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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] 285 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (65 children)

If y'all got kids, don't forget to teach them how MP3's and actual media files work, I see many young people nowadays don't even realize you can locally store your own music in a portable device-agnostic format. They're beginning to get used to the idea of not owning anything.

[–] flintheart_glomgold 44 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Indeed! I introduced my kids to this through the example of our in-house Plex server, and it worked really well.

First they "get it" because Plex works like the streaming services they're used to and they think "oh neat mom can do that too."

Then they like it more because I show them how its streaming we can control ourselves - streaming home movies and pics really impresses this upon them.

And then they see that there's no magic to where the content comes from -- it's a digital file on Plex just as it is on Netflix.

Voila. Free thinkers for life.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

If I ever do have children, this is one of the things I want to teach them.

Hopefully, it turns into an important memory for them.

Learning about technology from their parents' and how it isn't magic.

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