Visits to music piracy websites went up more than 13 percent last year, a new report says. The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
I never stopped but i started buying music too from small artists
I feel like Bandcamp’s biggest fans are prolific pirates with a conscience who just want to see their favorite artists actually get paid.
EDIT: Don’t forget it’s Bandcamp Friday today.
bandcamp sold out
look forward to its demise
But we’ll still need a proper place to support our favorite creators (where the artists actually receive some of the money). I wonder where people will migrate next.
Haven’t heard about that one, thank you for the heads-up.
First impressions:
- From top 10 artists i follow:
- 5/10 have profile and uploaded at least one song on Bandcamp.
- 3/10 have an account on Audius (possibility to donate).
- 1/10 has uploaded at least one song on Audius.
- One MUST upload a profile picture to create an account.
- About 1/3 of proposed artists during account creation have uploaded <5 songs, most seem to be remix and cover artists.
- Didn’t figure out how to search for artists during account creation, ended up choosing 2/3 artists I’ve never heard of.
- Not immediately apparent whether I can download bought music to a lossless format.
- Not sure how to buy album or individual song at first glance.
- LOTS of remixes and covers, not so much original songs (this is both good and bad).
- Nice that you can donate arbitrary amount without buying anything, in case you already got the music from… other places…
- I didn’t find anyplace where “$AUDIO” is explained, how much the artist receives, or what you receive if anything.
Less relevant observations:
- weird pause/play button, sometimes there’s just a loading wheel spinning where it’s supposed to be, not really functional.
- Slightly intrusive, had to disable some plugins (Javascript (obviously it’s playing music) and fingerprinting (cloudflare?)) for the site to load. Not relevant to music, but just a general observation since we’re in the piracy community.
Not much going on by now, but it probably just needs some time to grow and assimilate the likely soon-to-be-migrating Bandcamp user base. I’ll keep an eye on it, and probably revisit it once more artists have migrated to it.
- From top 10 artists i follow:
That’s super based. Pirate whoever’s stuff you want, but small artists usually depend on that income.
A few notes:
Own music, do not rent.
I’m buying CDs from smaller labels directly. Cheaper than Scamazon sometimes. A couple examples: https://metalblade.indiemerch.com/collections/cds https://metalonmetalrecords.com/shop/
My library has loaned me many CDs over the years. I still have an external CD burner I can connect to my PC. Thank you, library.
Used media stores are awesome. Give them your business.ETA: Corrected link to Metal On Metal records shop.
I know this does not make me look good - but I am a YouTube Premium subscriber. I had Spotify, but they jacked up their family plan rate, and it was only a few bucks cheaper than Premium, then I got the ad-free (without adblockers). I mostly did it to help my kids avoid the toxic ads that are littered into the kid content. The main reason I stick with some of this stuff is for the discovery. Pandora was great, Spotify is ok.
Regardless - the smart playlists, and AI stuff on YouTube music is AWFUL. I cannot put into words how bad it is. Spotify got it right about 1/4-1/2 of the time. YouTube, maybe 1/100. Constantly recommending a country, which I cannot stand. When it isn’t doing country, it recommends hard rock/metal which I also do not listen to. I feel like I need a new way to find music, then I could sever ties with all these trashy subscriptions.
I have started buying vinyl with the digital downloads when I find a great album. I feel better doing it this way. Most of my music is not super big name artists.
If I cannot buy on Bandcamp or Boomkat or directly from the artist then I sail the high seas, proudly.
I refuse to stream.
I want to counter that buying individual songs and albums would get too expensive compared to streaming, but then I realized I’ve been listening to the same set of playlists in the past few years and the total cost of streaming subscription in those period is probably more than enough to buy those songs.
My current favorites playlist, accumulated over 15+ years, is 4,235 songs. I don’t think I can afford to buy that.
Looks like you’ve paid 15 years * 12 months / year * $10 / month = $1800
Seems like you’re getting a pretty good deal!
Assuming each of those tracks is about 3.5 min long, that’s about 250 hours of music. Given your numbers they paid an average of 7 bucks per hour of music.
For context, 25 years ago a typical 45 minute album would fetch 15 bucks. And that’s not accounting for inflation adjustment.
I’m sure that’s totally sustainable for those artists…
One, this is just my favorites list, not every album I’ve listened to. And I’ve listened to my playlists on random quite a few times over the years.
Two, I don’t listen to pop music, so the average is probably closer to 4-5 minutes per song. (About 362 hrs of music on the playlist, if you must know.)
Three, you can’t just plug in a yearly rate, convert it to hours, and use it in any meaningful way.
Your first two paragraphs make the picture worse, not better.
As for your last, I’m not writing an economics thesis. It was a quick analysis to illustrate a problem no sane person disputes: streaming services have substantially driven down revenue for artists, to the point that for many it’s genuinely impossible to create their art while making a living wage.
Is it better than piracy? Sure. At least the artists are getting something (well, unless you drop below Spotify’s streaming cutoff, in which case you can get fucked). But it’s still a shitty deal and gives consumers someone else to blame as artists slowly bleed out.
Soulseek
Or Nicotine+ (a great Soulseek client)
What are the two things?
Share your music library, download directly from other users library. Both are compatible, just different clients.
It’s a direct p2p connection to a single user for downloads. It’s not swarm style like bittorrent. It’s also a great resource for really rare / out of print stuff.
I used it without a vpn for years and never got a single nastygram from my ISP. I think I started with a beta release back around 2000 because I used to be cool like that.
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.
You want a good paid VPN first. Mullvad is amazing.
VPNs see everything you do, and you pay them for it. I don’t understand how people don’t see the irony there.
they in theory see everything someone does, but in the case of mullvad they have no idea who you are
Could you say how Mullvad differs from ProtonVPN? I have it with my mail subscription and it seems pretty good. I don’t know much about vpns though
haven’t looked into protonvpn much, but it’s more or less a different company providing the same service. I imagine the differences aren’t too significant if you trust both companies
if there was a way to get spotify with at least CD quality and the artists getting the rest of the money that spotify doesn’t already take, more people would probably pay for it.
i am in a spotify family plan already, but i get that paying 12 bucks a month for 320 kbit/s and getting the artist fucked over is too much.
it’s a thing of morals for many people, like with steam. steam doesn’t actively fuck both the developer and the user over, they just take a 30% cut. you could argue about if that’s too much, but i’m fine with it.
Weird… yt-dlp -f “ba” url
Never need to use one of those horrible malware laden download sites again…
Downloading YouTube isn’t piracy lol it’s time shifting.
The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
This is not piracy. We’ve always been allowed to record e.g. radio and TV for personal use.
I think the RIAA has a different view on that. Huge push backs against recordable cassettes and VHS tapes when they were introduced.
Soulseek for life! There should be a documentary about this because…. how? How has this been able to go this strong for so long? One of the first installs on any new OS I spin up. And when it comes to supporting the artists? Live shows and merch, when possible.
Wow so we call downloading YouTube piracy?
I guess most content creators are pirates.
2023 was absolutely the year I dove back into music piracy. I started with downloading youtube playlists but the real game changer was soundiiz, which allowed me to import text, m3u, csv, spotify, xspf playlists into qobuz and deezer so i can download whole playlists of FLAC with qobuz-dl and deemix-gui. My collection went from 20,000 to 100,000, downloading playlists from qobuz and deezer, xspf playlists from my remaining lossy music. I used streamripper on a few web radio stations just to get a list of songs to pull down this way. I only bought music for years and years, but that got me a narrow type of collection.
hey im a noob with music stuff, why would this be preferable to soulseek?
It’s not they probably just don’t know about soulseek / nicotine+
It’s just so much better than any other method I have to assume anyone using these overly complicated methods just doesnt know
Just the idea of downloading playlists instead of albums / discographies feels so incredibly icky to me
Why doesn’t youtube use DRM the way other Big Tech sites do?
Because it’ll stop working on a not-insignificant portion of their userbases devices.
Give me lidarr but with a smart daily generated playlist focus instead of collecting artist discographies
Yeah. I want a self-hosted Pandora alternative
Plex’s specialty audio client Plexamp is pretty good if you want to make your own “radio stations.” And if you have a Plex Pass, the server does “sonic analysis” of each track so it can do a good job of playing related music in its smart playlists.
Of course, Plex Pass ain’t free, but if you are in it for the long haul the lifetime purchase may be worth it.
(Everyone’s worried about Plex’s future right now but I would be surprised if they killed self-hosting. That’s another topic though.)
What was the service you could upload your own. Playlist and songs and share with friends? Last.fm? Something like that, shit was awesome.
There’s a federated platform called Funkwhale that’s very similar to that.
