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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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[–] RememberTheApollo_ 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)

But YT audio quality is pretty shit most of the time. There’s plenty of sites that will strip the audio for you from a video and IIRC a couple browser plugins, too. I guess if you really want the song you’ll have it, but it’s not going to sound great.

[–] linearchaos 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

We used to record shit off broadcast radio. DJ's talking up to the post, tiny little bit of static in the mix. Maybe even a crossfade into the next song if you're unlucky. We'd put it in the mixtapes and give copies of it to our friends. This copies would have about a 5 to 10% further degradation unless you have professional equipment.

There's plenty of people out there that'll enjoy relatively bad copies of music as long as it's not too complicated and free.

[–] buddascrayon 4 points 10 months ago

You are saying things that audiophiles just cannot comprehend. The fact that most people just don't give a shit that the audio quality of a recording is sub par is mind boggling to them.

[–] RememberTheApollo_ 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

A clear radio broadcast recorded on a decent analog cassette is pretty damn good compared to a ripped mp3 with a shitty bit rate, warbling and hissing.

I, too, recorded off the radio, or off CDs, onto mixtapes, not that this history has anything to do with what we’re talking about here.

I’m not an audiophile, but I can’t stand low-quality mp3 rips. If people are happy with those rips, great, but that doesn’t make them good copies which is the point of what I said. The fact that people settle for the low quality may just as well be a result of their inability, lack of knowledge, or just laziness on how to procure better copies rather than actually being happy with the quality.

[–] sebinspace 3 points 10 months ago

I got ChatGPT to write a Python script that lets me choose between stripping the audio or taking the whole video from the highest quality of that video available.

[–] NickwithaC 2 points 10 months ago

It all sounds the same coming out of someone's shitty Bluetooth speaker.