Music Piracy Is Back, Baby
Music Piracy Is Back, Baby
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.
If y'all got kids, don't forget to teach them how MP3's and actual media files work, I see many young people nowadays don't even realize you can locally store your own music in a portable device-agnostic format. They're beginning to get used to the idea of not owning anything.
First you're gonna have to teach them how file systems work since they've spent a life saving everything to Google Drive or OneDrive and using a search term to find their files.
I'm continually astonished how I thought grunt-work IT jobs would fade away as my generation and younger aged into the workforce becoming ever more technologically literate. Then the iPhone my rich friends bought in highschool became the new standard for interfaces.
Now I'm helping people several years younger and much older than me navigate the machines they use for their jobs.
Thats the exact reason I just donated my old pc to my sisters kids as a "practice computer", encouraging them to go rummaging around.
What woke me up was all these 20-somethings in our uni having trouble using computers. Damn, how can you get through our secondary education in our country and not know how to use a normal Windows pc?
That brief, magical moment in time of about 2 decades in the "home computer revolution" of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, where you had to be an actual geek to be able to effectively use a computer are gone. That's how we all got trained. By being forced to learn if we wanted to do anything. Now, it's one-button instant gratification.
Partially yeah, but atleast Google Drive and Onedrive still have folders to sort and share more than one file, which sometimes gets the kids to actually use those features.
What also killed the basic understanding of PCs, is the way in which everything is now done "in-Browser". No longer do you need to open Word to edit a document, nor do you need to open Photoshop. It's all done in the browser, and if you want to simply "save" a document, well, just don't close the tab and you're golden.
As a cultured collector of memes, one of the most annoying things ever is downloading images to my phone from the internet with filenames like "124fdgklhhr24.jpeg" and if I don't separately navigate to it, hold down to rename it, move it manually to where I want it for later, it just falls into the endless "Download" folder.
I think this behavior is encouraged precisely so people don't understand directories, fill up their phones with random nonsense, and then happily subscribe to "cloud storage" when it's constantly pushed at them.
We start with Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems. 🥲
This sort of thing is why my kids are getting Raspberry Pis as their first computers.
Indeed! I introduced my kids to this through the example of our in-house Plex server, and it worked really well.
First they "get it" because Plex works like the streaming services they're used to and they think "oh neat mom can do that too."
Then they like it more because I show them how its streaming we can control ourselves - streaming home movies and pics really impresses this upon them.
And then they see that there's no magic to where the content comes from -- it's a digital file on Plex just as it is on Netflix.
Voila. Free thinkers for life.
If I ever do have children, this is one of the things I want to teach them.
Hopefully, it turns into an important memory for them.
Learning about technology from their parents' and how it isn't magic.
This makes me sad. I had so much fun growing up learning about compression and encoding, ripping, tagging, spectral analysis. Listening to 24/96 vinyl FLACs on my parents old stereo with my pinky up. Hanging out with a bunch of 40-year olds on IRC. Good times, man
Get your kids a real computer. Show them how to move files around. Show your 7 year old how to manually install a Minecraft skin. Show your teens how to turn an mp3 into a ringtone. Show them the actual practical uses for understanding how a computer works, and what a "file" actually is. You're giving them tools to save money, make better decisions, and actually control their experience.
That's how one spends time with his kids!
No worries. They'll reinvent the wheel eventually.
Look, it's on it's last legs, but Bandcamp and Bandcamp Fridays still exist.
Reasonable cost, money goes directly to the artist, and you get high quality FLACs with no DRM to keep permanently.
I pirate a lot, but I also spend a lot of money at Bandcamp trying to get money directly in the hands of the artists I enjoy.
Don't use shady sites. Use yt-dlp.
but yt audio quality is terrible.
Most people can't tell the difference between low bitrate vs high bitrate. Usually just confirmation bias.
Have you truly tested whether you can? I don't mean playing each side by side and seeing whether you can tell the difference, but actually testing yourself in a way that you don't know which is being played (like having someone else play it for you).
- typed on a vacuum tube keyboard
Then use a Spotify downloader. I had one but forgot the name of it.
It's very fine unless you decide you just must and have to convert that audio to MP3 (the audio loses quality with every lossy compression), because you are an old boomer and other formats scare you even though almost all modern device can play OPUS or at least M4A or you are one of those people who call themselves "Audiophiles" to feel more special, but wouldn't recognize a shit if I played OPUS 192kbps on their 2000$ home audio setup instead of the 24 bit uncompressed FLAC that has over 30MB in size each. I have most of my library from YT Music which is ~128kbps OPUS and it has been transparent on all audio devices I have played it till now.
is there an android version?
Seal is a yt-dlp frontend
It's a Python command line program, so yes. I use Termux (a Linux terminal emulator), and I installed
yt-dlpusingpip, a package manager for Python. I also haveffmpegfor command line video editing on my phone.I have it setup such that when I click "Share" on a URL from Firefox or YouTube, and I choose Termux as the receiving app, I am presented with a menu that let's me choose if I want the video saved to a normal folder or a hidden folder (for reasons), or if I want to download just the audio and save it to an MP3. yt-dlp can download from much more than just YouTube.
The script is just a bash script with a specific name in a specific folder that Termux knows to invoke when sent a URL. You can do anything you want with such a script.
Only get Termux from F-Droid or Droid-ify. Not from the Play Store. The Play Store version is way out of date.
Like the other person said, Newpipe can also download from YouTube. It's a YouTube front-end that scrapes the public HTML website for YouTube. You can also download that from F-Droid or Droid-ify.
Oh, and another person mentioned Seal, which is a yt-dlp front-end for Android. It's pretty great! I just installed it. As usual, it's on F-Droid and Droid-ify.
Pretty sure revanced has a download option too.
You need a third app like newpipe to download. But, it works fine in youtube and youtube music.
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.
A radio station is a small selection of music curated by an individual and meant for the masses.
Modern music streaming has dynamically curated music from a nearly infinite source, it's really not the same.
Gen Xer here....
It didn't use to be this bad. The FCC (and ftc) dropped the bag (regulatory capture), letting clear channel gobble up stations.
When I was a kid had a couple great local stations back in the day. One was a highschool station that local bands could send in cassette tapes and they would play them on Tuesdays. They had a Mosh Monday curated by local metalhead kids/young adults (there was vocational training at the radio station in evening classes).
Even the commercial channels were better. Not great or anything, but they had a lot more variety.
Sucks to have your radio stations. Mine rotates crap through all the time.
Funny story, when I started doing curation, I wanted to get a good list to start from. I looked at the API for Jack FM because I kind of like their mix.
I knew that there was going to be a substantial amount of repetition because you hear the same stuff a lot. Turns out there API doesn't have any limits on it. If you talk to the iHeartRadio API and ask it for 20,000 of the last played songs it'll give them to you.
I went back 3 years. Their entire roster was 600 songs. As I started pulling my own curation together from their list I noticed some things were absent. I noticed that some of the things that were on the same album and were arguably better songs weren't in the curation list. My guess is that whatever catalog they were licensed to pull from they only had a certain number of top hits. A lot of the stuff was the b side of the singles, It was probably a cost savings scenario.
Later on I decided I wanted some other collections to pull from so I started pulling serious XM stations and my local radio stations. Unfortunately for this phase of the date I had to collect for a long period of time so I don't have years of history. My local radio station had 6,000 unique songs played over the period of 1 and 3/4 years. Which I never would have guessed because again you just hear the same stuff over and over but it's confirmation bias.
Obviously it's nothing like the catalog Spotify has where you might hear two new things to every old thing. But there was a fair amount of discovery there. The whole concept of adding pop as it comes in you know.
i love going through my music library at times, it's a treat. and yeah, gen-x. strange breakdown....
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.
That's Pandora... Eventually everything like this gets boring if you are interested in music instead of musak.
I get it though. Some people really aren't that interested in music and just want some background noise. That's probably even the majority of people, but I'm not sure it's entirely an age thing.
This makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the insight!
I'm just here pondering. Might be as wrong as anyone.
Man, your comment reminded me of mp3.com back in the early days of digital music.
It had a lot of up and coming bands on it. And it allowed users the ability to create their own curated 'radio stations'. You could compile hours of music from those artists and share it with the rest of the user base. And other users could recommend songs for inclusion in your station (which also helped you discover new bands).
I created a station that was getting some decent listening numbers, and I got some good recommendations from listeners (sometimes self-promotion, but that's okay).
Then one day it was all gone. Probably related to the backlash from the record industry caused by Napster (even though, I think, mp3.com had acquired rights from those artists?). Sad times.
That's what music streaming fused with social media should be about.
Inflation being a major cause is definitely on my mind, too. For the past decade basically everything has experimented with becoming a subscription service, and if people aren't doing so hot on their monthly budgets they're going to start looking for things to cut.
One of the main reasons I still pay for Spotify is because it is very cheap in my country, specially when splitting a family plan. However I noticed that the user experience has gone downhill over the past years.
I remember when I could seamlessly switch playback devices, from my car to my phone, to my computer and them a Chromecast almost instantaneously. Now I'm lucky if my devices recognise each other even if they are on the same network.
And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable because it tries yo grab online content first before checking whatever is downloaded. Time and time again I have to put my phone on aeroplane mode just for the main menu to load, it is so frustrating and this didn't happen some 5-6 years ago
All of those things are 100% legitimate criticisms, I want to add that the UX experience has become more and more horrible. They've regressed terribly in most aspects of their apps, wether PC or Mobile. Absolutely unbelievable, this is the thing I see from Google search where marketing takes over from engineering/customer needs/market reality/I don't know what. Stop shoving shit into the services. You beat piracy for a minute, you can keep that lead, you're slowly losing it.
Honestly, if this was any other product this would be unacceptable. It'd be like all books went back to only black and white, all movies were only 480p, all music was only mono.
At first I was confused about the books comment, since most books are just black text on white paper, but then I realized you were probably including comic books and manga in that too (and probably textbooks that include a lot of graphics)
And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable
This is an issue I've been noticing across more and more apps and operating systems. It seems like there's no developers out there even willing to consider how their software operates under non-ideal conditions.
It's not developers, it's management. We know how to make it better, but that's extra complexity. Meaning extra developer time (higher cost and longer turn around) to better support a small fraction of normal use, added on every time that part of the system is changed
It's more profitable and faster to say "forget those users" now that they're a smaller and smaller part of the customer base
I'm paying for a family plan, for my family and two friends. The day this plan goes away, or they actively prevent sharing like this, I'm done paying for music. All alternative services are considerably more expensive, and also have a much more limited library. My favorite artists get less than pennies on a dollar from this anyway. No wonder they have to sell 85$ hoodies at concerts
I got caught in a crazy loop of Spotify resetting my password once a week. they offered no help except telling me my 40 char generated password was not secure enough. so I cancelled and deleted the account. the seas are a much more friendly place.
Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is "no longer in your library."
this is exceptionally true from my experience with Spotify. I had downloaded a playlist that had a specific song. One day I went to play my locally downloaded playlist only to glance over it and see that the song was unavailable. I had the song downloaded. In my device and it still removed the song. No warnings, no nothing. Ever since, I downloaded everything locally and completely ditched Spotify. Fuck this scummy behaviour
I get your anger, but if they no longer have the license to play the song, they cannot allow you to play it, even if the file is on your device. I don't find it scummy in the least. You didn't own the file, you were renting it from Spotify.
Whatever you say lawyer, now he's a pirate, nobody cares about the technicality.
Yeah, I get what you are saying, but then it's imho dishonest Marketing, and the user expected something different when they signed up for the paid service. I think "renting" movies, tv shows or music is not something the user expects.
If they would advertise it as "pay us 20 Dollarinos a month, and you can listen to your favorite music for as long as we allow it and don't take it away from you!" they surely would never be popular...
That's fair, but at least they could say something like "you can download our songs for as long as we allow it" and not "you can download your favourite songs and listen to them any time, anywhere" when that is only partially true, since, if someone has a playlist downloaded (still talking about personal experience) and they go offline for a long period of time, they can no longer play the songs and are required to get an internet connection only for spotify to audit and say "yeah you still have a valid subscription, you can still listen offline". It's not truly offline if I have to connect to the internet every once in a while.
Again, it's completely fair, but they could at least tell more than half-truths
I wish we had Google Play Music again. It really was an excellent app and had flawless suggestions for me I always enjoyed, and truly the most intuitive mixes. Google is evil of course, but honestly one of the best features was the listing of bands playing near you in the upcoming weeks, I went to so many shows because I'd try their music via the GPM suggestions.
I listen to the Henry Rollins show on KCRW to try to get into new music but despite my appreciation of him I find his music tastes repetitive. How many weeks in a row can I listen to the Jesus and Mary Chain?
I don't listen to nearly as much music these days, YouTube music is so ass, I really miss gpm. YouTube can't even get notifications right, like I get a notification that a band I like released a new album or something so I tap it........ and it just fuckin opens the home page of the app??? EVERY SINGLE TIME. How do you fuck up even the most basic feature of the notifications?!?!
The "radio" always brings me back to the same shit that's playing on the actual radio, regardless of me playing the radio based off of bluegrass or fuckin clown techno idfk it will play imagine dragons and blinding lights shit eventually, guaranteed. The algorithms are actually dumpster fires.
Probably around 60% of the roughly 20,000 songs I uploaded (I think that was the limit) didn't get transferred over and are just gone. Thanks Google.
Also even though the notifications don't work, it is nice to know when your favorite artists release something new. Gpm was great about this, ytm seems to think I want the hottest vevo shit
Also who the fuck ever thought it was a good idea to use the music video versions for songs instead of the song version, when we're in the music app, should be fired into the sun. They're probably the same person that originally synced your video and music "histories," skewing your YouTube algorithm entirely so your homepage would suggest nothing but music videos
Seriously, what a shitshow of an app, but that's where most of Google is headed these days
Also who the fuck ever thought it was a good idea to use the music video versions for songs instead of the song version, when we're in the music app, should be fired into the sun.
Agreed, this is infuriating. I'm in the music app, searching for a piece of music by it's exact name and artist, and I know that it's available on YouTube Music.
Here's a lyric video uploaded to some random asshole's YouTube channel. Or maybe you want this awful cover version from this other asshole on YouTube. Oh, my mistake, you wanted it as performed by the actual band? That you included in your search? How about this phone camera recording of a live show.
It's compete garbage. Made even worse when you're searching by voice command while driving and can't just quickly correct bad results by looking through the list yourself.
I still use YTM (don't judge me 😛) and it actually defaults to the audio version instead of the video version. They just give you an option to switch to video if you wanted to.
I still use it because I will not give Spotify money, and Apple Music is SUPER Caucasian and repetitive, I still like YTM the best, but it is way shitty. I hate the video function.
The fun part is, before it was Google play music it was another service by another company that I can't even remember now. Google bought it, then fiddled with it for a few years before shit canning it.
I miss the original app, it was wonderful for just throwing music on based on your mood.
I think what you're describing is Songza and it was great as a service. 8Tracks has been pretty decent as well.
I just always figured they canned it once they bought YouTube and started YouTube Music. I never got into Google Play music, but I use YouTube music, and it don't do everything I am seeing Google play music did.
I remember that app! Can't think of the name.
But it is a good example of inconvenience. One day they decided well, we're closing shop. And that made it pretty clear for users that they didn't own the music.
Google lets you download your music files that you previously uploaded. The method isn't intuitive but it's not difficult. I don't know if the option is still offered but I would guess it is since they still have YouTube Music.
I used to have a big CD collection. Ripped it all off the CDs and uploaded the files to GPM. I was able to download it all.
I bought a lot of music through Artist Hub. It kind of was the best of both worlds for me, I'd try an album streaming, love it and buy it.
I never liked suggestions/radios on any streaming platform - GPM, Apple, Deezer, Spotify, they're all shit.
I use streaming platforms solely for checking out new music that picked my interest on sites like RYM, albumoftheyear, anydecentmusic, Quietus, Picthfork, etc. If I like what I hear, I acquire it either on Bandcamp or on Soulseek and into Plex it goes.
I wish we had Google Play Music again.
I liked the fact that I could take my Google survey money and buy albums on that service. It's pretty irksome that they cancelled it.
I wish we had Google Play Music again.
Not exactly Google Music, but I recently started working on a Funkwhale instance where people can have up to 250GB of space for their personal music collection and where I am planning to have a store front for musicians who'd like to sell/promote their own songs as well. 29€/year if you go to https://communick.com/packages/access. Sounds reasonable?
Never left, baby! Although ripping from YouTube should be a last resort. And even then, use a proper tool like Yt-dlp.
It's taken longer than I expected, but more and more people are realising streaming services as a model are not good, by any measure.
They cost more in the long run, you are made powerless as a consumer (perpetually increasing costs and removing your favourite content), and you can't even get 'everything at the convenience of your fingertips' cause the market is fragmented and they remove things periodically. You own nothing and pay more. Absolutely stupid model that deserves to die.
Yeah, that is true for video steaming, but not music. Spotify has almost every song on the planet, and with a family account it's very cheap. Unless you only listen to a very small music library it's vastly cheaper than buying all the music
Spotify has almost every song on the planet
Until a contract negotiation with UMG goes south and they lose half the catalog overnight. See what's happening on tiktok right now for a good example of this.
I understand the convenience draw, but I'm not a fan of continually paying for content that can disappear at any moment.
I do use streaming (although for free) to find new tracks. But I cannot imagine having my PRIMARY collection there, mostly because it's so locked-down. You can't use it on a dumb MP3 player, you can't use a player application of your choice, etc.
Their android app is total garbage and frustrates me to no end. I'm seriously considering just going back to pirating my music just because I hate spotifys music app..
I'm surprised everyone didn't realize it right from the beginning before things got to this point. Better late then never, I - suppose.
My theory is that it's just the fact that there is always a new generation of people around the corner who haven't learned the lesson of how capitalists work. Therefore, there is always a market vulnerable to being swindled. They can keep using the same tactics, there's always a delay in people figuring out the grift, then by the time they do there's a new group of suckers ready to fall for it.
It never left. My MP3 collection is getting kinda disgusting at this point. I really should delete a bunch of it, but you never know when I'm going to want to listen to that album I downloaded 15 years ago and haven't gotten into yet!
Every few years I just create a new folder of the artists that I actively listen to and keep the older stuff out of my library but still in storage.
Sounds better than my method of having the first ten-fifteen years of collecting arranged neatly by artist names in folders labeled alphabetically followed by a few different folders labeled by the year I downloaded (not the year of release), a few genre folders, and a a few, uhh, folders sorted by how I acquired the music torrented or through Soulseekqt. Yeah, mine is a complete mess. Pulsar player for Android makes it incredibly easy to sort through stuff anyway. I did conveniently fail to put a lot of the stuff I rarely listen to on my current phone anyway. I'm not too egregiously awful. I do at least listen to everything I download at least once or twice. I had a friend in the 00s who just downloaded everything whether he listened or not. Yeah, I'll keep comparing myself to his 20+ year old standard of digital hording.
I lost mine several times - I didn't always use to have backups. Two were on MP3 players that stopped working. One was on an old smartphone, which worked but which I just didn't bother copying most of the data from. Once I just wiped it accidentally. In hindsight - I don't mind, that would've got cleaned up anyway.
I kinda wish I'd lost mine once or twice.
Piracy creates an endless loop of artists taking advances and eventually losing royalties. That's just what I've seen growing up in the music /film/ TV industry and briefly working in both. Screw labels and Spotify but go support artists and actually buy stuff.
Artists have never made much on sales anyway. Go to shows.
“It’s my understanding that I had over 80 million streams on Spotify this year, So, if I’m doing the math right that means I earned $12. Enough to get myself a nice sandwich at a restaurant. So, from the bottom of my heart, thanks for your support, and thanks for the sandwich.” - Weird Al
No they don't. I don't have a problem with let me listen to this to see if I should buy it. That's totally understandable. People who just do it to get everything free is what I have a problem with. If you really like the work find a way to support them because those numbers open doors to bigger opportunities.
Totally agree on the show's and I've seen some big name artists at small shows randomly. Also some really good merchandise.
Screw labels and Spotify but go support artists and actually buy stuff.
This is the way.
Seems like advances exited long before piracy was a significant thing. Though I'm sure piracy does contribute to the imbalance like you describe.
I don't mind paying artists for work that I like. Hell, I've bought much of my collection 3 times now: LP, cassette, CD. I never bought MP3s - just ripped them myself. All my CDs are in storage, which is dark, cool, and dry.
I'm pretty sure the distributors kept most of that money.
And that's where the bulk of the problem lies: the power brokers that have always tried to control production and distribution.
And that goes back a long way. I know I'm being repetitive, but Payola has been around a long time, and rather indicative of the state of media production. It's not like these ideas left just because someone got busted... They just learned new ways to accomplish the same goals of controlling the media marketplace without getting caught.
The problem isn't price. People just don't want to pay for a bad experience.
It's all about the price for me cause I live in a 3rd world country. Even if their service improves, I will not hesitate for a second to pirate stuff. I'll just use the money i save to pay the internet bill instead of availing a monthly sub
I was going to say that this is where I disagreed with the OP. It is 100% about price and has absolutely nothing to do with bloat or hostile design. As I wouldn't consider Spotify's design or Apple Music's design choice bad. If anything they are popular because of their design choice.
If people cared about bloat they wouldn't be on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. The rest of the consuming world lives in a pretty concerning place financially. Anyone who thinks it has to do with the design of the apps is either missing the point and not looking at the rest of the shit going on in the world or blatantly wants to believe Apple bad and FOSS good and I have found that to be a part of what I call the Lemmy mentality.
Paying for spotify, was google music before. Current "experience" is bad, I hate pop-ups to try to upsell me something I don't want or features I don't care. It happens too much and I'm considering switching to self host.
Never a bad time to plug ListenBrainz. ListenBrainz logs what you listen so you can keep track of what you hear and it helps you get recommendations and insights into your listening habits. It's not specifically for music pirates but it is compatible with music piracy. You can submit listens from all kinds of sources, youtube, spotify, but also local files (pirated or not). ListenBrainz is FOSS and publishes all their data on a open license, for the benefit of everyone.
Do you know if there is anything that locks up to this that will automatically download the music they recommend?
It would be cool to have an app where if you like the track, you give it a thumbs up, but if you don't you give it a thumbs down and the track is deleted automatically
Not that I'm aware of but I never looked into this.
Pandora?
Sheesh, kids have it so easy now... Back in my day, we had to set sail along the Atlantic trade routes looking for ships full of the latest wax cylinders out of Europe and Asia. Didn't have anything to play them on but at least we owned our collections.
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.
Please for the love of god avoid buying a real mp3 player with a metal shell, become a linux nerd, install yt-dlp, and run this command in the terminal
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 -o "%(playlist_index)02d - %(title)s.%(ext)s" MUSIC-PLAYLIST-URL-LINKIt also totally doesn't work on other music websites like bandcamp.Screw MP3, Opus is better.
I personally carefully avoid ed2k, gnutella and soulseek, just like in the olden days. But you may also want to avoid YouTube with youtube-dl or YT search in QMPlay2.
Thesome of the old music sites are still there. But I would avoid torrentgalaxy.to it has curated weekly albums of top playlists from Spotify, tiktok, etc that have all the new stuff updated every week, for your local playback displeasure. Only uncool people play locally stored music, all the cool kids stream. Do not go there.
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.
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.
PowerAmp is the only thing I found that could replace Google Music in my heart!
For me, it’s neither the price nor the quality of apps (idgaf, it plays music in the background). The thing that pushes me towards piracy is the same as for movies and TV shows: disappearing content. Because of content licensing deals, every piece of media is temporary on a service. I do rewatch movies from time to time and it’s infuriating if it’s gone (or rather would be, if I was still paying for any streaming service). This is especially true for music. My Spotify favorites list has a huge percentage of greyed out entries (and I’m pretty sure there are things that were outright deleted).
I still use spotify as well. It works for me, i just found like 10 new songs last week. At the same time, last year i listened 2hrs/day on average.
BUT at the same time, every few months i export my whole playlists, just in case, using this site.
I think it was maybe 4 or 5 years ago I started noticing the greying out in spotify Minute that happened it was back to the high seas
I fucking love my selfhosted flac collection! 250gb and growing
I don't want to run a server for selfhosting, so I just have my library (about 300GB of mostly OPUS files) On my pc and on a 512GB microSD card in my phone.
I use Foobar2000 on PC and Poweramp on Android.
Yeah sometimes with this self hosting stuff, it's like wow it organizes my music, lets me play it, makes it available to other devices... so does my operating system.
Wow, this is my exact setup. Except I have auxio exclusively for audiobooks to keep them away from my random shuffle.
There's no need to run a server if you can do the same locally.
Server is useful when you have a lot of devices with limited memory, or want to take advantage of some specific functionality server software may offer.
OPUS files
Ah yes, a man of culture
Over 20 years ago, the internet was revolutionized through free music file sharing. Today, Napster’s legacy lives on through websites that rip YouTube’s audio.
Is this guy a boomer or a zoomer? It sure seems like he doesn't know that what made Napster great wasn't really the downloading so much as how it facilitated discovering new music. Looking through other people's collections while the thing you came for downloaded was amazing.
Edit: I looked it up, Zoomer
Napster was not great for discovery. These were the days of 56k modems. Even with 128k mp3s it took a while to download a song. Idk, maybe I used it differently, but Napster was definitely a “look for specific song” application.
Discovery came later with Kazaa and DC++ and the beginnings of broadband.
The way I remember "discovery" working on Napster was when someone incorrectly labeled unrelated music as by an artist you searched for. Wow, new music!
Once you found the song and started downloading it you had plenty of time to browse the rest of the library of the person you were downloading from. That could lead to finding stuff you never heard of that you would like. The only catch was that you couldn't listen to it immediately, but you could Google what you found to get an idea of what it was and go from there.
Is this guy a boomer or a zoomer? It sure seems like he doesn’t know that what made Napster great wasn’t really the downloading so much as how it facilitated discovering new music.
Like most journalists, probably a millennial former spoiled rich kid.
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 🤷🏻♂️
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.
I haven't enjoyed possessing music since my phone replaced my ipod. Maybe I didn't try hard enough, but the seamless* updating of my library and playlists on iTunes and iPod was great. The poor format of the music I did pirate off limewire wasn't as big a deal - partly from the smooth UI of iTunes, partly due to lower music acquisition. I say seamless* because it was problematic when my iPods got full, having to cull the library, but I do beleive it was simple enough to drag selections and individual playlists.
But now what? I don't have a program to load my pc and phone, I never liked what I found for music management on windows, as you said formatting isn't consistent on torrents, and my phones fill with pictures faster than music. So, in comes Spotify. Anything I want on a whim, shared playlists, I do enjoy not storing music myself, the social aspect of public playlists, and an option to store things offline. It's similar reasons Netflix curtailed my pirating. But, as a warning to Spotify, if music streaming services break up content like Netflix, I won't wait to cancel my subscription. That'll be my push to start whatever suggestions I imagine I'll get here in the replies
I mean, you just have to learn everything mp3 formats and go pass the What.cd test and you're good.
Getting back to CDs after about 10 year hiatus.
Discogs is usually very neat.
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.
Really? Their made-for-you playlists are nowhere near as good as they used to be. The discover playlist is now ass. Radio plays the same 20 songs over and over and over again.
Right now the app is suggesting a Classical Piano playlist to me. I have never listened to classical piano. Ever. Most recently I’ve listened to Tool, Rage Against the Machine and a 90’s metal playlist (I’m on a 90’s kick). Why on earth would it think I want classical piano?
"Radio plays the same 20 songs over and over and over again. "
So just like traditional radio stations then. ☹️
I swear, we are stuck in a loop where shitty solutions just get reinvented over and over again. And most times when sometime comes up with a genuine improvement, those in power say "oh no no no! That won't do!" and kill it. I'm Gen-X and it's been this way all my life. And probably for many generations before that too.
Possibly because some of those bands are influenced by classical music (though I mean it's rather broad; you could probably trace most musical influences back to the classical period).
I listen to the same kinda shit as your most recent stuff and I don't have much issue with most suggestions. I don't really like the modern pop stuff, but I still get why it serves it up (most of the best 90's alternative stuff was technically pop and I like one Taylor Swift song).
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.
What are you saying OP? You don't want video and paid, exclusive podcasts on your streaming service? /s
What you don't want to pay for the streaming service that brings you Joe Rogan and his disinformation? Why not?
I found some of my favourite bands by downloading mislabelled songs on limewire.
The strange bit is, even in the 80s,I was paying waaaay more than that per year for records and tapes.
It's only the fact that someone suggested I had to pay them a subscription that causes me to download illegally
Don't fucking tell me I need to keep paying every year for something I don't own, I'm not buttoned up the back
Yah, I remember paying like $10-15 mid 1990s for a single CD album. And we liked it! Easily spent a few hundred bucks a year on music.
I swear if these stupid music labels just switched to 5 cents a song, no DRM, own it forever, global distribution, bill you once a month to manage transaction fees -- they'd make more money than god.
I'm kinda waiting for this bad boy to come out so I can put into it all the songs I legally acquired all these years...
Qobuz ... check it out
how does qobuz pay artists? does it much at all?
For streaming they pay out the most of anybody last I checked.
For DRM free purchases I'm not sure, but it's almost certain the lions share goes to the record labels and then goes to the artist (or directly to the artist if there's no "record label").
The apps is definitely a part of it for me. One if my friends got YouTube Premium, and since he has 3 profiles he can attach to it, hrs letting me use it. It's nice for the ad free videos on my TV. But it also comes with YouTube Music. It's honestly kind of annoying at times.
Like yesterday I wanted to listen to an album by a band, and they only have like 2 of 3 albums. The one I wanted to listen to is the one they didn't have. So I had to make a Playlist by finding videos of the songs.
And thats for a band that's not super underground. I listen to a lot of grindcore and black metal, and a lot of that isn't even on there.
And when you download things, you can only have it organized by albums. I can't organize it by band and then have all the albums.
It's also sometimes slow to load up stuff I've downloaded.
Over all its not the greatest experience. I'm currently looking at getting a mobile game device for my emulators so I can free up space on my phone, and then I'm thinking about just going back to having all the music on files on there and using an music player app. And like you said, I can have it organized how I want and customize things a bit more. Especially since I no longer have Comcast, so I can use Soulseek again.
@HipHoboHarold @flintheart_glomgold
Yes, I have noticed a trend of homelab hobbyists going back to something like this:
- Soulseek -> Nicotine+ for plentiful, lossless content
- Jellyfin for self-hosting
- Infuse for streaming the content remotely to save storage on your phone.
I don't endorse piracy for ethical reasons, but I get why this is trending up:
-Increasingly aggressive pricing models
-Service quality and content accessibility going downReally makes it hard for consumers...
Just a small tip with yt music if you are not aware, you can upload your own mp3s (50k files iirc). It's the main reason I use it since so much dnb is missing from all the streaming platforms.
It's a whole torrent of alternatives, that's for sure.
Songs disappearing, pushing podcasts, and raising prices. That's why I went back to buying music. I salute the sailors
I doubt spotify's small price increase mattered as much as the big increase in overall living expenses. If the choice is between paying for services like spotify or paying rent, then it is a lot easier to pirate music than housing.
I don't know, waiting for the day your favorite tracker goes down unexpectedly and either never comes back or is replaced by an FBI seizure warning is at least kind of like waiting for the day the cops finally show up to kick you out of the building you have been squatting in.
I agree conceptually. Experientially, I would say losing housing (legally occupied or not) is far more dramatic and life changing than being inconvenienced over the loss of a torrent tracker.
Source: In my drinking, I've found myself homeless (due to choices I made, no doubt). Wildly, losing access to torrents (which I've also done) is somewhat less consequential than being on the streets.
i'm a big fan of music streaming, the way i listen to music only really works with a discovery algorithm. but the way streaming services and labels have been unnecesarily fucking over the customer as well as the artist is getting ridiculous.
qobuzz could be a possible alternative, with them providing FLACs and/or CD quality tracks to purchase and download, but also having a subscription plan. they say more money is going to the artist. the only thing missing is the algorithm.
go ahead, tell me i'm "corrupted by capitalism" or whatever. this is the way i want to do it. there's no point in building up a collection worth hundreds and thousands of euros now, apart from FLACs being gigantic files and taking up all of the storage on my phone. plus i would cut myself off from being able to discover good artists the way i'm used to.
the way i listen to music only really works with a discovery algorithm
People have been listening to music without an algorithm for hundreds of years. Even digitally, algorithms for discovery are fairly new. What’s so different about how you listen to music?
i have more than 10 playlists for different genres and occasions, the ""smart"" shuffle helps pad those out since otherwise the playlist would be like 20 songs long.
the recommended songs at the bottom are often pretty bad, but for every 10 shitty songs there's one worth adding to the list.
occasionally i also listen to full albums, often only from bands i really really like.
i get that spotify influenced how i do it, and i don't have a problem if people do it differently. but an algorithm is a major plus for any music platform (from my perspective)
i probably won't start pirating music, but if spotify continues to enshittify itself i'm gonna have to look for alternatives.
The problem
isn'tis price."People just don't want to pay for a bad their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: "people want to Own their music (reuters.com)." Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun."Fixed the post for you. I am not trying to be an ass and stated this in a previous post but people's push to piracy is almost always to obtain what is believed to be what is becoming or is unobtainable. Price is and availability is almost always the driving force of piracy because price plays a part in availability.
I was all on board with the post until I saw, "people just don't want to pay for a bad software that is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is the user-hostile design." This to me is so far from the truth that I like to call statements like this the Lemmy or FOSS mentality that I see on here and it isn't meant to be insulting. I have defined it that way because I think Lemmy users get just as wrapped up in their own opinions and personal belief system that they forget they are also in a bubble and their opinions steer far off course to justify some personal idea or hope about what is actually pushing "mainstream" people to make choices that just aren't why average consumers are making choices.
People will 100% buy and use bad products user experience does only go so far though. I would say Spotify is as popular as it is because of its design as well as Apple Music. The features and design layout are what make their music services easier to use for most consumers that and they are popular services by word of mouth and are commonly used on the most popular devices because they are pre installed. Why have 5 music apps on an iPhone when Apple makes a music app that is already there. Point being design isn't the issue. The issue is competition, choice, and price. There really aren't a whole lot of options, popularity wise, outside of Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube music. These users aren't flocking to open source apps they are going straight to Piracy by ripping the content from YouTube directly and it is absolutely almost in direct relation with the increase in price increase. The "mainstream" user which I call the average consumer isn't worried about Spotify's design they want it to just function and play their music and be available and popular by design.
OK so they didn't find the other sites. Good good
But YT audio quality is pretty shit most of the time. There’s plenty of sites that will strip the audio for you from a video and IIRC a couple browser plugins, too. I guess if you really want the song you’ll have it, but it’s not going to sound great.
We used to record shit off broadcast radio. DJ's talking up to the post, tiny little bit of static in the mix. Maybe even a crossfade into the next song if you're unlucky. We'd put it in the mixtapes and give copies of it to our friends. This copies would have about a 5 to 10% further degradation unless you have professional equipment.
There's plenty of people out there that'll enjoy relatively bad copies of music as long as it's not too complicated and free.
You are saying things that audiophiles just cannot comprehend. The fact that most people just don't give a shit that the audio quality of a recording is sub par is mind boggling to them.
A clear radio broadcast recorded on a decent analog cassette is pretty damn good compared to a ripped mp3 with a shitty bit rate, warbling and hissing.
I, too, recorded off the radio, or off CDs, onto mixtapes, not that this history has anything to do with what we’re talking about here.
I’m not an audiophile, but I can’t stand low-quality mp3 rips. If people are happy with those rips, great, but that doesn’t make them good copies which is the point of what I said. The fact that people settle for the low quality may just as well be a result of their inability, lack of knowledge, or just laziness on how to procure better copies rather than actually being happy with the quality.
I got ChatGPT to write a Python script that lets me choose between stripping the audio or taking the whole video from the highest quality of that video available.
It all sounds the same coming out of someone's shitty Bluetooth speaker.
So what is the best way to actually own music? I miss having a physical file I could put wherever and listen to anywhere, but haven't resorted to pirating anything since limewire
Bandcamp first, if you can pay for what you want and then, surprisingly, still Soulseek.
I started using Soulseek nearly 20 years ago. Throughout my life I have seen p2p sharing platforms disappear one by one. But Soulseek? I'm amazed every day that I use it and discover that it's still alive. It is the eternal soldier that continues the fight to this day.
Amusingly there are a few search terms which come up blank, but just throw in alternative key words and all is fine. I discovered this when searching Franz Ferdinand came up with none of their music!
Bandcamp was sold off. I stopped buying off them on that day.
For obtaining music, I check Bandcamp, then Amazon (they have drm free mp3s of most music and cds for everything else), then the artist site if available, then finally I look in the seas.
As for the best way to store and play the music back, I’ve put everything on my Jellyfin instance and then stream the media to my devices. On iOS, FinAmp is a decent music player for this setup.
Yeah.... How many times does the lesson need to be learned? The worse deal the consumer is given, the more likely they'll just pirate instead. This is in both price and usability/frustration level.
I still remember when Sirius/xm was actually popular. Ad free good quality radio where you could tune in to specialized stuff for a good price.You could generally get it for around $6/7 per mo/device. At the time I was going to buy a new stereo head just for better navigation of my flash drive with my music (I was already off of burned discs). But Sirius/xm was so cheap and it had an added bonus of some discovery and stuff that why bother? I'll just primarily use that!
The prices raised a couple of bucks and commercials for their top 10 channels but they are very quick.
Then prices raised and it was commercials for every channel and so on. I cancelled when it was $18/mo/device with commercials everywhere long enough that it wasn't as bad but close enough to being as bad as radio, except I'm paying for it. My friends told me "yeah but you just call them when your time is up and they'll always make it like $12/mo/device for the first year and sometimes if you complain after it runs out they'll do it the second year too.
But why bother when by then you had great alternatives like Pandora and then Spotify and so-on. You get the same experience as Sirius/xm but it is free. Don't want ads? It's just a few bucks a month!
Now streaming music is going down the same road that every popular service of everything always does. Worse experience and ad revenue. The price point for the pay options rise and won't atop. It won't be but maybe a decade until you can't pay for no ads. You'll pay to be able to pick exactly what you want to play and to decrease ad time I'm sure.
In the background as the deal gets worse and there is no alternative offering a good deal with a good consumer experience then piracy rises. It always does. Companies will always complain piracy hurts them and the artists but all they have to do is be more reasonable.
In the background as the deal gets worse and there is no alternative offering a good deal with a good consumer experience then piracy rises. It always does. Companies will always complain piracy hurts them and the artists but all they have to do is be more reasonable.
100% this
I'm not even able to put music on my watch unless it's a mp3, so paying to stream music is out of the question.
Always has been
Nicotine+ is the way to go for this.
God bless soulseek
Did it ever go away?
Not in the slightest. Even with the last decade of 'pfft, why pirate when we have Spotify?!1' dialogues, music piracy never slowed down for a moment.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Last year, over 17 billion visits were made to music piracy websites around the world, first reported by Wired.
We’ve come a long way since Napster, but people are once again using the internet to illegally download their favorite songs in a major way.
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.
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.
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.
Google has hardline policies against copyright infringement in its terms of service but seems to let these music piracy sites scootch by.
The original article contains 379 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
"when pigs fly: the death of oink, the birth of dissent, and a brief history of record industry suicide"
Look it up if you haven't read it, I never miss an opportunity to post it but it looks like the original demonbaby host is now offline. There are mirrors though.
Fuck YouTube rips. V0 for life!
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.
Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music.
Meanwhile I've been paying the same $4.99 for Pandora's simple commercial free service for the last 10 years. I can't select individual songs to play, it just plays random songs based on my channel choices, but it works fine for me. Anything I specifically want to listen to I'll just look up on YouTube.
Family sharing is the way to go for me.
more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Noobs...
I used to DJ on Second Life and it was always a treat to hear someone else DJing and they play music that was obviously ripped from YouTube. Because they were too lazy to cut off the parts when the channel would ask for subscribers, play different sounds and they'd even rip off music video versions.
The other thing with Spotify is that it bullies you into it's subcription. Limited Skips. Ad bombardment (ads are still on podcasts so why even pay a subscription?). The app on mobile is abysmally slow with connection issues.
I really miss iTunes circa 2007 (I think?) before it got enshittified. I had it running on a Windows machine with my carefully-curated music library until the machine died. I got the music files off but had to reinstall iTunes and by that time it was a bloated piece of crap. I haven't found the equivalent since!
I can’t ever remember a time that iTunes as a music player wasn’t a shitty product, especially on windows.
At my last job all the default company phones where iPhones. So all the windows laptops had iTunes pre-installed by IT on them.
Having refused apple products due to poverty and being forced to use a Mac desktop at a previous job (clusterfuck) I had not seen it in years.
It's one of the the most poorly designed, confusing dumpster fires of a program around. The company of "it just works" my ass.
I swear it was like 4 different uninstalls to get rid of it. Only to restart and see another mysterious program appear. I have gotten malware that was easier to get rid of.
I was in the same boat as you about 5 years ago - I had been stubbornly using iTunes, but it was so slow and the store was just an annoyance, it was getting in the way of me actually listening to my music. I ended up choosing MusicBee over Winamp or foobar2000 because it has all the library management stuff (even a sync to mobile device function) and a great interface right out of the box.
Yah, and before that SoundJam, an indy app which Apple bought and re-skinned into iTunes.
At the time it was all wonderful and intuitive. Drag and drop everything, beautifully curated collections, simple and dependable, and sitting right there on your hard drive / iPod so you always had everything.
Now it's all a sewer of bullshit, annoying and alienating to use, it makes music a miserable experience. They wonder why people don't want to pay for it. And use the law to beat us over the head until we submit to our own misery.
We really gotta update consumer laws for the digital age so there's a reasonable balance between corporations and consumers again.
Me, still using youtube-mp3 website
If there was soulseek on an iOS app I think I’d go fully back to piracy. Never gotten over Apple Music ruining all my playlists, just want to go back to basics
Anghami is $2.99 per month or $24.99 per year. It is the only subscription service I use and I’m happy with it. $10.99 per month is excessive.
Do they actually have the same selection as Spotify and Apple music? I checked their website, and it appears to be catered to Arabic listeners, but I saw one of the pictures at least has Taylor Swift on there. I listen to a lot of niche stuff, though, and I don't feel like downloading the app just to see if it's there. That is a good price if they have all of the same artists, though.
verifiable via personal experience
"The problem isn't price. People just don't want to pay for a bad experience."
The experience using a paid service is way better than pirating, let's be honest here. The problem for some people is price.
For music, I think yes. For other forms of media, not so much.
I’m willing to say that this is probably true for most, but not for all.
If you run your own music streaming server, in some cases it’s better than streaming services.
This isn’t sour grapes either. I had Google music for a couple of years, and I currently have a ninety day trial of Spotify unlimited…these services might be better for most, but if you care about the things I do they’re worse.
I haven’t really even used my Spotify trial because my streaming setup is so much better in a variety of ways.
All that said, I’m an album listener, an older cat, and borderline music obsessive. I’m likely a dying breed. But I find music streaming services much worse.
I honestly think it's much easier to have a catalog of music than, for instance, TV shows. I listen to the same albums over and over again, but I'm not nearly as keen on rewatching the same shows or watching the same movie more than even once.
I would not be so sure about that.
They don't want a bad experience so they use shady websites to download music in the shittiest possibile quality? I don't buy it.
People are just not able to afford what they want, that's it
shady websites
There are no innocents here. There' s a case to be made that nothing is more shady for consumers than the mass data harvesting, profiling, brokering and content shaping that flows from using Facebook, Twitter, Amazon or TikTok
shittiest possible quality
You're doing it wrong
The quality is much better than you think. Most people also don't have the acute hearing of audio technologist to determine if a song is 192kbps or FLAC without hearing them back-to-back repeatedly or would care much. It's also why terrestrial radio is still a thing. People tend to either want full control of their library or just want something to listen to all without having to deal with an unfriendly interface.
People tend to respond to whether something is getting better or worse, more than whether it's objectively good.
Like virtually any community software, the piracy experience is getting better, but usually quite slowly.
But thanks to needless DRM, price hikes, and skimping on mobile app development, streaming services are actually somehow getting worse.