Music Piracy Is Back, Baby
Music Piracy Is Back, Baby
Websites for illegally downloaded music are seeing a sharp rise, and YouTube plays a massive role in enabling modern-day piracy.
"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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They don't want a bad experience so they use shady websites to download music in the shittiest possibile quality? I don't buy it.
People are just not able to afford what they want, that's it
shady websites
There are no innocents here. There' s a case to be made that nothing is more shady for consumers than the mass data harvesting, profiling, brokering and content shaping that flows from using Facebook, Twitter, Amazon or TikTok
shittiest possible quality
You're doing it wrong
The quality is much better than you think. Most people also don't have the acute hearing of audio technologist to determine if a song is 192kbps or FLAC without hearing them back-to-back repeatedly or would care much. It's also why terrestrial radio is still a thing. People tend to either want full control of their library or just want something to listen to all without having to deal with an unfriendly interface.
People tend to respond to whether something is getting better or worse, more than whether it's objectively good.
Like virtually any community software, the piracy experience is getting better, but usually quite slowly.
But thanks to needless DRM, price hikes, and skimping on mobile app development, streaming services are actually somehow getting worse.