"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.
i’m a big fan of music streaming, the way i listen to music only really works with a discovery algorithm. but the way streaming services and labels have been unnecesarily fucking over the customer as well as the artist is getting ridiculous.
qobuzz could be a possible alternative, with them providing FLACs and/or CD quality tracks to purchase and download, but also having a subscription plan. they say more money is going to the artist. the only thing missing is the algorithm.
go ahead, tell me i’m “corrupted by capitalism” or whatever. this is the way i want to do it. there’s no point in building up a collection worth hundreds and thousands of euros now, apart from FLACs being gigantic files and taking up all of the storage on my phone. plus i would cut myself off from being able to discover good artists the way i’m used to.
the way i listen to music only really works with a discovery algorithm
People have been listening to music without an algorithm for hundreds of years. Even digitally, algorithms for discovery are fairly new. What’s so different about how you listen to music?
i have more than 10 playlists for different genres and occasions, the ““smart”” shuffle helps pad those out since otherwise the playlist would be like 20 songs long.
the recommended songs at the bottom are often pretty bad, but for every 10 shitty songs there’s one worth adding to the list.
occasionally i also listen to full albums, often only from bands i really really like.
i get that spotify influenced how i do it, and i don’t have a problem if people do it differently. but an algorithm is a major plus for any music platform (from my perspective)
i probably won’t start pirating music, but if spotify continues to enshittify itself i’m gonna have to look for alternatives.
I get it. I really enjoyed Spotify’s recommendations, but I had to quit as part of my “fuck streaming” pledge. My questions were genuine, I hope they didn’t come off as antagonistic.
I switched to Plex / Plexamp, and I have to say whatever algorithm they’ve implemented has greatly helped me discovery things in my local library. It does a great job at “vibe mixing”, by that I mean you’re not going to shuffle from rock to classical to electronic. It’s even nailed some transitions that were both beat- and keymatched.
Might be more than you’re willing to undertake, but it allowed me to drop the Spotify sub.
I’m not even able to put music on my watch unless it’s a mp3, so paying to stream music is out of the question.
It’s taken longer than I expected, but more and more people are realising streaming services as a model are not good, by any measure.
They cost more in the long run, you are made powerless as a consumer (perpetually increasing costs and removing your favourite content), and you can’t even get ‘everything at the convenience of your fingertips’ cause the market is fragmented and they remove things periodically. You own nothing and pay more. Absolutely stupid model that deserves to die.
Yeah, that is true for video steaming, but not music. Spotify has almost every song on the planet, and with a family account it’s very cheap. Unless you only listen to a very small music library it’s vastly cheaper than buying all the music
Their android app is total garbage and frustrates me to no end. I’m seriously considering just going back to pirating my music just because I hate spotifys music app…
Spotify has almost every song on the planet
Until a contract negotiation with UMG goes south and they lose half the catalog overnight. See what’s happening on tiktok right now for a good example of this.
I understand the convenience draw, but I’m not a fan of continually paying for content that can disappear at any moment.
Well if that happens, then there’s always piracy. But until then. I’ll use my family account. Because I don’t have the resources to download all the songs that my other 4 family member likes.
Or, since I cannot download each and every song they like, I’ll turn to another form of piracy. Revanced yt music.
I do use streaming (although for free) to find new tracks. But I cannot imagine having my PRIMARY collection there, mostly because it’s so locked-down. You can’t use it on a dumb MP3 player, you can’t use a player application of your choice, etc.
I’m surprised everyone didn’t realize it right from the beginning before things got to this point. Better late then never, I - suppose.
My theory is that it’s just the fact that there is always a new generation of people around the corner who haven’t learned the lesson of how capitalists work. Therefore, there is always a market vulnerable to being swindled. They can keep using the same tactics, there’s always a delay in people figuring out the grift, then by the time they do there’s a new group of suckers ready to fall for it.
“The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience.”
The experience using a paid service is way better than pirating, let’s be honest here. The problem for some people is price.
deleted by creator
For music, I think yes. For other forms of media, not so much.
Music is getting worse though. Spotify is bloating all searches with stuff you don’t want. The “Artist top songs” is rarely the most popular songs and is limited to 10 song. In the beginning you could list all the songs from an artist and sort it on “Plays”.
Spotify needs to connect to network to play songs, and there is no option to not play on metered network. So I sometime would play songs that Spotify mysteriously deleted from downloads, and lose a month of data.
Now, I mostly get my music from bandcamp and only listen to couple classical album on spotify, since there is no good place to buy them.
The day that Spotify pull a Netflix on their family plan is the day I leave Spotify.
I’m willing to say that this is probably true for most, but not for all.
If you run your own music streaming server, in some cases it’s better than streaming services.
This isn’t sour grapes either. I had Google music for a couple of years, and I currently have a ninety day trial of Spotify unlimited…these services might be better for most, but if you care about the things I do they’re worse.
I haven’t really even used my Spotify trial because my streaming setup is so much better in a variety of ways.
All that said, I’m an album listener, an older cat, and borderline music obsessive. I’m likely a dying breed. But I find music streaming services much worse.
I honestly think it’s much easier to have a catalog of music than, for instance, TV shows. I listen to the same albums over and over again, but I’m not nearly as keen on rewatching the same shows or watching the same movie more than even once.
I would not be so sure about that.
If I download music, I have access to a larger music library, the ability to change the pitch, speed, and equalizer of the music, and the freedom to choose the player that I want. Can’t do that with a streaming service.
I try to support artists if I can still download the music in a DRM-free file. Just this week I made a purchase, and late last year I bought an album and a midi file to support two artists.
And this is for personal listening. I make sure to follow royalty laws and attribute the artist when the music ends up in something I publish to the Internet.
For anyone who’s a music enthusiast, having the files makes more sense. Poweramp is a way better experience than Spotify or YT Music. I loved being able to set the EQ on an album or song basis.
That said, YT Music comes with YT premium, and I’m lazy, so I do that for now. I also haven’t got much of a commute right now, so I don’t listen to music near as much.
PowerAmp is the only thing I found that could replace Google Music in my heart!
Yeah… How many times does the lesson need to be learned? The worse deal the consumer is given, the more likely they’ll just pirate instead. This is in both price and usability/frustration level.
I still remember when Sirius/xm was actually popular. Ad free good quality radio where you could tune in to specialized stuff for a good price.You could generally get it for around $6/7 per mo/device. At the time I was going to buy a new stereo head just for better navigation of my flash drive with my music (I was already off of burned discs). But Sirius/xm was so cheap and it had an added bonus of some discovery and stuff that why bother? I’ll just primarily use that!
The prices raised a couple of bucks and commercials for their top 10 channels but they are very quick.
Then prices raised and it was commercials for every channel and so on. I cancelled when it was $18/mo/device with commercials everywhere long enough that it wasn’t as bad but close enough to being as bad as radio, except I’m paying for it. My friends told me "yeah but you just call them when your time is up and they’ll always make it like $12/mo/device for the first year and sometimes if you complain after it runs out they’ll do it the second year too.
But why bother when by then you had great alternatives like Pandora and then Spotify and so-on. You get the same experience as Sirius/xm but it is free. Don’t want ads? It’s just a few bucks a month!
Now streaming music is going down the same road that every popular service of everything always does. Worse experience and ad revenue. The price point for the pay options rise and won’t atop. It won’t be but maybe a decade until you can’t pay for no ads. You’ll pay to be able to pick exactly what you want to play and to decrease ad time I’m sure.
In the background as the deal gets worse and there is no alternative offering a good deal with a good consumer experience then piracy rises. It always does. Companies will always complain piracy hurts them and the artists but all they have to do is be more reasonable.
In the background as the deal gets worse and there is no alternative offering a good deal with a good consumer experience then piracy rises. It always does. Companies will always complain piracy hurts them and the artists but all they have to do is be more reasonable.
100% this
deleted by creator
Family sharing is the way to go for me.
I fucking love my selfhosted flac collection! 250gb and growing
I wish we had Google Play Music again. It really was an excellent app and had flawless suggestions for me I always enjoyed, and truly the most intuitive mixes. Google is evil of course, but honestly one of the best features was the listing of bands playing near you in the upcoming weeks, I went to so many shows because I’d try their music via the GPM suggestions.
I listen to the Henry Rollins show on KCRW to try to get into new music but despite my appreciation of him I find his music tastes repetitive. How many weeks in a row can I listen to the Jesus and Mary Chain?
I used to use Google Play music back in the day. It was also nice to upload your own music and then be able to stream it anywhere.
Now I use Plex with Plexamp which works almost as well.
And to buy music!
Plex is not great for privacy or ownership these days. Jellyfin or Kodi are much better.
Does their music player compare to Plexamp at all?
Best alternative to plexamp I’ve found is Symfonium. It supports plex, jellyfin, subsonic and possibly others.
Thanks!
Oh my god you’ve literally just recommended me a dream app. PlexAmp has so many annoying usability issues and symfonium seems to have solved all of them, I can’t thank you enough.
But it is a good example of inconvenience. One day they decided well, we’re closing shop. And that made it pretty clear for users that they didn’t own the music.
Google lets you download your music files that you previously uploaded. The method isn’t intuitive but it’s not difficult. I don’t know if the option is still offered but I would guess it is since they still have YouTube Music.
I used to have a big CD collection. Ripped it all off the CDs and uploaded the files to GPM. I was able to download it all.
It is still available. My collection of some 20,000 digital vinyl tracks are streamable for me. Google is evil, but that is nice.
I bought a lot of music through Artist Hub. It kind of was the best of both worlds for me, I’d try an album streaming, love it and buy it.
I never liked suggestions/radios on any streaming platform - GPM, Apple, Deezer, Spotify, they’re all shit.
I use streaming platforms solely for checking out new music that picked my interest on sites like RYM, albumoftheyear, anydecentmusic, Quietus, Picthfork, etc. If I like what I hear, I acquire it either on Bandcamp or on Soulseek and into Plex it goes.
Sad about what happened to Pitchfork.
what happened to pitchfork?
Have you used Jamendo radios?
The fun part is, before it was Google play music it was another service by another company that I can’t even remember now. Google bought it, then fiddled with it for a few years before shit canning it.
I miss the original app, it was wonderful for just throwing music on based on your mood.
I remember that app! Can’t think of the name.
I just always figured they canned it once they bought YouTube and started YouTube Music. I never got into Google Play music, but I use YouTube music, and it don’t do everything I am seeing Google play music did.
I think what you’re describing is Songza and it was great as a service. 8Tracks has been pretty decent as well.
I wish we had Google Play Music again.
I liked the fact that I could take my Google survey money and buy albums on that service. It’s pretty irksome that they cancelled it.
I wish we had Google Play Music again.
Not exactly Google Music, but I recently started working on a Funkwhale instance where people can have up to 250GB of space for their personal music collection and where I am planning to have a store front for musicians who’d like to sell/promote their own songs as well. 29€/year if you go to https://communick.com/packages/access. Sounds reasonable?
I don’t listen to nearly as much music these days, YouTube music is so ass, I really miss gpm. YouTube can’t even get notifications right, like I get a notification that a band I like released a new album or something so I tap it… and it just fuckin opens the home page of the app??? EVERY SINGLE TIME. How do you fuck up even the most basic feature of the notifications!!!
The “radio” always brings me back to the same shit that’s playing on the actual radio, regardless of me playing the radio based off of bluegrass or fuckin clown techno idfk it will play imagine dragons and blinding lights shit eventually, guaranteed. The algorithms are actually dumpster fires.
Probably around 60% of the roughly 20,000 songs I uploaded (I think that was the limit) didn’t get transferred over and are just gone. Thanks Google.
Also even though the notifications don’t work, it is nice to know when your favorite artists release something new. Gpm was great about this, ytm seems to think I want the hottest vevo shit
Also who the fuck ever thought it was a good idea to use the music video versions for songs instead of the song version, when we’re in the music app, should be fired into the sun. They’re probably the same person that originally synced your video and music “histories,” skewing your YouTube algorithm entirely so your homepage would suggest nothing but music videos
Seriously, what a shitshow of an app, but that’s where most of Google is headed these days
I still use it because I will not give Spotify money, and Apple Music is SUPER Caucasian and repetitive, I still like YTM the best, but it is way shitty. I hate the video function.
I still use YTM (don’t judge me 😛) and it actually defaults to the audio version instead of the video version. They just give you an option to switch to video if you wanted to.
Also who the fuck ever thought it was a good idea to use the music video versions for songs instead of the song version, when we’re in the music app, should be fired into the sun.
Agreed, this is infuriating. I’m in the music app, searching for a piece of music by it’s exact name and artist, and I know that it’s available on YouTube Music.
Here’s a lyric video uploaded to some random asshole’s YouTube channel. Or maybe you want this awful cover version from this other asshole on YouTube. Oh, my mistake, you wanted it as performed by the actual band? That you included in your search? How about this phone camera recording of a live show.
It’s compete garbage. Made even worse when you’re searching by voice command while driving and can’t just quickly correct bad results by looking through the list yourself.
For me, it’s neither the price nor the quality of apps (idgaf, it plays music in the background). The thing that pushes me towards piracy is the same as for movies and TV shows: disappearing content. Because of content licensing deals, every piece of media is temporary on a service. I do rewatch movies from time to time and it’s infuriating if it’s gone (or rather would be, if I was still paying for any streaming service). This is especially true for music. My Spotify favorites list has a huge percentage of greyed out entries (and I’m pretty sure there are things that were outright deleted).
I doubt spotify’s small price increase mattered as much as the big increase in overall living expenses. If the choice is between paying for services like spotify or paying rent, then it is a lot easier to pirate music than housing.
I don’t know, waiting for the day your favorite tracker goes down unexpectedly and either never comes back or is replaced by an FBI seizure warning is at least kind of like waiting for the day the cops finally show up to kick you out of the building you have been squatting in.
I agree conceptually. Experientially, I would say losing housing (legally occupied or not) is far more dramatic and life changing than being inconvenienced over the loss of a torrent tracker.
Source: In my drinking, I’ve found myself homeless (due to choices I made, no doubt). Wildly, losing access to torrents (which I’ve also done) is somewhat less consequential than being on the streets.
The problem
isn’tis price.“People just don’t want to pay for a bad their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to Own their music (reuters.com).” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun.”Fixed the post for you. I am not trying to be an ass and stated this in a previous post but people’s push to piracy is almost always to obtain what is believed to be what is becoming or is unobtainable. Price is and availability is almost always the driving force of piracy because price plays a part in availability.
I was all on board with the post until I saw, “people just don’t want to pay for a bad software that is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is the user-hostile design.” This to me is so far from the truth that I like to call statements like this the Lemmy or FOSS mentality that I see on here and it isn’t meant to be insulting. I have defined it that way because I think Lemmy users get just as wrapped up in their own opinions and personal belief system that they forget they are also in a bubble and their opinions steer far off course to justify some personal idea or hope about what is actually pushing “mainstream” people to make choices that just aren’t why average consumers are making choices.
People will 100% buy and use bad products user experience does only go so far though. I would say Spotify is as popular as it is because of its design as well as Apple Music. The features and design layout are what make their music services easier to use for most consumers that and they are popular services by word of mouth and are commonly used on the most popular devices because they are pre installed. Why have 5 music apps on an iPhone when Apple makes a music app that is already there. Point being design isn’t the issue. The issue is competition, choice, and price. There really aren’t a whole lot of options, popularity wise, outside of Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube music. These users aren’t flocking to open source apps they are going straight to Piracy by ripping the content from YouTube directly and it is absolutely almost in direct relation with the increase in price increase. The “mainstream” user which I call the average consumer isn’t worried about Spotify’s design they want it to just function and play their music and be available and popular by design.
If there was soulseek on an iOS app I think I’d go fully back to piracy. Never gotten over Apple Music ruining all my playlists, just want to go back to basics
Piracy creates an endless loop of artists taking advances and eventually losing royalties. That’s just what I’ve seen growing up in the music /film/ TV industry and briefly working in both. Screw labels and Spotify but go support artists and actually buy stuff.
Seems like advances exited long before piracy was a significant thing. Though I’m sure piracy does contribute to the imbalance like you describe.
I don’t mind paying artists for work that I like. Hell, I’ve bought much of my collection 3 times now: LP, cassette, CD. I never bought MP3s - just ripped them myself. All my CDs are in storage, which is dark, cool, and dry.
I’m pretty sure the distributors kept most of that money.
And that’s where the bulk of the problem lies: the power brokers that have always tried to control production and distribution.
And that goes back a long way. I know I’m being repetitive, but Payola has been around a long time, and rather indicative of the state of media production. It’s not like these ideas left just because someone got busted… They just learned new ways to accomplish the same goals of controlling the media marketplace without getting caught.
Artists have never made much on sales anyway. Go to shows.
“It’s my understanding that I had over 80 million streams on Spotify this year, So, if I’m doing the math right that means I earned $12. Enough to get myself a nice sandwich at a restaurant. So, from the bottom of my heart, thanks for your support, and thanks for the sandwich.” - Weird Al
No they don’t. I don’t have a problem with let me listen to this to see if I should buy it. That’s totally understandable. People who just do it to get everything free is what I have a problem with. If you really like the work find a way to support them because those numbers open doors to bigger opportunities.
Totally agree on the show’s and I’ve seen some big name artists at small shows randomly. Also some really good merchandise.
Go to shows.
Ticketmaster has kicked in the doors of the chat, and secured every exit with burly goons.
This is still making them a significant amount of money regardless of Ticketmaster.
Fucking dirtbags. They were recently forced to lump all their fees into the ticket price so their new tactic is to tack on fake taxes when purchasing tickets. I recently bought some for a festival through a ticketmaster subsidiary (to a venue owned by ticketmaster) and they charged me $33 in taxes on the purchase. The thing is, I live in Oregon where we don’t have any sales tax. I wrote both them and the promoter asking about it and they gave me some bullshit excuse about them being “state and local taxes” (venue is in rural Washington) even though that’s not how it works when it comes to purchases nor are there any local taxes in that area. The rate they charged me doesn’t even match the WA sales tax rate.
buy swag from their web presence if you are old and your ears can’t do live shows no more.
Noise attenuating earbuds are a game changer, haven’t gone home with ringing ears since I started using them.
Those are called earplugs.
Screw labels and Spotify but go support artists and actually buy stuff.
This is the way.
I’m kinda waiting for this bad boy to come out so I can put into it all the songs I legally acquired all these years…
