I have ~100 users downloaded ~1000 of my files in the last week alone. Music piracy is still alive and kicking. I encourage everyone to download and install SoulseekQT/Nicotine+/Seeker-Android and share whatever kind of music you have for everybody to download. Let’s bring back music piracy!
I waffle on whether I should use my VPN or not with it.
Support your favourite artists directly. That wasn’t an option in the Napster days.
I like to have the older versions of songs before they “Remaster” and change them and if they stop selling everything but the remasters, it’s time to fire it up.
Have you heard of “Navidrome”? you can be your own Spotify. It also supports transcoding. For instance, if you are on a phone connected to data, you can set the bitrate to 128kpbs to save some data.
Not at all. For a lot of people, hi-fi audio is basically indistinguishable from “regular” audio, and you also need things like a DAC and good headphones to hear it. Bluetooth, as an example, can’t even play hi-fi audio at its full quality.
I mostly listen to jazz, blues and classical. I use rutracker which has everything I want and in lossless formats. Mp3s too but I’m more interested in lossless.
I’m not advocating piracy as a way to support artists, but a way to fight against the big corps/streaming platforms/the system that just take the majority of revenue for themselves while hurting both the consumers and the creators. As I replied to other comments, I try to look for ways to directly support artists individually whenever I can.
Fuck spotify. Unlike video which poses some infrastructure challenges, musical files are tiny and bandwidth costs are ridiculous. Internet should allow us to give money to the artists directly, not to some greedy evil corp that makes billions without giving artist their fair share. Bandcamp is the closest we have to that.
Related: https://neurodifferent.me/@clowncollege/109994297731928004
Tbh, why pirate music when I can listen to a new album within 5 seconds of its release? I don’t have to wait for downloads, don’t have to deal with mistaken metadata, I don’t have to worry about physical storage sizes.
I fully support piracy for basically everything, but we should count ourselves lucky that music streaming went the way it did and not the way movie and series streaming has gone.
Streaming sites are convenient up until you want to listen to that mildly obscure artist from your country your parents used to listen to back in the early 50s. Then it’s absolute bollocks.
Architecture In Helsinki is missing the third album on Spotify. There are plenty more, but that’s always the first that pops in my head whenever I’m listening to Indie playlists, Of Montréal comes on and I realise I haven’t heard Places Like This in a long time. Then I remember why, and I either have to dig through my old CD collection or download it.
With Spotify, both you and artists are still screwed.
If you have Spotify free you will be interrupted by ads breaking all immersion in your albums. Artists will get paid barely anything.
If you have Spotify Premium, you will have to pay money, and most of that money won’t even go towards the artists. The artists will get paid a little more then barely anything.
I absolutely do where I can but when a lot of stuff gets released within the scene I am into on a dead inferior format (vinyl) exclusively then I am absolutely going to pirate that shit if I can.
Spotify probably is the only algorithm I use that just gives me stuff I would enjoy, other services try to push bs I don’t want. While I use soulseek and buy from Bandcamp when possible I still use Spotify for discovery.
Spotify sucks, but the whole music industry has sucked like that for literally a hundred years - A very very few artists make bank, about 5% make a little, everyone else makes zero.
Guess what, it’s not only the small musicians who suffer, it’s everyone who falls into the “small” category.
Speaking as an IT professional, who has worked at smaller agencies, where new technologies arise and make our work more efficient. Do you think our bosses let us enjoy the free time that we gained from these advancing technologies? They don’t! Instead they put even more workload onto us, up to the point where we burn out even faster than before. It’s huge difference wirking on one task for five days (bc of limitations) vs. working on 10 tasks during the same period.
If you aren’t going to shows and buying from the merch table, or buying directly from bancamp etc you aren’t supporting artists.That’s where the majority of their money comes from.
I’ll be sticking to spotify personally out of convenience, and the fact that I’m paying for a family plan but to be fair paying that money directly to the artists you like will be much more effective while not supporting platforms that pay them very little for their work.
If you want though, using spotify adblock has been quite effective in my experiance. That way you have the convenience and you don’t pay spotify shit
Spotify is literally the only subscription service that I haven’t cut ties with, because as much as I hate its horrific data harvesting, I’m running it on GrapheneOS with legitimately next to zero privileges in a sandbox, and for what I’m paying, I truly do feel I’m getting my money’s worth. I use it every single day, and while I have all my music stored locally (as in legitimately scraped and downloaded, not ‘downloaded’), I only did so as a precaution just in case Spotify decides to fuck things up and I also choose to cancel it as well.
If you’re up for another recommendation, I suggest trying out Innertune [Link to Github repo]. It has been discussed on the GrapheneOS Discussion Forum as an alternative to Spotify for music streaming. Also, Innertune’s dev released an update recently (2 days ago from the time of this post) that includes a major UI rewrite and other improvements to the app [Link to latest stable release].
I buy music on bandcamp/directly from artists all the time. I just dislike streaming services, as I always want to have the files, and the money artists get from them is abbyssmal anyway.
Especially for smaller/indie artists I wait for Bandcamp Fridays so all of the money goes straight to them (Fuck Epic). Buying even one album for $5-10 is more than they would earn from thousands of Spotify listens from you.
Where can you legitimately buy music these days? I’ll be happy to pay if the artist gets their fair share. I used to buy from Amazon but that has gone completely to shit recently. Like they really don’t want you to buy stuff from them any more. And I cannot bring myself to give a cent to Spotify when they paid 100 million to Joe fucking Rogan.
Very fair point - Spotify does shaft a lot of their artists from what I’ve heard. As the other user mentioned, bandcamp gets brought up a lot. Try reachin out to some bands over email maybe and see what they say!
Don’t forget stream ripping. I used to rip internet radio direct to MP3 with no quality loss and then go back and manually edit the files for playback gaps, keeping the best in case of duplicate recordings. If you have really niche interests it sometimes was literally the only way to get copies of some tracks, especially rare remixes.
Is it fair to call them alternatives? They’re just alternative front-ends to YouTube. I use Revanced along with Youtube Premium so I can use SponsorBlock along with not having ads
I’d say so. Considering both are free. And it’s not YouTube. Yes it’s using the front ends to YouTube, but I only need to use one app. Jerboa would be considered an alternative to Connect, would it not?
I just don’t see a point either in paying YouTube subscription to use extra features and not have ads, when New Pipe and Freetube both do that without extra steps.
I guess that makes sense. I’ve just always liked the YouTube Mobile UI and don’t see a reason to move away from it. Premium Family in my country is so cheap I pay less than half a US dollar every month for it
Understandable. And that’s not a bad deal, pretty cheap. YouTube UI is not bad at all either. I preferred New Pipe because I didn’t have to pay for it lol
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
I waffle on whether I should use my VPN or not with it.
I like to have the older versions of songs before they “Remaster” and change them and if they stop selling everything but the remasters, it’s time to fire it up.
It use P2P network so I don’t think you need VPN for it…? IDK I’m not an expert.
Well torrenting is also P2P but people generally recommend VPNs for that.
Yea but with torrenting it’s multiple peers you are connected to. Soulseek only connects you 1-1 so it’s generally lots safer.
Ah, I see.
I’ve got slskd and lidarr set up with jellyfin and FinAmp on my phone and honestly I don’t open Spotify except to discover new music
Are you saying you can use slskd as a source in Lidarr? If so, I’d love some details on how to set that up.
Soulseek is great for finding and sharing music. I would strongly recommend Nicotine+ over the old SoulseekQt
Maybe I’ll publish my 3 TB FLAC collection soon.
Yessir
using Spotify is much easier… until they delete a few tracks from your playlist.
i feel this.
though have gigabytes of pirated music in my hd, but i cant transfer that all on my phone that’s wy i have spotify
Have you heard of “Navidrome”? you can be your own Spotify. It also supports transcoding. For instance, if you are on a phone connected to data, you can set the bitrate to 128kpbs to save some data.
No, I haven’t heard of it. I’ll look it up. Thanks.
You guys don’t just download stuff with yt2mp3?
You don’t get high quality mp3s from that.
I use deemix for 320kbps, I originally had FLAC but as almost 100% of my listening is remote from my server I found 320 to be great.
I’m no Hi-Fi listener, but YT rips suck.
Is there something wrong with my ear that I can’t distinguish between music quality levels?
Not at all. For a lot of people, hi-fi audio is basically indistinguishable from “regular” audio, and you also need things like a DAC and good headphones to hear it. Bluetooth, as an example, can’t even play hi-fi audio at its full quality.
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Bruh. I’ve been listening to that stuff for way too long, idk what good quality is anymore.
But, what about disk space?
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FLAC isn’t too bad on disc space.
I mostly listen to jazz, blues and classical. I use rutracker which has everything I want and in lossless formats. Mp3s too but I’m more interested in lossless.
Spotify is well worth the price. I think I cost them more with my near constant streaming of musics.
The thing is, you barely support the artists you’re listening to when you use spotify.
I don’t want to be a dick but you just posted that we should pirate music more which for some reason supports the artists more…?
I’m not advocating piracy as a way to support artists, but a way to fight against the big corps/streaming platforms/the system that just take the majority of revenue for themselves while hurting both the consumers and the creators. As I replied to other comments, I try to look for ways to directly support artists individually whenever I can.
Fuck spotify. Unlike video which poses some infrastructure challenges, musical files are tiny and bandwidth costs are ridiculous. Internet should allow us to give money to the artists directly, not to some greedy evil corp that makes billions without giving artist their fair share. Bandcamp is the closest we have to that. Related: https://neurodifferent.me/@clowncollege/109994297731928004
Interesting feedback
There’s no way to directly support artists unless you’re buying merch from their specific site or at a concert
Music piracy isn’t dead but it’s a shell of what it was. You can see even here most people would rather just stream
Soulseek needs more users though as the proportion of locked file users keeps increasing
Tbh, why pirate music when I can listen to a new album within 5 seconds of its release? I don’t have to wait for downloads, don’t have to deal with mistaken metadata, I don’t have to worry about physical storage sizes.
I fully support piracy for basically everything, but we should count ourselves lucky that music streaming went the way it did and not the way movie and series streaming has gone.
You don’t own the music so it can be edited/taken away as desired by the DSP
Also me personally very little of what I listen to is on DSPs and a lot isn’t even on YouTube but I recognize this as an extreme outlier
Yeah fuck those traders and scammers. Soulseek isn’t created for that shit.
Convenience can win over piracy. Music and videogames proved that
Nicotine+ is such a wild name for a piece of software.
Streaming sites are convenient up until you want to listen to that mildly obscure artist from your country your parents used to listen to back in the early 50s. Then it’s absolute bollocks.
Not even old music.
Architecture In Helsinki is missing the third album on Spotify. There are plenty more, but that’s always the first that pops in my head whenever I’m listening to Indie playlists, Of Montréal comes on and I realise I haven’t heard Places Like This in a long time. Then I remember why, and I either have to dig through my old CD collection or download it.
That’s why I pay for YouTube Music. YouTube has a pretty good collection of obscure tracks and it lets you upload your own files to access anywhere.
Better chance to find that on Youtube honestly
Or if you live outside of America, the number of albums that don’t let you play some of the songs is insane.
Support your favourite artists directly. That wasn’t an option in the Napster days.
I do when I can afford to, but you can’t really buy every song you listen to, can you?
Have you heard about Spotify?
With Spotify, both you and artists are still screwed.
If you have Spotify free you will be interrupted by ads breaking all immersion in your albums. Artists will get paid barely anything.
If you have Spotify Premium, you will have to pay money, and most of that money won’t even go towards the artists. The artists will get paid a little more then barely anything.
Spotify doesn’t do shit for the artists.
More than pirating
Yeah I’m sure artists enjoy their 0.003 cents per stream a lot.
More than 0.000 cents. ;-)
Bandcamp is an excellent option, I often try to get releases from their when possible.
I absolutely do where I can but when a lot of stuff gets released within the scene I am into on a dead inferior format (vinyl) exclusively then I am absolutely going to pirate that shit if I can.
Heyyyy it’s my fellow dubstep enjoyer! Yeah those vinyl exclusive is such a pain.
I share a pretty good size collection of music and fonts on Soulseek.
I really don’t feel the need to. I pay fair prices for my music and get it how I want it when I want it where I want it.
Im not pirating to shaft people out of money
Same here, while I do have the time to chase around pirated movies/games/software, I want my music to just be there with me without all the hassle.
Spotify’s algorithm is just great!
Spotify probably is the only algorithm I use that just gives me stuff I would enjoy, other services try to push bs I don’t want. While I use soulseek and buy from Bandcamp when possible I still use Spotify for discovery.
Spotify shareholders say thanks. The artists, not so much. Keep your spotify money to go to concerts or buy albums on bandcamp. Spotify is the worst.
Spotify sucks, but the whole music industry has sucked like that for literally a hundred years - A very very few artists make bank, about 5% make a little, everyone else makes zero.
Oh indeed, I dont’t think it was better before. But technology should be about making things better, shouldn’t it?
Guess what, it’s not only the small musicians who suffer, it’s everyone who falls into the “small” category.
Speaking as an IT professional, who has worked at smaller agencies, where new technologies arise and make our work more efficient. Do you think our bosses let us enjoy the free time that we gained from these advancing technologies? They don’t! Instead they put even more workload onto us, up to the point where we burn out even faster than before. It’s huge difference wirking on one task for five days (bc of limitations) vs. working on 10 tasks during the same period.
If you aren’t going to shows and buying from the merch table, or buying directly from bancamp etc you aren’t supporting artists.That’s where the majority of their money comes from.
I’ll be sticking to spotify personally out of convenience, and the fact that I’m paying for a family plan but to be fair paying that money directly to the artists you like will be much more effective while not supporting platforms that pay them very little for their work.
If you want though, using spotify adblock has been quite effective in my experiance. That way you have the convenience and you don’t pay spotify shit
Spotify is literally the only subscription service that I haven’t cut ties with, because as much as I hate its horrific data harvesting, I’m running it on GrapheneOS with legitimately next to zero privileges in a sandbox, and for what I’m paying, I truly do feel I’m getting my money’s worth. I use it every single day, and while I have all my music stored locally (as in legitimately scraped and downloaded, not ‘downloaded’), I only did so as a precaution just in case Spotify decides to fuck things up and I also choose to cancel it as well.
Try vimusic, from what i’ve seen its just spotify without the data harvesting (and the api’s taken from youtube music, shouldn’t change much though)
That actually sounds fantastic, cheers for the recommendation!
Aye, no problem!
I wouldnt count on it working for long. vfsfitvnm hasn’t touched the repo since december with several PRs left untouched.
Seems abandoned to me. https://github.com/vfsfitvnm/ViMusic
If you’re up for another recommendation, I suggest trying out Innertune [Link to Github repo]. It has been discussed on the GrapheneOS Discussion Forum as an alternative to Spotify for music streaming. Also, Innertune’s dev released an update recently (2 days ago from the time of this post) that includes a major UI rewrite and other improvements to the app [Link to latest stable release].
this
I buy music on bandcamp/directly from artists all the time. I just dislike streaming services, as I always want to have the files, and the money artists get from them is abbyssmal anyway.
Especially for smaller/indie artists I wait for Bandcamp Fridays so all of the money goes straight to them (Fuck Epic). Buying even one album for $5-10 is more than they would earn from thousands of Spotify listens from you.
This is the way.
Yep. That’s why I pay Spotify but stopped paying netflix. Fuck this need to subscribe to countless streaming services.
Where can you legitimately buy music these days? I’ll be happy to pay if the artist gets their fair share. I used to buy from Amazon but that has gone completely to shit recently. Like they really don’t want you to buy stuff from them any more. And I cannot bring myself to give a cent to Spotify when they paid 100 million to Joe fucking Rogan.
I generally run Spotify with the XManager version on Android and SpotX on PC. Works great.
Why do I care who they paid money to to have some random podcast on their service?
Bandcamp (indie)
Qobuz, 7digital, artists website directly (general stuff)
NativeDSD (audiophile)
Bandcamp my friend!
Very fair point - Spotify does shaft a lot of their artists from what I’ve heard. As the other user mentioned, bandcamp gets brought up a lot. Try reachin out to some bands over email maybe and see what they say!
Don’t forget stream ripping. I used to rip internet radio direct to MP3 with no quality loss and then go back and manually edit the files for playback gaps, keeping the best in case of duplicate recordings. If you have really niche interests it sometimes was literally the only way to get copies of some tracks, especially rare remixes.
I just pay for Youtube Premium and I have REDacted, Orpheus and Jpopsuki for anything specific that’s not on YouTube
New Pipe and Freetube are great free alternatives to YouTube.
Is it fair to call them alternatives? They’re just alternative front-ends to YouTube. I use Revanced along with Youtube Premium so I can use SponsorBlock along with not having ads
I’d say so. Considering both are free. And it’s not YouTube. Yes it’s using the front ends to YouTube, but I only need to use one app. Jerboa would be considered an alternative to Connect, would it not?
I just don’t see a point either in paying YouTube subscription to use extra features and not have ads, when New Pipe and Freetube both do that without extra steps.
I guess that makes sense. I’ve just always liked the YouTube Mobile UI and don’t see a reason to move away from it. Premium Family in my country is so cheap I pay less than half a US dollar every month for it
Understandable. And that’s not a bad deal, pretty cheap. YouTube UI is not bad at all either. I preferred New Pipe because I didn’t have to pay for it lol
@yoichi @4onTheFloor
I use YouTube revanced simply because of sponsorblock and return youtube dislike.
Those features don’t come with premium.