Technology

59593 readers

4603 users here now

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

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

1084

Music Piracy Is Back, Baby (gizmodo.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by flintheart_glomgold@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

341 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago

Wow, I had no idea. I didn't even really know that cable was at one time the fancy premium version of TV.

One thing I think we can say though is that a big part of why Netflix was disruptive was the promise of watching uninterrupted-- No ads. So even though folks thought "of course cable has ads, that's the norm," they also flocked to services that provided ad-free alternatives.

I'm always surprised when I see someone just sit through a YouTube ad or something, instead of beating their chest and screaming "WHERE uBLOCK? HOW ADS?" which alarms the neighbors but they're used to it at this point (which is what I do)... But it's encouraging that people still voted with their feet by dropping cable as soon as a less extractive experience emerged. It gives me hope that the endgame of enshittification is irrelevance.