Visits to music piracy websites went up more than 13 percent last year, a new report says. The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
I never stopped but i started buying music too from small artists
I feel like Bandcamp’s biggest fans are prolific pirates with a conscience who just want to see their favorite artists actually get paid.
EDIT: Don’t forget it’s Bandcamp Friday today.
bandcamp sold out
look forward to its demise
But we’ll still need a proper place to support our favorite creators (where the artists actually receive some of the money). I wonder where people will migrate next.
Haven’t heard about that one, thank you for the heads-up.
First impressions:
- From top 10 artists i follow:
- 5/10 have profile and uploaded at least one song on Bandcamp.
- 3/10 have an account on Audius (possibility to donate).
- 1/10 has uploaded at least one song on Audius.
- One MUST upload a profile picture to create an account.
- About 1/3 of proposed artists during account creation have uploaded <5 songs, most seem to be remix and cover artists.
- Didn’t figure out how to search for artists during account creation, ended up choosing 2/3 artists I’ve never heard of.
- Not immediately apparent whether I can download bought music to a lossless format.
- Not sure how to buy album or individual song at first glance.
- LOTS of remixes and covers, not so much original songs (this is both good and bad).
- Nice that you can donate arbitrary amount without buying anything, in case you already got the music from… other places…
- I didn’t find anyplace where “$AUDIO” is explained, how much the artist receives, or what you receive if anything.
Less relevant observations:
- weird pause/play button, sometimes there’s just a loading wheel spinning where it’s supposed to be, not really functional.
- Slightly intrusive, had to disable some plugins (Javascript (obviously it’s playing music) and fingerprinting (cloudflare?)) for the site to load. Not relevant to music, but just a general observation since we’re in the piracy community.
Not much going on by now, but it probably just needs some time to grow and assimilate the likely soon-to-be-migrating Bandcamp user base. I’ll keep an eye on it, and probably revisit it once more artists have migrated to it.
Thanks for the detailed obesrvation! Yeah unfortunately it still has some technical issues and shortcomings but imo this platform has some great potential.
- From top 10 artists i follow:
The economics with the artists haven’t changed. Until they do I’ll still use them to pay artists a living wage.
That’s super based. Pirate whoever’s stuff you want, but small artists usually depend on that income.
I listen to hundreds of small artists. I can’t buy every singles albums they have.
You don’t have to. Buy the ones you think are worth it, attend shows and maybe buy merch. Like we used to do before leechify
Same issue, I don’t have enough money to support everybody
Small artists depend on their income from their 9 to 5 jobs. The music is a bonus
Source - been there
I never stopped either, but i buy vinyl…slowed down since my turntable only spins at 33.3 in special occasions when the spirits shine upon it.
Belt driven? May need new belt.
Its a technics DD. I think its a mk 2 or 3 model. When its off its consistently off. Like it still locks into a speed its just the wrong speed.
I think its an electrical issue and im too afraid to take it apart while it still works sometimes. I probably couldnt fix anyway
That could be simple to fix. I bought a used SL-1500 which had the issue that it’d only spin at 33rpm. 45rpm didn’t work. I opened it up and with some tuner spray I washed the switch (spraying it, switching it back and forth). Now as good as new. These things are built like tanks
Oh yeah that’s way out of my wheelhouse too lol. Hopefully someone online has or posts a video on fixing it (or at least a similar table with the same issue)!
I have never pirated music more in my life as I do now.
I have never purchased as much music as I do now.
Downloading YouTube isn’t piracy lol it’s time shifting.
TiVo has entered the chat.
What’s that?
TiVo was an early digital video recorder that dominated the market for a while. Broadcasters brought lawsuits against the company saying the recording of videos was violating copyright laws, and advertisers hated it because you could skip commercials. TiVo argued in court that they weren’t pirating, but just time shifting the content. Similar arguments were used for people who ripped rented dvds and so on.
They really went hard on VCRs before all of that for the same reasons. Fortunately the time shifting argument was able to be backed by the courts. Otherwise TiVo and so many other formats would’ve basically been banned from the general public being able to have anything nice. Was especially important rulings for forcing most content providers and/or studios into using new ideas and technologies. They are the ones that hold back on everything that could actually make it easier to legally enjoy content.
They make things require so many hoops to go through and like a punishment for wanting to enjoy anything legally. While also making it cost more on their end overall. If these companies were to embrace stuff like torrenting tech, then it would mean less overall costs needed to always be running. We have so many ways of getting stuff from here to there and making sure media is not lost. Copyrights should at best last like 10 years imo. These companies still can’t even be bothered to allow me to buy movies and shows digitally that maybe got a DVD release. So if they won’t give options, then they forfeit the right to claim any “damages” or “lost sales.”
Mfw the kids don’t know about TiVo
It’s in the lexicon, but not the vernacular…
Oh god, I’m old…
The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
This is not piracy. We’ve always been allowed to record e.g. radio and TV for personal use.
I think the RIAA has a different view on that. Huge push backs against recordable cassettes and VHS tapes when they were introduced.
They def would’ve done radio drm if possible
I could be wrong but didn’t a cut from blank tapes go to the industry tp ‘make up for the losses’?
The Netherlands had a tax on blank CDs to “compensate” authors, essentially legalizing piracy (until the EU changed the rules).
Ah that might have been it. I vaguely remember hearing about it at the time.
My dad always got a huge kick out of VHSing NFL games to watch later lol.
I WISH I COULD HEAR YA OVER THESE HERE BANGING TUNES! 🏴☠️
But are they lossless 96kHz+? Only reason I use qobuz.
Did I misread 320bps mp3?
Hopefully it’s Kbps, otherwise…
Ç̶̡̡͙͖̝͙̩͖͈̣͚͓̹͇͓̲͈͔̤̭̳̘̤̖̰̟̱̱͙̓̒̍̿̀͗̏̒͒́̑̇͗̅̈́̈̉͊̂͆̔́͂̓̒̔̎̂̂́̌̀̄͑̀̆̽͒͆̕͝͝͝͝͝͝͝ơ̴̧̢̢̨̫̻̗̲̪͓̫̝̪̬͔͖͙͇̰͉̤̺̲̲̦̱͕̤͍̜̬͈͇͖̯̺̤̱̜͚̗̺͍̠͙̬̋̂̊͆̈́̐̓́̉̃͊̒̈͂̚̕ͅͅm̷̧̡̢̡̛̜̮̗̩̩̫̬̰̳͕̖͓̦̼̘͉̫̖̳͔̻͍̟͕̫̺̦̬̖̹̞̞̫̝̗̥͇̳̯̈́̈̔̎̈́̅͐̽̀͋̄̈́̾̆̄͆̋́̀̆͗̓́̌́̀̓̐̉͂̽̂͑͜͜͝͠͠͝ͅͅͅp̵͍̅̍̾͛͘͠r̵̨̡̡̧̧̢̨̙͔͓̦͕̻̻̣̭̮̝̼̦̹̰̗̬͓̺̤̱̤̖͖̻̙͖͖͔͎͓̮̟̝͈̭̠̮͂̾͊͋͐͊͌̏̇͋͗͜ě̵̡̨̩͖͖̻̗̞̘̮͈̾̓̽͋̎̈́͐́̀̀̈́̿̈̾͐͐̽̔̍̀͗̓̂̐̏̓͐̋̆̒͑͊͒̀̓̆̋͒̌̽̆͐̓̚̕͝͝ͅš̴̢̧̹̩̟͉̠̞̣̺̻͔͎͕̯̳̝̬̳̻̹͚̰̠͍̲̬̺͙̹̘̥͉̣̻̳͉͇̗̦͓̻̱̻͈͎̠̫̌̒̀̀́͒̊̍̋̚͘͜͜ŝ̷̡̨̫̙̯̠͖͔̫̰̯̹͉̱͈͚̩͐̐̈́ͅì̴̢̢̡̢̡̧̲̦͉̝͚̦͍̜͔̭̝͕̩͎͓͖̬͍̹̘͎̲̦̰̹̪̣̺̮͓̘̺̗̥̦̙̞̙͈̤͉͖͍͋̀̅͐͌͒̆̂̍̊̔́̌͛̈́̒̍̓̒̀͑͂̇̚͝͠͝ͅò̷̢̢̝͈̪̹̰͙̲̦͔̞̼̳͚͙̘̦̖̼̺͖͖̹̤̻̪̝͉͙̯̖͔̖͓̩̗̖̪̜̰͍͖̎̈́́͛̋̂̓̏͆̀̑̉̋̿̑̄͑̇̂̊̇̆̄͗̊̇̿́͘͘͜͝͠͝͠͝ņ̶̛̤͓̘̘̻͔̝̥̲͈̖̖͍̲̮͖͙͚͔̭̳͉͓͍́̉̿̉̒̍̈́̒̈́͂̉́̂̐͗̆̄̅̇̽́̇̉̑́͊͋̕͝͠͝ ̶̧͛̾̿̽̓̎͆͗̊̽͝g̶̡̨̢͚͈͔̹͚̳͎̩̝̜̦̖̬͉̙͖̜̪̖̟͚̯͔̟͉̮͖̻̮̺̼͓̰̱͈̪̟͈̺̲̘̅͒̉̈́̊̍́̈́̈͛̿̽́́̐͊̄̍̒̊̉̀̔͐͗̕̚̕͜͜͜͠ͅö̶̢̨̧̡͕͙̳͈̩̱͍̼͇̖̤̹̼́̈̓̓̏͊̅̿̽͝͝͝ͅ ̸̡̢̨̧̢̛̛̩͙̘̼̻̺̯̭̣̫͈͔̥̟̼͙͚̭͎̩͓̻̘̯̩̳̺̤̠̦̦̟̳̦̥̹̟̺͔̮͍̇̎̀́͌͛̂͌͜͝b̸̨̮̝͚͚̯̬̦̲̫̯̝̱̺̬̣̝̠̞̼̜̠̟̟́r̵̛̛̺̠̟̤̙̱̯̭̃̓͌̀̓̋̑͐̈́̿̾̒́̿̿́͊̉̏͆̓̿͌̅̈̐̀̒̐̽̀̕͝͝ͅṛ̸̢̢̡̧̨̛̫͈̲̜͍̥͇̩͉͚̳̝̼̪̬̯̗͍̗͙̦̭̠̻̯̹̮̺̻̳̹̠̟̪͍̬͓̝͙͗̏͌̀͌̈́͒́̐͗͌͗̈́̓̊̄̋̈̐́͌͘͜͜͝͝͠͝
Flac and opus on soulseek?
Tidal? You can even download all your music in lossless flac format
Can’t play music without the tidal client I think
You can extract an API key and use other players that support it like Strawberry.
I forgot that they had an API, but I don’t think you can download music without drm afaik
Yeah see this here is actual proper piracy, none of that youtube ripping BS thank you!
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Honestly the most complete source of high res music is private trackers like redacted. You can download all the stuff from qobuz and bandcamp, every CD rip you can think of in bit perfect quality of and even very good vinyl rips. You basically can download any version ever released from any album.
I know this does not make me look good - but I am a YouTube Premium subscriber. I had Spotify, but they jacked up their family plan rate, and it was only a few bucks cheaper than Premium, then I got the ad-free (without adblockers). I mostly did it to help my kids avoid the toxic ads that are littered into the kid content. The main reason I stick with some of this stuff is for the discovery. Pandora was great, Spotify is ok.
Regardless - the smart playlists, and AI stuff on YouTube music is AWFUL. I cannot put into words how bad it is. Spotify got it right about 1/4-1/2 of the time. YouTube, maybe 1/100. Constantly recommending a country, which I cannot stand. When it isn’t doing country, it recommends hard rock/metal which I also do not listen to. I feel like I need a new way to find music, then I could sever ties with all these trashy subscriptions.
I have started buying vinyl with the digital downloads when I find a great album. I feel better doing it this way. Most of my music is not super big name artists.
Not been my experience. Yt music playlists are really good for me and I’ve discovered a lot of new music through it.
That surprises me, but I suppose it had to work for some listeners or they wouldn’t have gotten it past testing. I have even tried clearing my listen history and starting over - still comes up with country and (going to clarify) ‘metal’ . I like rock and alternative and some forms of pop, as well as a bit of hip hop. cannot fathom why it suggests what it does.
Do you ever thumb down anything, or do you just skip the stuff you don’t like?
Every time. I am not sure it actually changes anything. I have submitted feedback and bug reports to YTM as well. Just generic replies.
I feel you. Feels like the algorithm just does whatever now, on main YouTube and Shorts it is awful as well, constantly showing me the same 5 shorts and recommending me channels I have asked to “not recommend” multiple times. No amount of disliking and clicking “Not Interested” seems to help, at least not for longer than a day.
I dunno, sorry to hear about your experience. I’ve never had a thumb downed song come back up, not ever. And it absolutely affects what kinds of things come up in my radios.
I never thumbs up or down and I find the recommended albums and “Mixed for your” playlists are pretty accurate. I hate that my grandfathered price went up last December tho
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I just listen to playlists that people make or youtube videos of song genres or artists that I like.
Soulseek if you don’t mind data hoarding.
I have yt premium for the same reason. Toddlers have little patience for ads on their Kindle fire, and they get upset when they click one to buy a luxury watch and can’t figure out how to get back to cocomelon.
I actually like the service and feel it’s fairly priced. So I don’t mind paying for it. I stream yt music all day at work.
I still havent found anything can match the experience of finding music from online discussions or list hopping on RYM.
What is rym?
Last fm users with similar taste can be a gold mine
Same boat here. My God it’s unbearable how bad YouTube premium is.
I get good value out of it…
…That being said, I curate my own feed heavily, and still have to use a ton of add-ons to keep from going insane - fuck your shorts YouTube.
It is admittedly terrible.
I used to do lots of piracy back in the days. I am so glad those days are behind me and have not been big on the scene. What would be some sites to avoid to not fall in the trap of being a criminal. I love giving companies all of my money and do not ever want to go back to my old ways. Please help me with a nice list of things to avoid.
You totally don’t want to just learn Linux command line and how to use the youtube-dl/yt-dlp packages through WSL or a Linux distro, that would deny corporations all of your money and be way too convenient. Thankfully it’s not intuitive to learn or there would be so much more piracy!
Yt-dlp is also available on Windows. No reason to spin up wsl or a Linux distro. There are also plenty of yt-dlp apps with GUI for those who don’t want to use a terminal.
Didn’t realize, good to know, thank you!
You want a good paid VPN first. Mullvad is amazing.
VPNs see everything you do, and you pay them for it. I don’t understand how people don’t see the irony there.
they in theory see everything someone does, but in the case of mullvad they have no idea who you are
Could you say how Mullvad differs from ProtonVPN? I have it with my mail subscription and it seems pretty good. I don’t know much about vpns though
haven’t looked into protonvpn much, but it’s more or less a different company providing the same service. I imagine the differences aren’t too significant if you trust both companies
If I cannot buy on Bandcamp or Boomkat or directly from the artist then I sail the high seas, proudly.
I refuse to stream.
I want to counter that buying individual songs and albums would get too expensive compared to streaming, but then I realized I’ve been listening to the same set of playlists in the past few years and the total cost of streaming subscription in those period is probably more than enough to buy those songs.
Heh. I never thought about it this way. I just need to finish downloading my Spotify playlists I guess, then plexamp l the way
My current favorites playlist, accumulated over 15+ years, is 4,235 songs. I don’t think I can afford to buy that.
Looks like you’ve paid 15 years * 12 months / year * $10 / month = $1800
Seems like you’re getting a pretty good deal!
Assuming each of those tracks is about 3.5 min long, that’s about 250 hours of music. Given your numbers they paid an average of 7 bucks per hour of music.
For context, 25 years ago a typical 45 minute album would fetch 15 bucks. And that’s not accounting for inflation adjustment.
I’m sure that’s totally sustainable for those artists…
One, this is just my favorites list, not every album I’ve listened to. And I’ve listened to my playlists on random quite a few times over the years.
Two, I don’t listen to pop music, so the average is probably closer to 4-5 minutes per song. (About 362 hrs of music on the playlist, if you must know.)
Three, you can’t just plug in a yearly rate, convert it to hours, and use it in any meaningful way.
Your first two paragraphs make the picture worse, not better.
As for your last, I’m not writing an economics thesis. It was a quick analysis to illustrate a problem no sane person disputes: streaming services have substantially driven down revenue for artists, to the point that for many it’s genuinely impossible to create their art while making a living wage.
Is it better than piracy? Sure. At least the artists are getting something (well, unless you drop below Spotify’s streaming cutoff, in which case you can get fucked). But it’s still a shitty deal and gives consumers someone else to blame as artists slowly bleed out.
I have 44k songs in 13 years
Weird… yt-dlp -f “ba” url
Never need to use one of those horrible malware laden download sites again…
That’s not how I would get a discography, a non YouTube artist (some international ones), a whole album or lossless though - or am I mistaken?
I think he is talking about this
The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
Makes sense, thanks for pointing it out!
Just FYI, yt-dlp does work with other sites, too. So you can get some pretty decent quality by downloading from bandcamp for example. But not all that what your asking for unfortunately…
2023 was absolutely the year I dove back into music piracy. I started with downloading youtube playlists but the real game changer was soundiiz, which allowed me to import text, m3u, csv, spotify, xspf playlists into qobuz and deezer so i can download whole playlists of FLAC with qobuz-dl and deemix-gui. My collection went from 20,000 to 100,000, downloading playlists from qobuz and deezer, xspf playlists from my remaining lossy music. I used streamripper on a few web radio stations just to get a list of songs to pull down this way. I only bought music for years and years, but that got me a narrow type of collection.
hey im a noob with music stuff, why would this be preferable to soulseek?
It’s not they probably just don’t know about soulseek / nicotine+
It’s just so much better than any other method I have to assume anyone using these overly complicated methods just doesnt know
Just the idea of downloading playlists instead of albums / discographies feels so incredibly icky to me
Nicotine+ is OK, I upload about a tb a month on there and occasionally I find a missing track I can’t find on Deezer, Qobuz or Bandcamp. Turns out other people aren’t just imperfect versions of you.
Soulseek is good for downloading albums and discographies, soundiiz, qobuz-dl and deemix-gui are good for that and also playlists of whatever. It’s also a good way to get FLACs. I download genre mixes, pitchfork’s top albums, it’s a good way to get 80gb of music in a night. It’s taken me 3 months to get that much off Soulseek. Sometimes you want to try out artists without downloading their whole discography.
Man, I never knew there was a way to download my entire spotify playlist.
That’s been the biggest thing tethering me to their service, since they empty you out when you unsubscribe.
I’m getting my playlists out then ditching Spotify. It’s the only service I pay for other than my ISP and VPN.
Soulseek
Or Nicotine+ (a great Soulseek client)
What are the two things?
Share your music library, download directly from other users library. Both are compatible, just different clients.
It’s a direct p2p connection to a single user for downloads. It’s not swarm style like bittorrent. It’s also a great resource for really rare / out of print stuff.
I used it without a vpn for years and never got a single nastygram from my ISP. I think I started with a beta release back around 2000 because I used to be cool like that.
wakes up in 2002
The Napster has you, Neo
Your comment just made me smile. Those were the days.
Wow so we call downloading YouTube piracy?
I guess most content creators are pirates.
Wow, that’s stupid. I consider ripping songs from YouTube to be the modern equivalent of taping songs off the radio. The quality is poor.
Basically, but it’s low hanging fruit. Kids not ripping a 20gb disco from pirate bay at school but they most certainly will download a song off YouTube.
Shoot I remember back in the mid 2000s with my shitty mp3 player ripping music in any class with a computer.
A few notes:
Own music, do not rent.
I’m buying CDs from smaller labels directly. Cheaper than Scamazon sometimes. A couple examples: https://metalblade.indiemerch.com/collections/cds https://metalonmetalrecords.com/shop/
My library has loaned me many CDs over the years. I still have an external CD burner I can connect to my PC. Thank you, library.
Used media stores are awesome. Give them your business.ETA: Corrected link to Metal On Metal records shop.
Give me lidarr but with a smart daily generated playlist focus instead of collecting artist discographies
Yeah. I want a self-hosted Pandora alternative
Plex’s specialty audio client Plexamp is pretty good if you want to make your own “radio stations.” And if you have a Plex Pass, the server does “sonic analysis” of each track so it can do a good job of playing related music in its smart playlists.
Of course, Plex Pass ain’t free, but if you are in it for the long haul the lifetime purchase may be worth it.
(Everyone’s worried about Plex’s future right now but I would be surprised if they killed self-hosting. That’s another topic though.)
What was the service you could upload your own. Playlist and songs and share with friends? Last.fm? Something like that, shit was awesome.
There’s a federated platform called Funkwhale that’s very similar to that.
I think last.fm might still exist. I just used it for the ‘scrobbling’ — stats way before Spotify Wrapped was a thing
Is t it funny how this seems to be happening in every industry possible? And it’s always reported with sUcH sURpRisE!
Like, we are being abused by capitalists. It feels good to steal. Because they can’t stop taking more and more from us, squeezing us harder and harder.
When you present us with ease of use and a reasonable price point, we are happy with the trade. But they need their returns to keep growing, so they keep squeezing us harder. Their investors demand the line go up. So they squeeze us harder. They need to cut costs, so they squeeze us harder.
It never stops. So we turn to theft. Because they’ve literally left us no choice.
To be fair we’ve never had more choice, and music has almost never been more affordable. We used to buy singles for like $10+. Albums for $20+. Now there are several competing streaming services where we can listen to almost unlimited music each month for less than the cost of one album. Hell, YouTube Premium includes unlimited music steaming for free. Being an independent artist has never been easier, and you can find and pay for any music you like directly with millions of your favourite artists all over the world. The industry used to be entirely controlled by large labels. Honestly, I consider the industry far healthier than it used to be.
I pirate movies and shows because they refuse to create a Spotify-like service. Content is fragmented across a dozen services, they’re infested with ads, content quality keeps declining, the interfaces suck, and prices are outpacing inflation. I pay for Spotify because it’s still a good service for a reasonable price.
on top of that music streaming services dont have exclusives like tv/film so you aren’t forced to get multiple
