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Music Piracy Is Back, Baby (gizmodo.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by flintheart_glomgold to c/technology

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"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.

Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."

The problem isn't price. People just don't want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: "people want to own their music." Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is "no longer in your library." Screw that.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I can’t ever remember a time that iTunes as a music player wasn’t a shitty product, especially on windows.

[–] The_v 5 points 10 months ago

At my last job all the default company phones where iPhones. So all the windows laptops had iTunes pre-installed by IT on them.

Having refused apple products due to poverty and being forced to use a Mac desktop at a previous job (clusterfuck) I had not seen it in years.

It's one of the the most poorly designed, confusing dumpster fires of a program around. The company of "it just works" my ass.

I swear it was like 4 different uninstalls to get rid of it. Only to restart and see another mysterious program appear. I have gotten malware that was easier to get rid of.