this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
1087 points (98.1% liked)

Technology

63082 readers
2410 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

"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.

(page 5) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I have a slightly different suggestion.

Inflation is crap and the first thing to go are subscriptions that raise their prices when people are already hurting. If you want retention, keep your prices locked when users are having bad times and you're raking in record profits.

I think curation is great too, but I also think age plays a lot into individual views. A bunch of the younger guys at work were saying how they didn't want playlists and they didn't want to listen to an album, they just wanted to hit a button that knew their tastes musically and would give them a mix of familiar likes and new discoveries. The proceeded to describe a radio station to me, sans commercials. They were hot on all the music streaming and though I was crazy for wanting to spend time sorting through music.

Looking at a Spotify by age graph, the boomers dig it (because it's easy?), Gen-Z and the Younger Millennials dig it, Gen X has less than half the uptake of the other groups.

We were mixing our own tapes in our tweens and teens. We wired ourselves to find music, copy it and play it in the specific order we want.

or at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I wanna know what is so different from my experience with Spotify. Because as far as enshittification goes, it hasn't really changed since I first began using it almost a decade ago aside from the price going up a little last year. I mean, I constantly see people saying it has ads even with premium but I have not once ever heard a single ad for anything, even for Spotify's own services on the platform, that was put there by Spotify and not simply already in a podcast that would be there from any source of listening to said podcast.

Maybe it's because most of the artists I like are fuckin dead so their shit never gets removed 🤷🏻‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Spotify was OK back when I used it after Google Music died. YouTube Music's algorithm sucked so I used Spotify for about a year. Then I installed Plex for movies and TV but also found it was also great at streaming music. PlexAmp gives me access to a good suggestion algorithm. I made the decision to give them my $$ instead. Now with lidarr+scripts I can have any music I want with almost zero effort. Plus, as the OP said, I get the fun little side hobby of music curation.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Pirating music is such a pain in the ass these days since there is no standard naming conventions like with TV and movies

Things haven't changed much since the days of Limewire and Kazaa in that regard. I remember when System of a Down did that Zelda song! 😂

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That one got properly labeled when I was going through a "add all the data" phase. The Rabbit Joint turns out to be the ones that made it, but that singer did sound a lot like Serj.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah I've been using Spotify for about 15 years now, since i first had to pretend I was German to access it. It along with Steam have always been the only two services I'm happy to pay for with zero issues.

As far as my experience has gone, nothing has changed for the worse in all that time.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Me, still using youtube-mp3 website

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If I download music, I have access to a larger music library, the ability to change the pitch, speed, and equalizer of the music, and the freedom to choose the player that I want. Can't do that with a streaming service.

I try to support artists if I can still download the music in a DRM-free file. Just this week I made a purchase, and late last year I bought an album and a midi file to support two artists.

And this is for personal listening. I make sure to follow royalty laws and attribute the artist when the music ends up in something I publish to the Internet.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For anyone who's a music enthusiast, having the files makes more sense. Poweramp is a way better experience than Spotify or YT Music. I loved being able to set the EQ on an album or song basis.

That said, YT Music comes with YT premium, and I'm lazy, so I do that for now. I also haven't got much of a commute right now, so I don't listen to music near as much.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

PowerAmp is the only thing I found that could replace Google Music in my heart!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fuck YouTube rips. V0 for life!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm in the process of replacing all my mp3 (including a lot of V0 and 320) with FLAC. I know that most of the time I can't tell the difference, but I did some testing and in some scenarios with some music I could tell. And, at the size of music files, disk is cheap.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To me, using FLAC files is like using a bay leaf in cooking. You can't always tell the difference, but you can always FEEL the difference.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Great analogy

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›