"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.

  • JuanR@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • Smokeydope@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Please for the love of god avoid buying a real mp3 player with a metal shell, become a linux nerd, install yt-dlp, and run this command in the terminal yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 -o "%(playlist_index)02d - %(title)s.%(ext)s" MUSIC-PLAYLIST-URL-LINK It also totally doesn’t work on other music websites like bandcamp.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      9 months ago

      I personally carefully avoid ed2k, gnutella and soulseek, just like in the olden days. But you may also want to avoid YouTube with youtube-dl or YT search in QMPlay2.

      • 31337@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        Thankfully, my ISP informs me if someone on my network shares movies on Bittorent without a VPN. Do ISPs typically do the same for music on the ed2k and gnutella networks?

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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          9 months ago

          I don’t know whether they detect it (technically no problem), but these are not widely used anymore. In USA maybe, but I live in Russia.

    • Forklift Certified@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The some of the old music sites are still there. But I would avoid torrentgalaxy.to it has curated weekly albums of top playlists from Spotify, tiktok, etc that have all the new stuff updated every week, for your local playback displeasure. Only uncool people play locally stored music, all the cool kids stream. Do not go there.

    • mhague@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      youtube-dl -F url

      That will list formats; get one of the audio only formats

      youtube-dl -f 140 url

      Bonus is that the script works for lots of sites. It can get movies from tubitv for example

      • ZiemekZ@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        -f 140 is AAC, please don’t do that. -f 251 is better since it’s Opus, the best versatile lossy codec so far.