What is ownership in the digital age?The big media companies want to redefine what it means to purchase content. They want everything to be a rental, even if...
Most of my music is “pirated” because you can’t find it on any streaming platform, it’s usually a YT download, often for game OSTs (often ones I own a copy of), and offline play allows stuff like Music Speed Changer to change the pitch and speed of the music!
I see more often than I’d like to see retconned and greyed out releases in my playlist…
The fuck am I paying them.
God do I hate those publisher licensing agreements.
If it was just for game OSTs and other less common music. Over time I noticed that my playlists on streaming services start losing songs, mainstream music. Sometimes this is because an artist leaves one label for another, but sometimes I have no explanation. And I don’t even notice that until “hey, I haven’t heard that song in years… wait, where is it? where are these albums??” It’s frustrating. This pushed me to pirate music again.
For me, I subscribe to Deezer (or you can do a trial) and run Deemix which is able to download the music in MP3 or FLAC. It directly downloads the music using Deezer’s API.
As far as organizing it goes, I typically just host it with Plex or a Subsonic player like Navidrome.
I bought an album off iTunes last year in September. I made the mistake of joining Apple Music and it completely fucked my offline music library. So I had to revert to a backup prior to September.
Went back to download that album and was told I couldn’t because it’s no longer available in my region.
It’s okay to buy it but you can somehow lose access to it because rights expired that had no bearing on you.
It’s fucking stupid and they wonder why people pirate when they pull shit like this.
I have the opposite experience. I have a heap of MP3s and flacs and those live on some hard drives.
Apple Music was like “wanna twy?” And I was like “aite sure”. I love having lossless of basically everything when I’m not at home, and iOS doesn’t touch my at-home collection.
I guess the problem is buying DRM music. I never trusted any of that.
It used to work for me for years and then it gave it up for some reason I can’t remember. Though this was under iTunes Match which is still sort of the same thing, just exclusively for uploading music but no streaming what you haven’t uploaded or purchased.
Though, it did replace some of my music for clean versions which I despise. Music I’ve had for decades and have no copies of any longer…I would be morally justified pirating the right copies, but it’s too many to go through.
What they did this last time was that they replaced more of my music with different versions. I’m talking very different versions to what my CDs had from back when these were CDs my dad let me rip when I was a teen decades ago and they replaced some of my music with versions that didn’t download correctly and couldn’t be played anymore. Almost like corrupt copies.
My offline music library was a mess. 60+ GB worth of music, most of it was inaccessible anymore and would give me strange errors like it wasn’t available in my region anymore despite it being music I uploaded. Apparently others have experienced similarly recently and the only fix was if you have a backup to restore from backup.
That is super fucked and I’m so sorry that happened.
Replacing for clean versions though, that’s hilarious. Like WHY?!
I’m not blaming you AT ALL because software should never fuck with your music irreparably. I’m just paranoid something is going to go wrong with my collection I’ve curated for 15+ years, I keep it backed up on multiple drives now.
…after I had a HDD die.
I do love Apple Music though. It’s super cheap for having lossless shit everywhere, and I’m not a shill I PROMISE I USE LINUX ALSO AND UNFORTUNATELY PREDOMINATELY WINDOWS 10 AAAAAAAAAA
Music purchased from the iTunes Store is DRM free though. I think they actually upgraded purchases made prior to this change to DRM free versions (called iTunes Plus or something).
So many japanese creators still limiting themselve to CD releases (local only obviously so get fucked and export them) or making it a limited edition is so annoying…
It’s totally dumb because it’s not about getting a good deal for consumers or artists, purely about rights-holders maximising revenue. If they can’t negotiate a good enough deal in a region they’ll simply not allow it to be streamed. This is what happens when they separate the cultural value of “content” from the monetary value of it, the perceived desirability. Viewers and listeners want a good show to watch or album to hear, rights-holders simply want to get a good deal, regardless of what the stuff it.
Yeah, I once discovered an artist, even bought some albums, only to notice about a year later that the place I discovered them was now blocked in my country. If I would’ve come a year later, I would never have bought these albums.
Whenever I release music myself, I actively block it in Russia, because they relentlessly steal my trance / freeform releases and upload them in warez sites.
Of course geoblocking can be circumvented by a determined pirate but it helps to not be on their radar in first place as a lesser known artist.
As an example, once I released a freeform album. Freeform is a very niche, small scene. It was on Russian forums within a couple of days. Fortunately one of my fans notified me, I had a Russian friend contact the site on my behalf to explain that I’m a poor struggling artist, and they’re literally taking money out of my pocket; to my surprise they agreed to take the links down.
Having a sale price adjusted for local currency would likely go a long way, and I don’t mean just a price conversion I mean an adjusted sale price. Some regions 9£ is a lot of money vs their monthly income and others it’s not much at all.
Not so much currently (in the case of Russia) as you likely can’t sell it there due to sanctions, but in general that would help a lot in boosting sales vs piracy.
I agree. I think people have taken my comment as a defence of the geoblocking, was just offering an example of why someone like a small indie musician may choose to do that. I do find it frustrating when I have to VPN to a different country to watch a video.
But the reason I geoblock one country isn’t to be an arsehole, it’s because Russia has no recourse for indie musicians like myself who have their music stolen. They have no law preventing music theft which is why it’s rampant in that one territory (not saying it doesn’t ever happen elsewhere). Pretty much the entire rest of the world has some sort of avenue where I can issue something like a dmca.
They have proven many times over that pirating/accessibility have inverse relationship.
My most frustrating example was when I needed one song for a project my wife was working on a long time ago. I looked to try to purchase it online and could only find it on iTunes. In order to purchase from iTunes you had to download the application and install it. However I had an old machine running Linux… By the time I figured this all out I had spent 2 hours trying to pay $0.99 for one song. I could not find an approved way to do it. So I went the alternative route and had the song in under 5 minutes.
They keep pushing accessibility down recently. I am not playing their games again. When they want to be reasonable they will get paid.
People say this all the time about Spotify, but it’s actually a viable outlet for revenue if you’re on a decent label who understands how to leverage playlists.
Obv that doesn’t apply for freeform… but for styles like trance, techno, DnB etc it’s not unheard of for a track to get 500k streams across a variety of playlists, which equates to $1500.
Got a sample preview of your favorite release?
I don’t think it would be wise to dox myself here after I’ve made an unpopular comment!
Hard to say really. I’m fairly sure if it was available online for free, less people would have bought it.
When you’re talking only £2000 or so of sales for a small indie release, piracy makes a huge hit to sales. My more popular stuff like trance, the sales drop off a cliff the moment it’s leaked. There was a huge problem with people on promo lists leaking pre-released tracks to warez sites, not sure if the main labels (eg ones like Armada, Anjuna etc) ever got to the bottom of it, but it really hurt the sales of people who aren’t exactly making bank from their music
I guess, I just don’t see many people getting something for free then deciding to go buy it out of the goodness of their heart… maybe I’m too pessimistic.
I try not to pirate music production software because I make some small money from my music, and I’ve personally seen companies go bust and get snapped up by Apple because everyone (me included) justified pirating their small plugins as “they’re making lots of money anyway”. But I justify pirating shit like Adobe to myself I hate paying a subscription to use software. I dunno maybe more people have this mindset than I realise and are happy to pay after ‘trying before buying’.
I’m interested to hear responses from anyone who genuinely buys the music they enjoy after pirating it. Why would they not just buy it in the first place?
This is actually one of the less effective examples of geoblocking that someone could ever imagine.
Russian warez sites are only “Russian” because they’re run by local admins as pirate sites located in the Global South have tendency to have a longer lifespan and less chances to end their days by being raided than hosted in the Western world. Most part of such sites users / uploaders are from worldwide, for example, if you’ll check your active peers for any active rutracker upload, you’ll see, that only small part of them have Russian flag. So such geoblocking makes literally zero impact, as it never prevents user from any other country from uploading the tunes to such website.
Also all Russian users are already geoblocked, as they won’t buy anything from you (even if they would want to) because most of webservices that you could use to promote your album won’t be able to charge their cards due to sanctions. And if some of such users use foreign VPN + credit card combo and are able to use such services, they are not affected by your geoblocking, as they’re attached to different region.
Yeah, this is the thing that’s making me want to go back to having a private music library again. I pay for this shit, and they keep removing songs from my play lists.
I started back up again with Lidarr + Plexamp, with the noted exception that I’ve actually tried to buy music from Bandcamp.
Not everything I want is available on the high seas
I’m at a place financially where I can drop $40 on something like Lagwagon’s back catalog.
Honestly? It’s way better than Spotify - the Plexamp DJs work really well, I can offline download albums for runs/work (where I’m in the basement and have zero cell coverage).
If you are looking for an open source alternative to plexamp I recommend checking out Logitech Media Server. Don’t let the Logitech in the name fool you.
I’ve done the same. You can get some obscure stuff from soulseek if Lidarr isn’t finding all the stuff you want. I’m mostly using that and just using Lidarr for organizing and tracking.
You’re 100% right about the plexamp DJs. They’re super good. Love the deepcuts one.
If you own your music, you can have it in a digital format and copy it somewhere else.
I’m an old millennial that started with dial-up and downloaded MP3s from IRC/Napster/Kazaa/torrents.
Eventually I started to buy what I could on CD then ripped them, then bought MP3s when possible. Otherwise I don’t mind using yt-dlp.
Those MP3s have been played by a portable CD player, then a Samsung MP3 player, then 3 or 4 phones. I’m still playing that collection on my actual phone, using Poweramp.
The device that plays the files may not last but you can certainly copy those elsewhere and do what you want with them, for as long as you want.
Sure they do. I’ve got a Sansa Clip that I bought back in 2008 for $50 that’s still going strong, especially now that I’ve loaded Rockbox on it and it can play formats other than MP3. iPods especially are famous for basically living forever, especially if you flash-mod them (replace the hard drive with something solid state, like an SD card), possibly also replacing the battery if it’s stopped holding a charge.
DIY repair work isn’t for everyone, but it doesn’t get much easier than fixing an old iPod (the older the better).
I’ve got 3 iPods. The nano I got way back in like 2006, and two gen4s I bought 5yrs ago. They’ve all been modded with new batteries and ssds, but they all work just fine.
My only reason besides stuff being free is that I want my music library offline. There are some services like Bandcamp that offer it, but it would not cover a meaningful percentage of all my library. Not gonna buy and rip CDs myself as well
I try to buy all my music directly from the artist in CD form whenever possible. Whenever that’s not possible, I try to get a version that I can save locally & play offline…
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.
Most of my music is “pirated” because you can’t find it on any streaming platform, it’s usually a YT download, often for game OSTs (often ones I own a copy of), and offline play allows stuff like Music Speed Changer to change the pitch and speed of the music!
I see more often than I’d like to see retconned and greyed out releases in my playlist…
The fuck am I paying them.
God do I hate those publisher licensing agreements.
Ahh remember the good ol times when you could insert a jrpg cd into a cd player and could listen to all the music.
Many games did this. Dungeon Keeper, Theme Hospital and the GTA games are the ones I can think of right now.
I used to rock out to Quake II late into the night.
650MB CD media. The game itself was 40-50MB and the rest 500-600MB was the audio in wav (CD player compatible) type
I know but its still cool af
yeah I mostly commented that because the fact that the game itself is so much smaller than the audio is impressive and funny at the same time
If it was just for game OSTs and other less common music. Over time I noticed that my playlists on streaming services start losing songs, mainstream music. Sometimes this is because an artist leaves one label for another, but sometimes I have no explanation. And I don’t even notice that until “hey, I haven’t heard that song in years… wait, where is it? where are these albums??” It’s frustrating. This pushed me to pirate music again.
Just highly theoretical, how would one have the best possible experience pirating music via DDL (no torrenting) and organizing it?
Usenet and Soulseek
For me, I subscribe to Deezer (or you can do a trial) and run Deemix which is able to download the music in MP3 or FLAC. It directly downloads the music using Deezer’s API.
As far as organizing it goes, I typically just host it with Plex or a Subsonic player like Navidrome.
Any similar tool for Spotify so I don’t have to record a digital interface?
Zotify
bandcamp but pay the artists please it’s really fun to do i promise
I bought an album off iTunes last year in September. I made the mistake of joining Apple Music and it completely fucked my offline music library. So I had to revert to a backup prior to September.
Went back to download that album and was told I couldn’t because it’s no longer available in my region.
It’s okay to buy it but you can somehow lose access to it because rights expired that had no bearing on you.
It’s fucking stupid and they wonder why people pirate when they pull shit like this.
I have the opposite experience. I have a heap of MP3s and flacs and those live on some hard drives.
Apple Music was like “wanna twy?” And I was like “aite sure”. I love having lossless of basically everything when I’m not at home, and iOS doesn’t touch my at-home collection.
I guess the problem is buying DRM music. I never trusted any of that.
It used to work for me for years and then it gave it up for some reason I can’t remember. Though this was under iTunes Match which is still sort of the same thing, just exclusively for uploading music but no streaming what you haven’t uploaded or purchased.
Though, it did replace some of my music for clean versions which I despise. Music I’ve had for decades and have no copies of any longer…I would be morally justified pirating the right copies, but it’s too many to go through.
What they did this last time was that they replaced more of my music with different versions. I’m talking very different versions to what my CDs had from back when these were CDs my dad let me rip when I was a teen decades ago and they replaced some of my music with versions that didn’t download correctly and couldn’t be played anymore. Almost like corrupt copies.
My offline music library was a mess. 60+ GB worth of music, most of it was inaccessible anymore and would give me strange errors like it wasn’t available in my region anymore despite it being music I uploaded. Apparently others have experienced similarly recently and the only fix was if you have a backup to restore from backup.
That is super fucked and I’m so sorry that happened.
Replacing for clean versions though, that’s hilarious. Like WHY?!
I’m not blaming you AT ALL because software should never fuck with your music irreparably. I’m just paranoid something is going to go wrong with my collection I’ve curated for 15+ years, I keep it backed up on multiple drives now.
…after I had a HDD die.
I do love Apple Music though. It’s super cheap for having lossless shit everywhere, and I’m not a shill I PROMISE I USE LINUX ALSO AND UNFORTUNATELY PREDOMINATELY WINDOWS 10 AAAAAAAAAA
That’s like the number one rule of software design: preserve user data at all cost!
Music purchased from the iTunes Store is DRM free though. I think they actually upgraded purchases made prior to this change to DRM free versions (called iTunes Plus or something).
That’s fair, but the only music I’d ever purchase are flac files I just can have, outside of an ecosystem of any sort. And I say this as an iOS lover!
Quoting Cyberpunk 2077: fuck corpos
BURN
CORPO
SHIT
It’s pretty dumb when record companies limit distribution by region like this.
So many japanese creators still limiting themselve to CD releases (local only obviously so get fucked and export them) or making it a limited edition is so annoying…
In some cases some songs might even be only available in country specific versions of an album
It’s totally dumb because it’s not about getting a good deal for consumers or artists, purely about rights-holders maximising revenue. If they can’t negotiate a good enough deal in a region they’ll simply not allow it to be streamed. This is what happens when they separate the cultural value of “content” from the monetary value of it, the perceived desirability. Viewers and listeners want a good show to watch or album to hear, rights-holders simply want to get a good deal, regardless of what the stuff it.
Yeah, I once discovered an artist, even bought some albums, only to notice about a year later that the place I discovered them was now blocked in my country. If I would’ve come a year later, I would never have bought these albums.
Whenever I release music myself, I actively block it in Russia, because they relentlessly steal my trance / freeform releases and upload them in warez sites.
Of course geoblocking can be circumvented by a determined pirate but it helps to not be on their radar in first place as a lesser known artist.
As an example, once I released a freeform album. Freeform is a very niche, small scene. It was on Russian forums within a couple of days. Fortunately one of my fans notified me, I had a Russian friend contact the site on my behalf to explain that I’m a poor struggling artist, and they’re literally taking money out of my pocket; to my surprise they agreed to take the links down.
Bruh this is piracy community, fuck geoblock
Pirating from massive companies who exploit their workers and customers is different from pirating small indie artists, surely?
Yes it is different in my opinion. If you have a fair and easy way to pay for your product I will buy it.
Exactly. I had a 12 track album up for £9, or single tracks for 99p, don’t think that’s unreasonable!
Having a sale price adjusted for local currency would likely go a long way, and I don’t mean just a price conversion I mean an adjusted sale price. Some regions 9£ is a lot of money vs their monthly income and others it’s not much at all.
Not so much currently (in the case of Russia) as you likely can’t sell it there due to sanctions, but in general that would help a lot in boosting sales vs piracy.
I agree. I think people have taken my comment as a defence of the geoblocking, was just offering an example of why someone like a small indie musician may choose to do that. I do find it frustrating when I have to VPN to a different country to watch a video.
But the reason I geoblock one country isn’t to be an arsehole, it’s because Russia has no recourse for indie musicians like myself who have their music stolen. They have no law preventing music theft which is why it’s rampant in that one territory (not saying it doesn’t ever happen elsewhere). Pretty much the entire rest of the world has some sort of avenue where I can issue something like a dmca.
They have proven many times over that pirating/accessibility have inverse relationship.
My most frustrating example was when I needed one song for a project my wife was working on a long time ago. I looked to try to purchase it online and could only find it on iTunes. In order to purchase from iTunes you had to download the application and install it. However I had an old machine running Linux… By the time I figured this all out I had spent 2 hours trying to pay $0.99 for one song. I could not find an approved way to do it. So I went the alternative route and had the song in under 5 minutes.
They keep pushing accessibility down recently. I am not playing their games again. When they want to be reasonable they will get paid.
That’d be pretty hard to do over the internet.
Ah come on you know what I meant.
Got a sample preview of your favorite release?
(Presumably you’re not on Spotify since they’re not paying anything.)
People say this all the time about Spotify, but it’s actually a viable outlet for revenue if you’re on a decent label who understands how to leverage playlists.
Obv that doesn’t apply for freeform… but for styles like trance, techno, DnB etc it’s not unheard of for a track to get 500k streams across a variety of playlists, which equates to $1500.
I don’t think it would be wise to dox myself here after I’ve made an unpopular comment!
Did the sales increase as an effect of them taking it down?
Hard to say really. I’m fairly sure if it was available online for free, less people would have bought it.
When you’re talking only £2000 or so of sales for a small indie release, piracy makes a huge hit to sales. My more popular stuff like trance, the sales drop off a cliff the moment it’s leaked. There was a huge problem with people on promo lists leaking pre-released tracks to warez sites, not sure if the main labels (eg ones like Armada, Anjuna etc) ever got to the bottom of it, but it really hurt the sales of people who aren’t exactly making bank from their music
It can go both ways since a lot of people discover music through piracy too
I guess, I just don’t see many people getting something for free then deciding to go buy it out of the goodness of their heart… maybe I’m too pessimistic.
I try not to pirate music production software because I make some small money from my music, and I’ve personally seen companies go bust and get snapped up by Apple because everyone (me included) justified pirating their small plugins as “they’re making lots of money anyway”. But I justify pirating shit like Adobe to myself I hate paying a subscription to use software. I dunno maybe more people have this mindset than I realise and are happy to pay after ‘trying before buying’.
I’m interested to hear responses from anyone who genuinely buys the music they enjoy after pirating it. Why would they not just buy it in the first place?
This is actually one of the less effective examples of geoblocking that someone could ever imagine.
Russian warez sites are only “Russian” because they’re run by local admins as pirate sites located in the Global South have tendency to have a longer lifespan and less chances to end their days by being raided than hosted in the Western world. Most part of such sites users / uploaders are from worldwide, for example, if you’ll check your active peers for any active rutracker upload, you’ll see, that only small part of them have Russian flag. So such geoblocking makes literally zero impact, as it never prevents user from any other country from uploading the tunes to such website.
Also all Russian users are already geoblocked, as they won’t buy anything from you (even if they would want to) because most of webservices that you could use to promote your album won’t be able to charge their cards due to sanctions. And if some of such users use foreign VPN + credit card combo and are able to use such services, they are not affected by your geoblocking, as they’re attached to different region.
stay cheeky breeky friend.
I see what you did there ;)
This youtube link contains a tracking code ?si=… Remember to remove it next time.
Quick guide that’s been shared around online lately for those unsure what this is:
Nice link you have there as an example :)
You know the rules and so do I
this bothered me for a long time about youtube links. thanks for the incredible infographic
What word did he keep bleeping out?
enshittification?
“Enshittification”
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/7CDKvdlD6uQ?si=5AQ8Z5TbLTdUwCf1
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yeah, this is the thing that’s making me want to go back to having a private music library again. I pay for this shit, and they keep removing songs from my play lists.
I am thinking of doing the same thing. I will setup Navidrome to stream it.
I started back up again with Lidarr + Plexamp, with the noted exception that I’ve actually tried to buy music from Bandcamp.
Honestly? It’s way better than Spotify - the Plexamp DJs work really well, I can offline download albums for runs/work (where I’m in the basement and have zero cell coverage).
If you are looking for an open source alternative to plexamp I recommend checking out Logitech Media Server. Don’t let the Logitech in the name fool you.
I’ve done the same. You can get some obscure stuff from soulseek if Lidarr isn’t finding all the stuff you want. I’m mostly using that and just using Lidarr for organizing and tracking.
You’re 100% right about the plexamp DJs. They’re super good. Love the deepcuts one.
You were foolish to have ever given it up in the first place.
You know hardware doesn’t last forever right? Like, I couldn’t just have kept my ipod for 20 years bcz it wouldn’t even be functional.
If you own your music, you can have it in a digital format and copy it somewhere else.
I’m an old millennial that started with dial-up and downloaded MP3s from IRC/Napster/Kazaa/torrents.
Eventually I started to buy what I could on CD then ripped them, then bought MP3s when possible. Otherwise I don’t mind using yt-dlp.
Those MP3s have been played by a portable CD player, then a Samsung MP3 player, then 3 or 4 phones. I’m still playing that collection on my actual phone, using Poweramp.
The device that plays the files may not last but you can certainly copy those elsewhere and do what you want with them, for as long as you want.
Sure they do. I’ve got a Sansa Clip that I bought back in 2008 for $50 that’s still going strong, especially now that I’ve loaded Rockbox on it and it can play formats other than MP3. iPods especially are famous for basically living forever, especially if you flash-mod them (replace the hard drive with something solid state, like an SD card), possibly also replacing the battery if it’s stopped holding a charge.
DIY repair work isn’t for everyone, but it doesn’t get much easier than fixing an old iPod (the older the better).
I’ve got 3 iPods. The nano I got way back in like 2006, and two gen4s I bought 5yrs ago. They’ve all been modded with new batteries and ssds, but they all work just fine.
My only reason besides stuff being free is that I want my music library offline. There are some services like Bandcamp that offer it, but it would not cover a meaningful percentage of all my library. Not gonna buy and rip CDs myself as well
I try to buy all my music directly from the artist in CD form whenever possible. Whenever that’s not possible, I try to get a version that I can save locally & play offline…
Bandcamp is also good. You get flac downloads and the artists get money and more so than on other platforms
I am curious how they will continue their business now that they are for sale.
Never tried bandcamp, but will have to try it out soon…
removed by mod
It is not only about that is about real ownership of the media.
Some songs get completely yanked. You can list them, you can scrape them with the Spotify API. And you can see the available countries is empty.
It’s as if they’re asking to be pirated.
they’re asking for you to hand over your wallet, repeatedly