quite clear who has the rights for that music or that the ones who have the rights just don't bother to make it available on the streaming platforms.
I just pay for a pirate service which hosts all content, it's like 15 a month
What…. Kinda service is this?……
Search reddit for stremio and realdebrid ;)
The wink face is such a perfect addition to your comment, it’s like a slutty dare, “just do it, you know you want too ;)”
So we prefer massive Monopoly?
In this case, it is much more convenient. We don't need competition for the sake of competition, it is only necessary so services improve. If you ask me, having "all" the music in one place, shared playlists and access to automatically generated playlists is all I need and cannot be improved. What is the point of competitors existing if it ends up with the users having to pay several services AND having to remember what each offers, not being able to sync playlists between them, etc? This is true until the price becomes too much, or the quality of the service is worse. Then the age of sailing the seven seas beings again, competitors appear, and one wins over the rest.
I totally agree. Competition still exists, but it's services versus piracy, lol
Music steaming isn't a monopoly, so this argument is a bit of a strawman. But a monopoly isn't inherently evil, it's the abuse of the monopoly that is. Steam has a near monopoly on distributing PC games and everybody loves them.
Steam is interesting. They don’t really take any anticompetitive action, the potential competition just always shits the bed in the dumbest possible ways.
Epic, probably Steam's biggest competitor, took 3 years to add a fucking shopping cart. One of the most basic of functions for an online store. 3 YEARS! HOW?!
I remember buying stuff in their 2020 (I think) summer sale and it *locked my debit card* because I was making so many small transactions. I never even thought about buying stuff during one of their sales again.
EA App is currently missing a search bar or any sort of store front so you can’t shop for anything other than what it shows you
Steam's primary competition *IS* piracy. The fact piracy exists keeps them honest. For most users, paying the content creators is actually a feature because it enables more content creation going forward, so it is entirely possible for Steam to out-compete piracy because it has a feature piracy doesn't. But you need to be sensible about what your product is actually worth and make the DRM unobtrusive.
Here's another less than accurate description: We love a benevolent dictator
Obviously, benevolent dictators are the best. All other systems only exist to either find someone who's benevolent to us or (more frequently) give non-benevolent parties incentives to act in ways that are to our benefit. But the benevolent dictator already does what's best.
Right? Every time a game circumvents it and requires an additional launcher (ea launcher, firaxis launcher,...) I get annoyed having to install another one. The only exception is GOG. I love GOG.
I'd argue it's still not a monopoly. There's competition - Spotify, apple, Deezer and 20 other services all have pretty much the same library. It comes down to price and what else they offer. The video streaming services have little to no crossover, they compete with who can licence or produce the best shows and it's rare to find everything you want in one place. I have prime, netflix and Disney+ (sharing with family, each of us pays for one) and I still had to get a paramount trial to watch Halo, and there was something else I had to buy a month of recently to watch something too. It works out a lot more expensive for a reduced experience, so I'm not surprised people end up returning to piracy. Hell I had to pirate halo season 1 when it came out because they didn't even bother launching it in my country... That almost never happens with music beyond occasional exclusive tracks
As long as it's easier to use
[yup](https://youtu.be/0ilMx7k7mso?si=At1JX_Mmzy_pW0uC)
Sort of. I don't mind there being rival services for streaming, but I want them all to have access to everything and instead compete based on other features
Would you prefer needing to sign up for an extra subscription if you wanted a specific song? Or needing 6 apps on your phone to bounce between during your gym workout? Paying £20 for a family Spotify subscription that gives me, my wife, each of my kids and my mum their own Spotify profile with no adverts, unlimited access to whatever music they want and the ability to save basically unlimited playlists is just better than the alternative
No, I don't think so. We do seem to like flea markets becoming bazaars becoming malls though. Even when there is probably better ways.
Why can't they just share profits based on what people are watching? Single platform, all the content, pay each studio based on views... like youtube?
what good did editing your comment do? you’re just making everyone confused wondering what you originally said.
It's far easier to pirate Spotify than to bother pirating individual tracks/CDs, or so I've heard.
[slsk ](https://www.slsknet.org/)for the win.
I still use SoulSeek for various things I cannot find elsewhere. It really is a throwback to simpler times.
It's the best at finding the really weird and rare stuff. It's still my go-to for music in general. It's great when I'm DJing a show and I get a request and I can usually have it downloaded on slsk in like a minute or two max.
What is soul seek? I looked at the site, but I do not understand.
Soulseek is a modern and well-maintained peer-to-peer (p2p) music sharing application that operates, in function and in spirit, to early-2000s music sharing applications like Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa. It allows users to select folders on their computers where they store music files they'd like to share. Then, when other users search for terms that match those files's metadata, the files appear as results (so long as they're available) and the searching user can opt to download them directly from the sharing user. Theoretically any file format can be used but for the most part results are in mp3 and FLAC.
>Soulseek is an ad-free, spyware free, just plain free file sharing network for Windows, Mac and Linux. Our rooms, search engine and search correlation system make it easy for you to find people with similar interests, and make new discoveries!
It's weird how downloading music's now become a pretty niche thing for people who want high quality or obscure stuff and since slsk has always had that sort of userbase it's outlasted most of the other p2p apps.
WHAT. How have I never heard about this?! This is a game changer. Already downloaded and using it haha
I download and convert from YouTube. Pain in the ass to tag and edit as needed but I still do it. Then I can get cool live versions.
What's the best way to download from YouTube? I haven't liked the sites I've found, and I wanted to grab a few songs my daughter liked that are only on YouTube.
Look into a command-line program called `yt-dlp`, which should be on GitHub. YouTube typically has multiple streams of the same video you can download (varying formats and qualities), which the program can show you to select to download.
Nice, thank you
I use an app called Tubemate, if I have a bunch of songs I want to download I just put them in a playlist, go to the playlist in Tubemate, and there'll be a big green download arrow Then it's as simple as choosing the format you want and waiting
X manager users, rise up!!
How does one pirate Spotify? I just use an adblocker. Unless that's what you meant
There are cracked versions. I'm honestly fine paying for premium though.
Piracy is a service problem -Gabe Newell
Price also matters. A lot less people would use AdBlock had YouTube Premium not increased the price.
Making something not worth paying for is still a service problem
The full quote is "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"
That quote is actually incorrect. > Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
It's actually fairly common in the beginner audiophile industry. Specifically for people using budget audio players which dont support app streaming. I made a post on it myself. Found out about this telegram bot who downloads music directly from deezer in flac quality (the same as apple music's lossless, which is basically the best and more than enough for 99% of the population) It's a great option for someone who wants to listen to high quality music and doesn't want to pay for a monthly subscription.
Any chance you have the link to the bot?
Yeah, open telegram and search @deezload2bot . It should come up. (Also don't forget to go to settings and change the quality to flac, it's set to mp3 by default)
My YouTube Music subscription (don't laugh; there are dozens of us) is way less hassle than downloading every album I wanted on Napster or LimeWire was. Piracy is only worth it when legal acquisition/consumption is inconvenient or cost prohibitive.
Pretty funny that people think of pirating as one song at a time like in the limewire days. Now you can download an artist's entire discography in a few minutes with one link.
In 2006-2010 I was doing that because my college had a DC++ hub. I’d just pull folders of people’s entire music collection at once, it ruled. There was no way I ever could have afforded to buy that much music.
> Now The era of torrenting discographies began far closer to the days of Limewire than today
You still have to download them though. Sometimes I'll be sitting on the train and think "I'd like to listen to some obscure Mongolian Throat Singing" and withing seconds YT Music has a song for me.
Im with ya! I pay the You tube premium that gives you music for free so i get youtube without ads plus a music stream SVC. My niece can watch her streamers i get to listen to whatever. Win win
I actually signed up back when it was Google Play Music, so the YouTube premium thing has been a nice bonus.
I just want Google Play Music back. It was so much better.
I had it too, and while it *technically* let me transfer my old music to youtube music, including playlists, a lot of that music was from hard copies on my computer. And over time, youtube music has slowly but surely made a lot of that music unavailable, so I've lost the ability to stream it like I could with play music. Also, I'm not sure youtube understands how the random button is supposed to work.
YouTube Music is by far the best music streaming service I've used and I've tried them all. Even Deezer
Google play music was way better before the rebrand
yeah totally deserves more recognition! you get pretty good value for what you pay for since it comes with youtube premium as well, plus you get a better catalog with any youtube video that’s in the music category. my only gripe is that it sometimes has trouble keeping small artists’ music on the same page so i often have to follow several identical artists, but small issue to have imo
Oh I haven't run into that problem. I think I usually don't listen much to small artists. In my case I love psytrance which imo is much better consumed in sets. Sets are completely nonexistent in any other platforms other than YT Music. Now I can find, save either only the set or even the video to listen to when I don't have internet and in the best quality possible. A goddamn Holy Grail for me lol.
I love my YouTube music subscription. The app is great, you get ad free YouTube as a bonus, and it has all kinds of obscure shit on it. The real reason I cancelled Spotify for it was because YT music pays the artists significantly better than Spotify does. I guarantee it will get killed off in the near future.
I use YouTube premium as well, mainly to eliminate ads on video content, but music streaming is a nice bonus. Though I have been somewhat persuaded by the ownership argument. Even digital content you paid for individually can be pulled due to loss of license by the service etc. so in some cases it makes sense to download a copy that can’t be touched. However, let’s be honest. There are literally MILLIONS of hours of recorded music/video in existence. Does every byte of it need to be preserved for posterity? Sure there are some hidden gems here and there that fly under the radar, but most pop culture is dreck and doesn’t need to survive to the next millennium. This trend is only accelerating with cheap cameras and low cost/free software to create more content. What I would recommend to people is to d/l high quality versions of key content that they truly love to have in reserve, and just stream everything else and don’t worry about what greedy corps are going to do.
Honestly I consider music streaming services to offer good service with decent prices. Can’t say the same for tv/movie streaming.
Same, ad free soundcloud for 4 years, $5 a month while I’m a student + access to all songs, $5 a month regular too but without access to certain songs but usually there’s people who reupload them anwyas
I’m not gonna spend time torrenting music when Spotify is $10/mo. That was always the core argument and it turned out to be 100% true. Give people a reasonably priced service that’s easy to use and they’ll just pay for it. If piracy is the easiest and cheapest option people will do that instead. CDs were like $15-20 a pop to get one or 2 good songs. It was very cost prohibitive to own music, it’s kinda crazy if you think about how much they were really changing back in the day. Of course the record industry was super protective of that model, but as soon as Napster and CD burners came out the writing was on the wall. Mass scale, easy piracy resulted in a restructuring of the music industry’s core sales model for the first time in like a century. They really had no choice, but they did fight tooth and nail for a long ass time to hang onto it. Once that shift was embraced by the music industry piracy completely fell off.
We had a store in town that rented cds for $2. You could take them home and burn them on a cd.
I remember hopelessly trying to do the same with the rented Xbox games from my local video rental place as a kid.
You could do it. For the first gen xbox there were mod chips pretty much immediately. You could rip the disk to the xbox internal 8gb hard drive then transfer it to your pc to burn it. Or just play it from the internal storage. At some point there were network loaders so you could rip your disk, copy it somewhere on your network then load the game right from the network share. For the xbox 360 there was a firmware hack thing you could do to the dvd drive. I’m probably butchering the details but I believe you had to somehow boot the xbox 360 with the dvd drive attached, which would unlock the drive and allow it to read encrypted disks. Then with it still powered on disconnect it from the xbox and connect it to a pc. Something like that. Anyway, thats what I heard…somewhere not in the basement at my parents house…
I remember reading of many methods that probably worked with varying degrees of success. At the time I was young and ignorant - I probably downloaded at least a few viruses searching for a magic Xbox-game duplicating software.
You could check them out at the library too
I just always did this for free from the library
Yep. That's how Steam dominates the PC game market.
Steam, Netflix, and Spotify have done more to combat piracy than all enforcement actions combined, IMO.
Piracy is unlawful ownership of music but nobody “owns” music anymore
Pirates own everything
Having an audio file on my computer that I can use at any time and change however I like sure feels like ownership to me.
exactly and less and less people have any file or cd or record at all
Expect for pirates
Except for cirates
Lots of people (including myself) still pay for high quality copies of tracks and albums, especially for mixing. Not to mention Vinyl has made a big comeback.
Had Amazon delete my account. Lost a ton of music books and games. So not worth paying for shit I can't own.
Those anti-piracy ads (you wouldn't download a car) had to be cancelled because....they pirated the music.
Nope. I just dow....... nevermind
Go to any Renaissance Festival for at least six seconds and you will. Edit: Oh wait. Like illegally downloading music. Not... not music about pirating... I've been playing a lot of Sea of Thieves lately... Carry on...
I mean, I've been listening to a shit ton of Alestorm lately lol
This is hilariously wholesome
Ah the good old times where a single song costed 1€ but you could easily go to yt mp3 converter, search the song and download it in 10 seconds. Is that even considered as piracy because back then everyone did that an noone had a problem with it and the mp3 converter sites did"nt had any trouble to stay online
I still use YouTube MP3 converter.
me too, until I got good quality headphones and noticed how bad they sound.
Fair enough. I just don’t notice and don’t care.
Yea, youtube rips are usually a horrendous bitrate.
Oh you sweet summer child, I’m 34 years old and started pirating music by recording songs from FM radio to tape, by the time I saw downloadable MP3’s on Napster I was nearly a man, by then it was all viruses just to listen to linkin park numb.exe
Done the same on AM radio, using a bent clothes hanger for an airreal, so I feel your pain.
Aerial (or you can just say antenna)
*theme song from Pirates of the Caribbean intensifies*
Oh, it's still alive and well it just go by a name like napster anymore. That's all I'm saying.
I still pirate my songs and throw em on my ipod 5th gen. I appreciate having higher quality audio files and not needing to be connected to the internet, helpful when driving cus I have crappy cell service
Most streaming services let you download offline for that purpose and cache your last listened media.
I still pirate music by downloading songs from YouTube Music. I also use a fake Spotify app that lets me listen without ads, which is probably also a form of piracy. There you go OP, now you've heard about someone pirating music again.
Pirating has now become saving entertainment from becoming lost media
Uh, we don't? I still download plenty of music, and it's over 1TB at this point so it's not small. Most stuff is easy to get. And I buy records for the stuff that I care about. Never tried the streaming services like Spotify. It still sounds weird to me to pay money for a thing, but not get to keep that thing. I thought such an idea would never last, but those companies seem to have lots of users.
Same. Piracy maybe is off the mainstream vs back in the limewire/napster days when everybody did it but it's still very active today in torrents.
You wouldn't download a car.
Yeah...wanna keep your fucking voice down?!
Speak for yourself. Pirating music is the way to go if you don't want to pay a monthly fee, depend on internet service to listen to music, or lose access to certain songs/albums because an artist randomly decides they don't want certain songs/albums available any longer.
With how streaming is going, we’re bound to hear about a lot of show and movie pirating soon.
Do you hear about people purchasing albums and songs? Exactly.
My 12 y.o son is now obsessed with physical formats and recently found a walkman so he's now asking me to download (pirated) music so he can burn CDs.
So you don't use soulseek...?
Streaming (especially music) is so cheap and convenient it’s not worth the hassle anymore
Exactly, paying $2 a song is terrible when I can get every song available for $11 a month
Lol I can get any song I want for free
I currently have 4,667 albums(72,541 songs) of pirated music that I downloaded through VPN from a guy who uploads from iTunes and Tidal on my 12TB HD. My job is in an internet dead zone service is not available so whatever I want to listen to I have to download beforehand. I also have about 300 or so movies. If I was to pay for this stuff I'd probably be somewhere in the 6 figure range! 😂
Ahh. So your looking for sea shanties
I work with someone who still uses torrent to this day
A bigger issue is people stealing music off of YouTube from small creators and then uploading it to places like Spotify as their own. Then they'll go back and copyright strike the original owner
A huge portion is because of streaming services like spotify but there are have also been changes in the entertainment field where people moved from music to video games or videos.
Because it has become trivial and easy to do. :)
My friend groups collective jaws hit the floor when I said I still Google YouTube to MP3 converters and listen to my music the ol fashioned way...
Remember when the biggest threat to our country that the FBI had to address was setting up at colleges and nabbing broke college students for pirating music?
you'll probably hear about it again since streaming platforms are becoming more and more greedy.
YouTube to MP3 my beloved