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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
That’s super based. Pirate whoever’s stuff you want, but small artists usually depend on that income.
I listen to hundreds of small artists. I can’t buy every singles albums they have.
You don’t have to. Buy the ones you think are worth it, attend shows and maybe buy merch. Like we used to do before leechify
Same issue, I don’t have enough money to support everybody
I never stopped either, but i buy vinyl…slowed down since my turntable only spins at 33.3 in special occasions when the spirits shine upon it.
I have never pirated music more in my life as I do now.
I have never purchased as much music as I do now.
Downloading YouTube isn’t piracy lol it’s time shifting.
TiVo has entered the chat.
What’s that?
TiVo was an early digital video recorder that dominated the market for a while. Broadcasters brought lawsuits against the company saying the recording of videos was violating copyright laws, and advertisers hated it because you could skip commercials. TiVo argued in court that they weren’t pirating, but just time shifting the content. Similar arguments were used for people who ripped rented dvds and so on.
They really went hard on VCRs before all of that for the same reasons. Fortunately the time shifting argument was able to be backed by the courts. Otherwise TiVo and so many other formats would’ve basically been banned from the general public being able to have anything nice. Was especially important rulings for forcing most content providers and/or studios into using new ideas and technologies. They are the ones that hold back on everything that could actually make it easier to legally enjoy content.
They make things require so many hoops to go through and like a punishment for wanting to enjoy anything legally. While also making it cost more on their end overall. If these companies were to embrace stuff like torrenting tech, then it would mean less overall costs needed to always be running. We have so many ways of getting stuff from here to there and making sure media is not lost. Copyrights should at best last like 10 years imo. These companies still can’t even be bothered to allow me to buy movies and shows digitally that maybe got a DVD release. So if they won’t give options, then they forfeit the right to claim any “damages” or “lost sales.”
Oh god, I’m old…
I WISH I COULD HEAR YA OVER THESE HERE BANGING TUNES! 🏴☠️
But are they lossless 96kHz+? Only reason I use qobuz.
Flac and opus on soulseek?
Tidal? You can even download all your music in lossless flac format
Can’t play music without the tidal client I think
You can extract an API key and use other players that support it like Strawberry.
I forgot that they had an API, but I don’t think you can download music without drm afaik
Yeah see this here is actual proper piracy, none of that youtube ripping BS thank you!
Honestly the most complete source of high res music is private trackers like redacted. You can download all the stuff from qobuz and bandcamp, every CD rip you can think of in bit perfect quality of and even very good vinyl rips. You basically can download any version ever released from any album.
deleted by creator
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.
They def would’ve done radio drm if possible
I could be wrong but didn’t a cut from blank tapes go to the industry tp ‘make up for the losses’?
The Netherlands had a tax on blank CDs to “compensate” authors, essentially legalizing piracy (until the EU changed the rules).
Ah that might have been it. I vaguely remember hearing about it at the time.
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 totally don’t want to just learn Linux command line and how to use the youtube-dl/yt-dlp packages through WSL or a Linux distro, that would deny corporations all of your money and be way too convenient. Thankfully it’s not intuitive to learn or there would be so much more piracy!
Yt-dlp is also available on Windows. No reason to spin up wsl or a Linux distro. There are also plenty of yt-dlp apps with GUI for those who don’t want to use a terminal.
Didn’t realize, good to know, thank you!
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
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.
Not been my experience. Yt music playlists are really good for me and I’ve discovered a lot of new music through it.
That surprises me, but I suppose it had to work for some listeners or they wouldn’t have gotten it past testing. I have even tried clearing my listen history and starting over - still comes up with country and (going to clarify) ‘metal’ . I like rock and alternative and some forms of pop, as well as a bit of hip hop. cannot fathom why it suggests what it does.
Do you ever thumb down anything, or do you just skip the stuff you don’t like?
Every time. I am not sure it actually changes anything. I have submitted feedback and bug reports to YTM as well. Just generic replies.
I feel you. Feels like the algorithm just does whatever now, on main YouTube and Shorts it is awful as well, constantly showing me the same 5 shorts and recommending me channels I have asked to “not recommend” multiple times. No amount of disliking and clicking “Not Interested” seems to help, at least not for longer than a day.
I dunno, sorry to hear about your experience. I’ve never had a thumb downed song come back up, not ever. And it absolutely affects what kinds of things come up in my radios.
I never thumbs up or down and I find the recommended albums and “Mixed for your” playlists are pretty accurate. I hate that my grandfathered price went up last December tho
I just listen to playlists that people make or youtube videos of song genres or artists that I like.
deleted by creator
Soulseek if you don’t mind data hoarding.
I have yt premium for the same reason. Toddlers have little patience for ads on their Kindle fire, and they get upset when they click one to buy a luxury watch and can’t figure out how to get back to cocomelon.
I actually like the service and feel it’s fairly priced. So I don’t mind paying for it. I stream yt music all day at work.
Same boat here. My God it’s unbearable how bad YouTube premium is.
I get good value out of it…
…That being said, I curate my own feed heavily, and still have to use a ton of add-ons to keep from going insane - fuck your shorts YouTube.
It is admittedly terrible.
I still havent found anything can match the experience of finding music from online discussions or list hopping on RYM.
What is rym?
Last fm users with similar taste can be a gold mine
Weird… yt-dlp -f “ba” url
Never need to use one of those horrible malware laden download sites again…
That’s not how I would get a discography, a non YouTube artist (some international ones), a whole album or lossless though - or am I mistaken?
I think he is talking about this
The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
Makes sense, thanks for pointing it out!
Just FYI, yt-dlp does work with other sites, too. So you can get some pretty decent quality by downloading from bandcamp for example. But not all that what your asking for unfortunately…
wakes up in 2002
The Napster has you, Neo
Your comment just made me smile. Those were the days.
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.
Is t it funny how this seems to be happening in every industry possible? And it’s always reported with sUcH sURpRisE!
Like, we are being abused by capitalists. It feels good to steal. Because they can’t stop taking more and more from us, squeezing us harder and harder.
When you present us with ease of use and a reasonable price point, we are happy with the trade. But they need their returns to keep growing, so they keep squeezing us harder. Their investors demand the line go up. So they squeeze us harder. They need to cut costs, so they squeeze us harder.
It never stops. So we turn to theft. Because they’ve literally left us no choice.
Wow so we call downloading YouTube piracy?
I guess most content creators are pirates.
Wow, that’s stupid. I consider ripping songs from YouTube to be the modern equivalent of taping songs off the radio. The quality is poor.
Basically, but it’s low hanging fruit. Kids not ripping a 20gb disco from pirate bay at school but they most certainly will download a song off YouTube.
Shoot I remember back in the mid 2000s with my shitty mp3 player ripping music in any class with a computer.
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.
I think last.fm might still exist. I just used it for the ‘scrobbling’ — stats way before Spotify Wrapped was a thing
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.
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.
Man, I never knew there was a way to download my entire spotify playlist.
That’s been the biggest thing tethering me to their service, since they empty you out when you unsubscribe.
I’m getting my playlists out then ditching Spotify. It’s the only service I pay for other than my ISP and VPN.
So right now, I have Radarr and Sonarr automate everything to plex.
Is there a way, I can automate:
I add to Spotify playlist (I would keep Spotify free as it is good at finding things for me)
Something detects it
Something downloads it
It shows up in PlexAmp
Ive been paying for Spotify premium because I need it for my job and I don’t want to spend a ton of time tweaking and naming things. I’d rather use PlexAmp and stop paying if possible but I’d like it to be easy (with a little work here and there) like my arr+plex setup.
Am I asking for something that doesn’t exist?
This is my time to shine !
I am currently working on this and have a prototype that I am testing : https://github.com/P6g9YHK6/SpotifyRipper
When I have the time to polish it I will dockerise the solution to have an automated spotify scraper ATM it is manually run but works pretty well 🥳
Pull requests are welcome for anything on the todo list 🫡 And github stars will help boost this project popularity 🥰
This looks cool!
Unfortunately I don’t know anything about Python or docker… Thanks for the link, maybe I’ll try and figure this out on my next holiday.
Just released an update that should take care of most of the libraries requirement for you. Just follow the instructions and it should work
Oh thank god, some songs for some reason are ONLY on Spotify and it drives me nuts
This was one of the issue I had too… I could not make lidarr work with my music tastes so I spent a couple of days prototyping with spotdl to get this working correctly and ended with the current version of the ripper I run it once a week to get the new favs and weekly playlist
I want to preface this by saying I have not tried this.
Lidarr is for music and their documentation says you can have import lists for spotify playlists.
I have done this. it can be quite messy but it will definitely import the albums of all the music you have either liked or followed or in playlist in Spotify.
I’m not 100% that it will actually organize it as it was originally on Spotify, though, just that it adds the list’s contents as “wanted tracks”. I assume there’s some way to do this but I haven’t looked into it enough yet.
It’s still on my list, along with figuring out how to get Critical Role working with my Sonarr so I can be done with YouTube frontends…
Hmmm… Maybe I’ll have to try this on my next holiday or long weekend and play around with it
Syncthing and Spotdl. Syncthing can sync folders over a network. Spotdl can download content from a playlist; it is multi-threaded and skips already existing or duplicate songs. It took me 20 minutes to automate everything. Syncthing and Spotdl start on startup and do their thing every 10 minutes.
