"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.
No, they’ll think the corporate dystopia they’ve grown up into is normal. They don’t know that corporations tried and failed to stop people from owning and using VCRs. They think it’s their duty to sit and watch ads from their favorite creators like passive cows.
It’s an outlook developed by watching the peers I grew up around and the things that they accepted and didn’t question because it was just “normal” by the time they were children.
For example, a lot of kids in my generation grew up with Cable Television, but by the time I was a kid, cable had lost it’s initial “we’re better than broadcast because we don’t have ads” and people just accepted the ads. Most people never knew there was a “time before” when there weren’t any ads, and because of their lack of knowledge of it ever being any different, they never had reason to question why cable television needed ads now when previously it had not.
Once things become a societal “norm,” the people who grow up around that norm tend not to question it simply because they have never known anything else. It’s not meant to be an indictment on the youth as much as the obvious “you can’t know what you don’t know.” If they don’t ever know it was ever any different, how can they expected to do anything but accept how things are? Especially when the adults around them don’t kick up a fuss and keep paying for Netflix when they keep getting screwed. They are learning that this is normal behavior and that it’s normal to get screwed by a company and just keep paying for it.
Wait, did the pitch for cable TV at one point really include that there were no ads?
It is, but it’s also true. Kids in schools have problem saving files in correct format in the correct places. Almost like your average grandma. Most kids dont even have computer, they do everything on their phones.
I mean, I get it, why bother with PCs or laptops, these things are heavy and too complicated. You can take, edit and share pictures from your phone, browse web, listen to music, chat with friends.
But IT literacy goes to hell.
