"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> my kids
> no one taught them
That was kind of your job m8
My RAM is screaming.
Just download more.
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.
The eternal September.
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.
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
Heh, now we’re the 40-olds on IRC.
I am Gen Z, and my whole social life is on IRC. So weird to be around so many people who were online since before my parents even had a computer…