I have ~100 users downloaded ~1000 of my files in the last week alone. Music piracy is still alive and kicking. I encourage everyone to download and install SoulseekQT/Nicotine+/Seeker-Android and share whatever kind of music you have for everybody to download. Let’s bring back music piracy!
Is it fair to call them alternatives? They’re just alternative front-ends to YouTube. I use Revanced along with Youtube Premium so I can use SponsorBlock along with not having ads
I’d say so. Considering both are free. And it’s not YouTube. Yes it’s using the front ends to YouTube, but I only need to use one app. Jerboa would be considered an alternative to Connect, would it not?
I just don’t see a point either in paying YouTube subscription to use extra features and not have ads, when New Pipe and Freetube both do that without extra steps.
I guess that makes sense. I’ve just always liked the YouTube Mobile UI and don’t see a reason to move away from it. Premium Family in my country is so cheap I pay less than half a US dollar every month for it
Understandable. And that’s not a bad deal, pretty cheap. YouTube UI is not bad at all either. I preferred New Pipe because I didn’t have to pay for it lol
You are very welcome! I use it with aria2, it’s opcional but recommended, in case you don’t want it you can strip the --external-downloader and -args part :)
Interesting. so, let me get this: how are you combining the yt-dl downloader with aria2? Like, you use yt-dl for getting the opus/ripping the vid, and feeding that to aria2 to actually download?
Not at all. For a lot of people, hi-fi audio is basically indistinguishable from “regular” audio, and you also need things like a DAC and good headphones to hear it. Bluetooth, as an example, can’t even play hi-fi audio at its full quality.
YouTube has audio in Opus format@~150kbit/s. Opus is a much better format than MP3. Almost all audio is completely transparent at that bitrate, where with MP3s, there are cases where audio is not transparent without using non standard >320kbit/s bitrates (a lot of content is transparent @320kbits/s though).
Now, sites/tools like the one you mentioned take the Opus (or AAC) file/stream from YouTube, and lossily re-encodes it again, probably to a file that is larger than the original, with at best the same quality, but probably worse quality. You obviously can’t get better output than the input in lossy compression.
So, the disk space argument is weird if you can play Opus/AAC (should be playable on every device nowadays).
This is the valid part for why you shouldn’t use YT-to-MP3 converters.
But there are also invalid reasons why people will tell you it’s shit:
They think all MP3s sound like the shit ones from a decade (or two, or three) ago, using low bitrates and/or created with shit encoders. In reality, not all MP3s sound like shit, but vigilance is needed at every encoding step, as is the case with all lossy conversions.
They are conflating the quality of the conversion, with the quality of the source, and think the bad quality of some user-uploaded YouTube content is due to the lossy conversion done by YouTube, and/or the MP3 converter re-encoding from YouTube. Content uploaded by the copyright holders (assuming basic competence) does not have that problem at all.
Soulseek is an old-style P2P network. It has nothing to do with my parent comment. I personally don’t use it (see my other comments in this thread).
If you want to grab a non-reencoded file from YouTube, you can use a tool like yt-dlp
# see what formats are available for a YT vid
yt-dlp -F <youtube-url>
# format 251 is usually available as the highest quality Opus format
yt-dlp -f 251 <youtube-url>
That last command should grab you an Opus stream in WEBM format.
If you’re not a CLI guy, others should be able to give you a good GUI recommendation.
Well my collection of FLACs are about 500GB. That’s about 16k songs with a total runtime of 52 days. I don’t think that’s too bad.
If you are really short on disk space I’d still rather download FLAC and transcode to opus @128kbps or maybe less yourself. It’s transparent and even smaller than mp3. I use that to fit everything on my phone which takes about 70GB.
I mostly listen to jazz, blues and classical. I use rutracker which has everything I want and in lossless formats. Mp3s too but I’m more interested in lossless.
With Spotify, both you and artists are still screwed.
If you have Spotify free you will be interrupted by ads breaking all immersion in your albums. Artists will get paid barely anything.
If you have Spotify Premium, you will have to pay money, and most of that money won’t even go towards the artists. The artists will get paid a little more then barely anything.
I absolutely do where I can but when a lot of stuff gets released within the scene I am into on a dead inferior format (vinyl) exclusively then I am absolutely going to pirate that shit if I can.
Have you heard of “Navidrome”? you can be your own Spotify. It also supports transcoding. For instance, if you are on a phone connected to data, you can set the bitrate to 128kpbs to save some data.
I waffle on whether I should use my VPN or not with it.
Support your favourite artists directly. That wasn’t an option in the Napster days.
I like to have the older versions of songs before they “Remaster” and change them and if they stop selling everything but the remasters, it’s time to fire it up.
Where can you legitimately buy music these days? I’ll be happy to pay if the artist gets their fair share. I used to buy from Amazon but that has gone completely to shit recently. Like they really don’t want you to buy stuff from them any more. And I cannot bring myself to give a cent to Spotify when they paid 100 million to Joe fucking Rogan.
Very fair point - Spotify does shaft a lot of their artists from what I’ve heard. As the other user mentioned, bandcamp gets brought up a lot. Try reachin out to some bands over email maybe and see what they say!
I buy music on bandcamp/directly from artists all the time. I just dislike streaming services, as I always want to have the files, and the money artists get from them is abbyssmal anyway.
Especially for smaller/indie artists I wait for Bandcamp Fridays so all of the money goes straight to them (Fuck Epic). Buying even one album for $5-10 is more than they would earn from thousands of Spotify listens from you.
Spotify probably is the only algorithm I use that just gives me stuff I would enjoy, other services try to push bs I don’t want. While I use soulseek and buy from Bandcamp when possible I still use Spotify for discovery.
Guess what, it’s not only the small musicians who suffer, it’s everyone who falls into the “small” category.
Speaking as an IT professional, who has worked at smaller agencies, where new technologies arise and make our work more efficient. Do you think our bosses let us enjoy the free time that we gained from these advancing technologies? They don’t! Instead they put even more workload onto us, up to the point where we burn out even faster than before. It’s huge difference wirking on one task for five days (bc of limitations) vs. working on 10 tasks during the same period.
Spotify sucks, but the whole music industry has sucked like that for literally a hundred years - A very very few artists make bank, about 5% make a little, everyone else makes zero.
If you aren’t going to shows and buying from the merch table, or buying directly from bancamp etc you aren’t supporting artists.That’s where the majority of their money comes from.
That’s fine, just know that this has already been looked in to and reported on with rough numbers on what artists earn and artists themselves talking about it, and you have extremely rose tinted glasses on how all of that actually plays out and the amount of money musicians earn from streaming.
I’ll be sticking to spotify personally out of convenience, and the fact that I’m paying for a family plan but to be fair paying that money directly to the artists you like will be much more effective while not supporting platforms that pay them very little for their work.
If you want though, using spotify adblock has been quite effective in my experiance. That way you have the convenience and you don’t pay spotify shit
Spotify is literally the only subscription service that I haven’t cut ties with, because as much as I hate its horrific data harvesting, I’m running it on GrapheneOS with legitimately next to zero privileges in a sandbox, and for what I’m paying, I truly do feel I’m getting my money’s worth. I use it every single day, and while I have all my music stored locally (as in legitimately scraped and downloaded, not ‘downloaded’), I only did so as a precaution just in case Spotify decides to fuck things up and I also choose to cancel it as well.
If you’re up for another recommendation, I suggest trying out Innertune [Link to Github repo]. It has been discussed on the GrapheneOS Discussion Forum as an alternative to Spotify for music streaming. Also, Innertune’s dev released an update recently (2 days ago from the time of this post) that includes a major UI rewrite and other improvements to the app [Link to latest stable release].
Spent the day recreating my Spotify playlists on Innertune. Thank you SO much for this recommendation, it is exactly what I’ve been looking for in an alternative. There’s even a heap of shit available that I can’t find on Spotify.
Hell I wouldn’t be pirating movies and shows if publishers allowed me to pay lol. Unlike Netflix, Prime Video etc, Spotify really gives me pretty much all music
You know, I don’t even comprehend what that means. Quality? you mean 720p?
As long as I can hear it, that’s fine to me, I’m not an audiophile so I really can’t tell the difference and I have cheap $20 headphones and $4 earphones, idk man.
Same concept as 720p vs 1080p but not exactly. Audio can be compressed in the same way that video can; certain flavour gets lost for the sake of smaller file size. In video, that means loss of colour spectrum, visuals aren’t as sharp and even artifacting when pushed too far. In audio that translates to loss of range so certain instruments can completely disappear from a song, other instruments aren’t as crisp and so on. Depending on those $20 headphones, you might be able to make out a difference. The earphones, it’s much less likely. There are some $20 earphones such as KBEars which are far better than they have any right to be and make being an audiophile more accessible, if it ever tickles your fancy.
Two simple facts of good audio:
1: Good audio stays good so no need to worry about age so long as equipment hasn’t been abused.
2: You can only spend so much before you get diminishing returns.
Youtube compresses the beejeezus out of everything and has a low bitrate for the sake of keeping cost down because of the insane amount of people it provides content to. The low bitrate is why you see artifacting on videos (that’s when it gets weirdly pixelated without having dropped a quality setting). All streaming platforms do it to some extent or another for the same reason but some have what is called “lossless” audio on their paid tiers. Ones that I know of are Tidal and Deezer. I’ve heard Spotify offers it too on their HIFI service but I don’t know the details of it.
Fuck spotify. Unlike video which poses some infrastructure challenges, musical files are tiny and bandwidth costs are ridiculous. Internet should allow us to give money to the artists directly, not to some greedy evil corp that makes billions without giving artist their fair share. Bandcamp is the closest we have to that.
Related: https://neurodifferent.me/@clowncollege/109994297731928004
I’m not advocating piracy as a way to support artists, but a way to fight against the big corps/streaming platforms/the system that just take the majority of revenue for themselves while hurting both the consumers and the creators. As I replied to other comments, I try to look for ways to directly support artists individually whenever I can.
Tbh, why pirate music when I can listen to a new album within 5 seconds of its release? I don’t have to wait for downloads, don’t have to deal with mistaken metadata, I don’t have to worry about physical storage sizes.
I fully support piracy for basically everything, but we should count ourselves lucky that music streaming went the way it did and not the way movie and series streaming has gone.
If a band is popular, albums get ripped/downloaded from streaming services and put on private music trackers within hours of release.
If you don’t have space, like recommendations from streaming services, or their app, or not wanting to catalog your music (or setup services that do that), then I would recommend a streaming application.
It’s a service problem as always. I want to listen to all the songs in my library on shuffle and if your service can’t offer that, I’ll use AIMP with local files.
My go to for the past year has been using Qobuz free trials and qbdl but they’ve recently stopped allowing disposable cards for unlimited free trials. Guess I’ll have to change tactics.
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I share a pretty good size collection of music and fonts on Soulseek.
I just pay for Youtube Premium and I have REDacted, Orpheus and Jpopsuki for anything specific that’s not on YouTube
New Pipe and Freetube are great free alternatives to YouTube.
Is it fair to call them alternatives? They’re just alternative front-ends to YouTube. I use Revanced along with Youtube Premium so I can use SponsorBlock along with not having ads
I’d say so. Considering both are free. And it’s not YouTube. Yes it’s using the front ends to YouTube, but I only need to use one app. Jerboa would be considered an alternative to Connect, would it not?
I just don’t see a point either in paying YouTube subscription to use extra features and not have ads, when New Pipe and Freetube both do that without extra steps.
I guess that makes sense. I’ve just always liked the YouTube Mobile UI and don’t see a reason to move away from it. Premium Family in my country is so cheap I pay less than half a US dollar every month for it
@yoichi @4onTheFloor
I use YouTube revanced simply because of sponsorblock and return youtube dislike.
Those features don’t come with premium.
Understandable. And that’s not a bad deal, pretty cheap. YouTube UI is not bad at all either. I preferred New Pipe because I didn’t have to pay for it lol
You guys don’t just download stuff with yt2mp3?
yt-dlp is the way my friend, I got a command to download a specific playlist of mine every once in a while:
alias youtube-dl-playlist-guardar="yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args '-c -j 3 -x 3 -s 3 -k 1M' --ignore-errors --continue --audio-format mp3 'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=_______'"Thank you for this! I’ll put it in a bash script and roll with it!
You are very welcome! I use it with aria2, it’s opcional but recommended, in case you don’t want it you can strip the --external-downloader and -args part :)
Interesting. so, let me get this: how are you combining the yt-dl downloader with aria2? Like, you use yt-dl for getting the opus/ripping the vid, and feeding that to aria2 to actually download?
That’s exactly it, I use aria2 pretty much for parallel downloads (also to be able to resume them).
Is yt-dl limited when it comes to downloading?
You don’t get high quality mp3s from that.
I use deemix for 320kbps, I originally had FLAC but as almost 100% of my listening is remote from my server I found 320 to be great.
I’m no Hi-Fi listener, but YT rips suck.
Is there something wrong with my ear that I can’t distinguish between music quality levels?
Not at all. For a lot of people, hi-fi audio is basically indistinguishable from “regular” audio, and you also need things like a DAC and good headphones to hear it. Bluetooth, as an example, can’t even play hi-fi audio at its full quality.
I mean, in that case, ig I’ll just stick to yt2mp3😂😎
There is definitely something wrong with your ears if you can’t differentiate between lossless and low quality YouTube rips.
Do you guys just listen to see how smooth it is?
Like, is there a difference between these 2: https://youtu.be/m-8n9YyfBB8 https://youtu.be/0lzRS5sIjm4
I’m pretty sure they can, they just don’t know it. It’s extremely obvious.
Keeping FLAC is such a hassle, it’s not even worth.
No, I enjoy my ears not bleeding from shit quality.
Bruh. I’ve been listening to that stuff for way too long, idk what good quality is anymore.
But, what about disk space?
YouTube has audio in Opus format@~150kbit/s. Opus is a much better format than MP3. Almost all audio is completely transparent at that bitrate, where with MP3s, there are cases where audio is not transparent without using non standard >320kbit/s bitrates (a lot of content is transparent @320kbits/s though).
Now, sites/tools like the one you mentioned take the Opus (or AAC) file/stream from YouTube, and lossily re-encodes it again, probably to a file that is larger than the original, with at best the same quality, but probably worse quality. You obviously can’t get better output than the input in lossy compression.
So, the disk space argument is weird if you can play Opus/AAC (should be playable on every device nowadays).
This is the valid part for why you shouldn’t use YT-to-MP3 converters.
But there are also invalid reasons why people will tell you it’s shit:
Interesting. So, if that’s the case, how do I get soulseek?
Soulseek is an old-style P2P network. It has nothing to do with my parent comment. I personally don’t use it (see my other comments in this thread).
If you want to grab a non-reencoded file from YouTube, you can use a tool like yt-dlp
That last command should grab you an Opus stream in WEBM format.
If you’re not a CLI guy, others should be able to give you a good GUI recommendation.
Ahh, ok. Thank you.
CLI all the way, bro!
FLAC isn’t too bad on disc space.
Well my collection of FLACs are about 500GB. That’s about 16k songs with a total runtime of 52 days. I don’t think that’s too bad.
If you are really short on disk space I’d still rather download FLAC and transcode to opus @128kbps or maybe less yourself. It’s transparent and even smaller than mp3. I use that to fit everything on my phone which takes about 70GB.
that’s not bad at all actually.
I mostly listen to jazz, blues and classical. I use rutracker which has everything I want and in lossless formats. Mp3s too but I’m more interested in lossless.
I pirate everything I favorite on Spotify just to be able to continue to listen to it ad-free if I have a lapse in payment.
Support your favourite artists directly. That wasn’t an option in the Napster days.
I do when I can afford to, but you can’t really buy every song you listen to, can you?
Have you heard about Spotify?
Spotify doesn’t do shit for the artists.
More than pirating
Yeah I’m sure artists enjoy their 0.003 cents per stream a lot.
More than 0.000 cents. ;-)
With Spotify, both you and artists are still screwed.
If you have Spotify free you will be interrupted by ads breaking all immersion in your albums. Artists will get paid barely anything.
If you have Spotify Premium, you will have to pay money, and most of that money won’t even go towards the artists. The artists will get paid a little more then barely anything.
I absolutely do where I can but when a lot of stuff gets released within the scene I am into on a dead inferior format (vinyl) exclusively then I am absolutely going to pirate that shit if I can.
Heyyyy it’s my fellow dubstep enjoyer! Yeah those vinyl exclusive is such a pain.
Bandcamp is an excellent option, I often try to get releases from their when possible.
using Spotify is much easier… until they delete a few tracks from your playlist.
i feel this.
though have gigabytes of pirated music in my hd, but i cant transfer that all on my phone that’s wy i have spotify
Have you heard of “Navidrome”? you can be your own Spotify. It also supports transcoding. For instance, if you are on a phone connected to data, you can set the bitrate to 128kpbs to save some data.
No, I haven’t heard of it. I’ll look it up. Thanks.
I waffle on whether I should use my VPN or not with it.
I like to have the older versions of songs before they “Remaster” and change them and if they stop selling everything but the remasters, it’s time to fire it up.
It use P2P network so I don’t think you need VPN for it…? IDK I’m not an expert.
Well torrenting is also P2P but people generally recommend VPNs for that.
Yea but with torrenting it’s multiple peers you are connected to. Soulseek only connects you 1-1 so it’s generally lots safer.
Ah, I see.
Soulseek is great for finding and sharing music. I would strongly recommend Nicotine+ over the old SoulseekQt
I really don’t feel the need to. I pay fair prices for my music and get it how I want it when I want it where I want it.
Im not pirating to shaft people out of money
Where can you legitimately buy music these days? I’ll be happy to pay if the artist gets their fair share. I used to buy from Amazon but that has gone completely to shit recently. Like they really don’t want you to buy stuff from them any more. And I cannot bring myself to give a cent to Spotify when they paid 100 million to Joe fucking Rogan.
Bandcamp my friend!
Very fair point - Spotify does shaft a lot of their artists from what I’ve heard. As the other user mentioned, bandcamp gets brought up a lot. Try reachin out to some bands over email maybe and see what they say!
I generally run Spotify with the XManager version on Android and SpotX on PC. Works great.
Why do I care who they paid money to to have some random podcast on their service?
Bandcamp (indie)
Qobuz, 7digital, artists website directly (general stuff)
NativeDSD (audiophile)
Yep. That’s why I pay Spotify but stopped paying netflix. Fuck this need to subscribe to countless streaming services.
I buy music on bandcamp/directly from artists all the time. I just dislike streaming services, as I always want to have the files, and the money artists get from them is abbyssmal anyway.
This is the way.
Especially for smaller/indie artists I wait for Bandcamp Fridays so all of the money goes straight to them (Fuck Epic). Buying even one album for $5-10 is more than they would earn from thousands of Spotify listens from you.
Same here, while I do have the time to chase around pirated movies/games/software, I want my music to just be there with me without all the hassle.
Spotify’s algorithm is just great!
Spotify probably is the only algorithm I use that just gives me stuff I would enjoy, other services try to push bs I don’t want. While I use soulseek and buy from Bandcamp when possible I still use Spotify for discovery.
Spotify shareholders say thanks. The artists, not so much. Keep your spotify money to go to concerts or buy albums on bandcamp. Spotify is the worst.
Guess what, it’s not only the small musicians who suffer, it’s everyone who falls into the “small” category.
Speaking as an IT professional, who has worked at smaller agencies, where new technologies arise and make our work more efficient. Do you think our bosses let us enjoy the free time that we gained from these advancing technologies? They don’t! Instead they put even more workload onto us, up to the point where we burn out even faster than before. It’s huge difference wirking on one task for five days (bc of limitations) vs. working on 10 tasks during the same period.
Spotify sucks, but the whole music industry has sucked like that for literally a hundred years - A very very few artists make bank, about 5% make a little, everyone else makes zero.
Oh indeed, I dont’t think it was better before. But technology should be about making things better, shouldn’t it?
If you aren’t going to shows and buying from the merch table, or buying directly from bancamp etc you aren’t supporting artists.That’s where the majority of their money comes from.
I am supporting the artist to some extent. Stealing Spotify content would be adding insult to injury imo
If you primarily consume content through Spotify or streaming you are supporting office with fractions of a penny per stream.
With millions if not billions of streams everyday 24/7/365
Agree to disagree on this one
That’s fine, just know that this has already been looked in to and reported on with rough numbers on what artists earn and artists themselves talking about it, and you have extremely rose tinted glasses on how all of that actually plays out and the amount of money musicians earn from streaming.
If you have any sources handy for these claims I’d love to see some real figures
I’ll be sticking to spotify personally out of convenience, and the fact that I’m paying for a family plan but to be fair paying that money directly to the artists you like will be much more effective while not supporting platforms that pay them very little for their work.
If you want though, using spotify adblock has been quite effective in my experiance. That way you have the convenience and you don’t pay spotify shit
this
Spotify is literally the only subscription service that I haven’t cut ties with, because as much as I hate its horrific data harvesting, I’m running it on GrapheneOS with legitimately next to zero privileges in a sandbox, and for what I’m paying, I truly do feel I’m getting my money’s worth. I use it every single day, and while I have all my music stored locally (as in legitimately scraped and downloaded, not ‘downloaded’), I only did so as a precaution just in case Spotify decides to fuck things up and I also choose to cancel it as well.
Try vimusic, from what i’ve seen its just spotify without the data harvesting (and the api’s taken from youtube music, shouldn’t change much though)
That actually sounds fantastic, cheers for the recommendation!
If you’re up for another recommendation, I suggest trying out Innertune [Link to Github repo]. It has been discussed on the GrapheneOS Discussion Forum as an alternative to Spotify for music streaming. Also, Innertune’s dev released an update recently (2 days ago from the time of this post) that includes a major UI rewrite and other improvements to the app [Link to latest stable release].
Spent the day recreating my Spotify playlists on Innertune. Thank you SO much for this recommendation, it is exactly what I’ve been looking for in an alternative. There’s even a heap of shit available that I can’t find on Spotify.
@Onii-Chan
Try https://funkwhale.audio/
@Rahid @chuuqovn @stevedidWHAT @sorrybookbroke
I wouldnt count on it working for long. vfsfitvnm hasn’t touched the repo since december with several PRs left untouched.
Seems abandoned to me. https://github.com/vfsfitvnm/ViMusic
Aye, no problem!
Hell I wouldn’t be pirating movies and shows if publishers allowed me to pay lol. Unlike Netflix, Prime Video etc, Spotify really gives me pretty much all music
I’m really happy with just downloading directly from youtube
I guess that will do if the kind of music you listen to doesn’t need to be high quality.
You know, I don’t even comprehend what that means. Quality? you mean 720p?
As long as I can hear it, that’s fine to me, I’m not an audiophile so I really can’t tell the difference and I have cheap $20 headphones and $4 earphones, idk man.
Same concept as 720p vs 1080p but not exactly. Audio can be compressed in the same way that video can; certain flavour gets lost for the sake of smaller file size. In video, that means loss of colour spectrum, visuals aren’t as sharp and even artifacting when pushed too far. In audio that translates to loss of range so certain instruments can completely disappear from a song, other instruments aren’t as crisp and so on. Depending on those $20 headphones, you might be able to make out a difference. The earphones, it’s much less likely. There are some $20 earphones such as KBEars which are far better than they have any right to be and make being an audiophile more accessible, if it ever tickles your fancy.
Two simple facts of good audio: 1: Good audio stays good so no need to worry about age so long as equipment hasn’t been abused. 2: You can only spend so much before you get diminishing returns.
And what is the difference between YouTube and other platforms?
Does YouTube “compress” the audio more or something so it loses detail?
Youtube compresses the beejeezus out of everything and has a low bitrate for the sake of keeping cost down because of the insane amount of people it provides content to. The low bitrate is why you see artifacting on videos (that’s when it gets weirdly pixelated without having dropped a quality setting). All streaming platforms do it to some extent or another for the same reason but some have what is called “lossless” audio on their paid tiers. Ones that I know of are Tidal and Deezer. I’ve heard Spotify offers it too on their HIFI service but I don’t know the details of it.
That’s good to know, I’ll try out those other services.
Spotify is well worth the price. I think I cost them more with my near constant streaming of musics.
The thing is, you barely support the artists you’re listening to when you use spotify.
Fuck spotify. Unlike video which poses some infrastructure challenges, musical files are tiny and bandwidth costs are ridiculous. Internet should allow us to give money to the artists directly, not to some greedy evil corp that makes billions without giving artist their fair share. Bandcamp is the closest we have to that. Related: https://neurodifferent.me/@clowncollege/109994297731928004
Interesting feedback
There’s no way to directly support artists unless you’re buying merch from their specific site or at a concert
I don’t want to be a dick but you just posted that we should pirate music more which for some reason supports the artists more…?
I’m not advocating piracy as a way to support artists, but a way to fight against the big corps/streaming platforms/the system that just take the majority of revenue for themselves while hurting both the consumers and the creators. As I replied to other comments, I try to look for ways to directly support artists individually whenever I can.
Maybe I’ll publish my 3 TB FLAC collection soon.
Maybe also, but 1/4 of it is live torrents already so 🤠
Yessir
Music piracy isn’t dead but it’s a shell of what it was. You can see even here most people would rather just stream
Soulseek needs more users though as the proportion of locked file users keeps increasing
Yeah fuck those traders and scammers. Soulseek isn’t created for that shit.
Convenience can win over piracy. Music and videogames proved that
Tbh, why pirate music when I can listen to a new album within 5 seconds of its release? I don’t have to wait for downloads, don’t have to deal with mistaken metadata, I don’t have to worry about physical storage sizes.
I fully support piracy for basically everything, but we should count ourselves lucky that music streaming went the way it did and not the way movie and series streaming has gone.
You don’t own the music so it can be edited/taken away as desired by the DSP
Also me personally very little of what I listen to is on DSPs and a lot isn’t even on YouTube but I recognize this as an extreme outlier
If a band is popular, albums get ripped/downloaded from streaming services and put on private music trackers within hours of release.
If you don’t have space, like recommendations from streaming services, or their app, or not wanting to catalog your music (or setup services that do that), then I would recommend a streaming application.
It’s a service problem as always. I want to listen to all the songs in my library on shuffle and if your service can’t offer that, I’ll use AIMP with local files.
spoiler
Always open for suggestions though
My go to for the past year has been using Qobuz free trials and qbdl but they’ve recently stopped allowing disposable cards for unlimited free trials. Guess I’ll have to change tactics.