"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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Last year, over 17 billion visits were made to music piracy websites around the world, first reported by Wired.
We’ve come a long way since Napster, but people are once again using the internet to illegally download their favorite songs in a major way.
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.
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.
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.
Google has hardline policies against copyright infringement in its terms of service but seems to let these music piracy sites scootch by.
The original article contains 379 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
One of the main reasons I still pay for Spotify is because it is very cheap in my country, specially when splitting a family plan. However I noticed that the user experience has gone downhill over the past years.
I remember when I could seamlessly switch playback devices, from my car to my phone, to my computer and them a Chromecast almost instantaneously. Now I’m lucky if my devices recognise each other even if they are on the same network.
And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable because it tries yo grab online content first before checking whatever is downloaded. Time and time again I have to put my phone on aeroplane mode just for the main menu to load, it is so frustrating and this didn’t happen some 5-6 years ago
All of those things are 100% legitimate criticisms, I want to add that the UX experience has become more and more horrible. They’ve regressed terribly in most aspects of their apps, wether PC or Mobile. Absolutely unbelievable, this is the thing I see from Google search where marketing takes over from engineering/customer needs/market reality/I don’t know what. Stop shoving shit into the services. You beat piracy for a minute, you can keep that lead, you’re slowly losing it.
Honestly, if this was any other product this would be unacceptable. It’d be like all books went back to only black and white, all movies were only 480p, all music was only mono.
They keep trying to reinvent the library UI, as does Apple. But neither will ever be able to top the way the iOS music app was organized, pre-Apple-music. Every attempt to innovate has been worse
The fact that they changed the default library view from playlists to a random mix of playlist, artists, albums and podcasts without the option to choose just one category is baffling. I’m all for user options, but not by taking user choice away
I’m paying for a family plan, for my family and two friends. The day this plan goes away, or they actively prevent sharing like this, I’m done paying for music. All alternative services are considerably more expensive, and also have a much more limited library. My favorite artists get less than pennies on a dollar from this anyway. No wonder they have to sell 85$ hoodies at concerts
And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable
This is an issue I’ve been noticing across more and more apps and operating systems. It seems like there’s no developers out there even willing to consider how their software operates under non-ideal conditions.
It’s not developers, it’s management. We know how to make it better, but that’s extra complexity. Meaning extra developer time (higher cost and longer turn around) to better support a small fraction of normal use, added on every time that part of the system is changed
It’s more profitable and faster to say “forget those users” now that they’re a smaller and smaller part of the customer base
Never left, baby! Although ripping from YouTube should be a last resort. And even then, use a proper tool like Yt-dlp.
Qobuz … check it out
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.
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.
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.
I’m continually astonished how I thought grunt-work IT jobs would fade away as my generation and younger aged into the workforce becoming ever more technologically literate. Then the iPhone my rich friends bought in highschool became the new standard for interfaces.
Now I’m helping people several years younger and much older than me navigate the machines they use for their jobs.
Yeah funny, right? I thought the same thing. It’d just be the older people and the younger would be more technically literate. But companies started abstracting a lot of things now and it’s both the older and younger that struggle with IT literacy.
I think thin clients with VDIs will be the future and both make this stuff even more abstracted for users and also bring in the age of subscribing to workstations. At work, it’ll start by just plopping stuff in your documents folder or personal folder or whatever and/or the desktop. They’ll live on a network share and the VDIs will revert to snapshots to be ‘fresh’ every time but the users won’t really know that. Their stuff will be plopped down like it is local every time and ‘follow’ them from VDI to VDI.
Then I think this will push to the home market and instead of spending a lot of money up front, you just get a cheap thin client, probably eventually a small little box with USB ports and mini-DP or whatever. You’ll then pay for the tiers you want. Want just a workstation to check mail on and do ‘web apps’ type stuff? $5 with a whole 5GB of personal space or whatever. Then there’ll be “productivity tiers” with pretty much the same stuff but more CPU, RAM and a small amount of vGPU allocated and you can install programs with something like 500 GB of personal space. There’ll be a “pro” version with more of everything and a “gamer” version with a lot of everything probably costing something like $30/$40 a month starting out per device.
And of course eventually, you’ll be getting ads to “keep the prices increases down” and then that won’t matter anymore and you’ll be given the option to pay for ad-free add-ons, time on the workstation and so-on. Prices will raise nearly every year. Thin clients will turn into all-in-ones and be basically tablets where you buy based on screen sizes and probably able to wireless connect more displays.
Technology in computing will become more abstracted and IT’s specialists will shrink once again because actual tech literacy will decrease.
I think the only reason it hasn’t started yet is due to Internet throughput availability but that’s quickly changing.
A boring dystopia indeed.
Thats the exact reason I just donated my old pc to my sisters kids as a “practice computer”, encouraging them to go rummaging around.
What woke me up was all these 20-somethings in our uni having trouble using computers. Damn, how can you get through our secondary education in our country and not know how to use a normal Windows pc?
I’m convinced primary education as a system is engineered to teach you how to be a patriotic, service-consuming, rentable employee first and foremost. (Humans As A Service?) Secondary education just levels that up so you require more expensive proprietary tool licenses for the potential privilege of doing more complicated jobs. (Funny how all the critical-thinking specialties are derided for not making tons and tons of money.)
Thank God for the good teachers that inspired us in spite of all the odds against us (and them).
It also blows my mind how much schools and universities are struggling for funding, but take the bait and use hyper-proprietary black-box commercial software for everything from OSs to coursework. Professors outside of CompSci will be shocked and confused to see a student using Linux, and courses love to use stupid niche features of Microsoft Office so your LibreOffice work won’t be good enough.
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.
We start with Tanenbaum’s Modern Operating Systems. 🥲
Partially yeah, but atleast Google Drive and Onedrive still have folders to sort and share more than one file, which sometimes gets the kids to actually use those features.
What also killed the basic understanding of PCs, is the way in which everything is now done “in-Browser”. No longer do you need to open Word to edit a document, nor do you need to open Photoshop. It’s all done in the browser, and if you want to simply “save” a document, well, just don’t close the tab and you’re golden.
Yeah the real takeaway is it’s not necessarily the kids fault that they don’t know these systems deeply as much as it is the fault of OS and app developers taking the path of least resistance and building everything around the stupidest users and their mistakes. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for the growth and development of Power Users when everything is locked down and obfuscated to protect the user from themselves.
When I was a kid there was an air of “anyone can do this” and I had friends who were only 15 were getting hired to build whole websites for $20 an hour when minimum wage was $5.15 an hour. Now there’s an air of “only professionals who are trained can do this” which doesn’t exactly make kids feel like they can just jump in feet first.
I remember my kids crying the first time they lost their school assignments using Microsoft Office at home. They’d only ever used Google docs and no one taught them to save. They also had no idea what the save icon is or represented (floppy disk).
As a cultured collector of memes, one of the most annoying things ever is downloading images to my phone from the internet with filenames like “124fdgklhhr24.jpeg” and if I don’t separately navigate to it, hold down to rename it, move it manually to where I want it for later, it just falls into the endless “Download” folder.
I think this behavior is encouraged precisely so people don’t understand directories, fill up their phones with random nonsense, and then happily subscribe to “cloud storage” when it’s constantly pushed at them.
I don’t normally use a phone to search for memes, but have a similar situation with game screenshots. But I solve it by just occasionally going through folders and sorting them instead of doing so on the spot. Adding metadata to MP3s, however, happens just like what you described, just because I don’t like leaving tracks without album art.
I made a concerted effort one evening to go into my downloads folder on my PC, rename all the nameless garbage filenames, and then actually move and sort them into my pictures/documents/etc folders.
Was a huge pain in the ass, but it saved me so much effort looking for stuff later on down the line. Also, changing Firefox’s default download setting to prompt me for a name and location every time certainly helped.
This makes me sad. I had so much fun growing up learning about compression and encoding, ripping, tagging, spectral analysis. Listening to 24/96 vinyl FLACs on my parents old stereo with my pinky up. Hanging out with a bunch of 40-year olds on IRC. Good times, man
Hanging out with a bunch of 40-year olds on IRC.
Heh, now we’re the 40-olds on IRC.
Indeed! I introduced my kids to this through the example of our in-house Plex server, and it worked really well.
First they “get it” because Plex works like the streaming services they’re used to and they think “oh neat mom can do that too.”
Then they like it more because I show them how its streaming we can control ourselves - streaming home movies and pics really impresses this upon them.
And then they see that there’s no magic to where the content comes from – it’s a digital file on Plex just as it is on Netflix.
Voila. Free thinkers for life.
Get your kids a real computer. Show them how to move files around. Show your 7 year old how to manually install a Minecraft skin. Show your teens how to turn an mp3 into a ringtone. Show them the actual practical uses for understanding how a computer works, and what a “file” actually is. You’re giving them tools to save money, make better decisions, and actually control their experience.
