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Music Piracy Is Back, Baby (gizmodo.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

341 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"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 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 153 points 9 months ago (41 children)

First you're gonna have to teach them how file systems work since they've spent a life saving everything to Google Drive or OneDrive and using a search term to find their files.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That brief, magical moment in time of about 2 decades in the "home computer revolution" of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, where you had to be an actual geek to be able to effectively use a computer are gone. That's how we all got trained. By being forced to learn if we wanted to do anything. Now, it's one-button instant gratification.