"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.
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 🤷🏻♂️