Websites for illegally downloaded music are seeing a sharp rise, and YouTube plays a massive role in enabling modern-day piracy.

"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.

  • ShepherdPie@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Agreed. I’m a frequent sailor of the high seas with TV and movies but I actually pay for a Spotify family plan because it’s so convenient and I love the features they have like being able to use my phone app to cast music to any available nearby source or having a party and allowing multiple people to input songs to a shared playlist. I do encounter frequent bugs with all their updates but that hasn’t risen above the level of mild annoyance yet.

    Pirating music is such a pain in the ass these days since there is no standard naming conventions like with TV and movies and there can be multiple sources for the same song (single, album, compilation album, web rip, etc) so even tools like Lidarr don’t make it easy and most public/private torrent trackers are pretty sparse when it comes to music outside of the most mainstream of mainstream albums.