Visits to music piracy websites went up more than 13 percent last year, a new report says. The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
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.
You totally don’t want to just learn Linux command line and how to use the youtube-dl/yt-dlp packages through WSL or a Linux distro, that would deny corporations all of your money and be way too convenient. Thankfully it’s not intuitive to learn or there would be so much more piracy!
Yt-dlp is also available on Windows. No reason to spin up wsl or a Linux distro. There are also plenty of yt-dlp apps with GUI for those who don’t want to use a terminal.
Didn’t realize, good to know, thank you!
You want a good paid VPN first. Mullvad is amazing.
VPNs see everything you do, and you pay them for it. I don’t understand how people don’t see the irony there.
they in theory see everything someone does, but in the case of mullvad they have no idea who you are
Could you say how Mullvad differs from ProtonVPN? I have it with my mail subscription and it seems pretty good. I don’t know much about vpns though
haven’t looked into protonvpn much, but it’s more or less a different company providing the same service. I imagine the differences aren’t too significant if you trust both companies
The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
This is not piracy. We’ve always been allowed to record e.g. radio and TV for personal use.
I think the RIAA has a different view on that. Huge push backs against recordable cassettes and VHS tapes when they were introduced.
They def would’ve done radio drm if possible
I could be wrong but didn’t a cut from blank tapes go to the industry tp ‘make up for the losses’?
The Netherlands had a tax on blank CDs to “compensate” authors, essentially legalizing piracy (until the EU changed the rules).
Ah that might have been it. I vaguely remember hearing about it at the time.
My dad always got a huge kick out of VHSing NFL games to watch later lol.
Downloading YouTube isn’t piracy lol it’s time shifting.
TiVo has entered the chat.
What’s that?
TiVo was an early digital video recorder that dominated the market for a while. Broadcasters brought lawsuits against the company saying the recording of videos was violating copyright laws, and advertisers hated it because you could skip commercials. TiVo argued in court that they weren’t pirating, but just time shifting the content. Similar arguments were used for people who ripped rented dvds and so on.
They really went hard on VCRs before all of that for the same reasons. Fortunately the time shifting argument was able to be backed by the courts. Otherwise TiVo and so many other formats would’ve basically been banned from the general public being able to have anything nice. Was especially important rulings for forcing most content providers and/or studios into using new ideas and technologies. They are the ones that hold back on everything that could actually make it easier to legally enjoy content.
They make things require so many hoops to go through and like a punishment for wanting to enjoy anything legally. While also making it cost more on their end overall. If these companies were to embrace stuff like torrenting tech, then it would mean less overall costs needed to always be running. We have so many ways of getting stuff from here to there and making sure media is not lost. Copyrights should at best last like 10 years imo. These companies still can’t even be bothered to allow me to buy movies and shows digitally that maybe got a DVD release. So if they won’t give options, then they forfeit the right to claim any “damages” or “lost sales.”
Mfw the kids don’t know about TiVo
It’s in the lexicon, but not the vernacular…
Oh god, I’m old…
Wow so we call downloading YouTube piracy?
I guess most content creators are pirates.
Wow, that’s stupid. I consider ripping songs from YouTube to be the modern equivalent of taping songs off the radio. The quality is poor.
Basically, but it’s low hanging fruit. Kids not ripping a 20gb disco from pirate bay at school but they most certainly will download a song off YouTube.
Shoot I remember back in the mid 2000s with my shitty mp3 player ripping music in any class with a computer.
I never stopped but i started buying music too from small artists
I feel like Bandcamp’s biggest fans are prolific pirates with a conscience who just want to see their favorite artists actually get paid.
EDIT: Don’t forget it’s Bandcamp Friday today.
bandcamp sold out
look forward to its demise
But we’ll still need a proper place to support our favorite creators (where the artists actually receive some of the money). I wonder where people will migrate next.
Haven’t heard about that one, thank you for the heads-up.
First impressions:
- From top 10 artists i follow:
- 5/10 have profile and uploaded at least one song on Bandcamp.
- 3/10 have an account on Audius (possibility to donate).
- 1/10 has uploaded at least one song on Audius.
- One MUST upload a profile picture to create an account.
- About 1/3 of proposed artists during account creation have uploaded <5 songs, most seem to be remix and cover artists.
- Didn’t figure out how to search for artists during account creation, ended up choosing 2/3 artists I’ve never heard of.
- Not immediately apparent whether I can download bought music to a lossless format.
- Not sure how to buy album or individual song at first glance.
- LOTS of remixes and covers, not so much original songs (this is both good and bad).
- Nice that you can donate arbitrary amount without buying anything, in case you already got the music from… other places…
- I didn’t find anyplace where “$AUDIO” is explained, how much the artist receives, or what you receive if anything.
Less relevant observations:
- weird pause/play button, sometimes there’s just a loading wheel spinning where it’s supposed to be, not really functional.
- Slightly intrusive, had to disable some plugins (Javascript (obviously it’s playing music) and fingerprinting (cloudflare?)) for the site to load. Not relevant to music, but just a general observation since we’re in the piracy community.
Not much going on by now, but it probably just needs some time to grow and assimilate the likely soon-to-be-migrating Bandcamp user base. I’ll keep an eye on it, and probably revisit it once more artists have migrated to it.
Thanks for the detailed obesrvation! Yeah unfortunately it still has some technical issues and shortcomings but imo this platform has some great potential.
- From top 10 artists i follow:
The economics with the artists haven’t changed. Until they do I’ll still use them to pay artists a living wage.
That’s super based. Pirate whoever’s stuff you want, but small artists usually depend on that income.
Small artists depend on their income from their 9 to 5 jobs. The music is a bonus
Source - been there
I listen to hundreds of small artists. I can’t buy every singles albums they have.
You don’t have to. Buy the ones you think are worth it, attend shows and maybe buy merch. Like we used to do before leechify
Same issue, I don’t have enough money to support everybody
I have never pirated music more in my life as I do now.
I have never purchased as much music as I do now.
I never stopped either, but i buy vinyl…slowed down since my turntable only spins at 33.3 in special occasions when the spirits shine upon it.
Belt driven? May need new belt.
Its a technics DD. I think its a mk 2 or 3 model. When its off its consistently off. Like it still locks into a speed its just the wrong speed.
I think its an electrical issue and im too afraid to take it apart while it still works sometimes. I probably couldnt fix anyway
That could be simple to fix. I bought a used SL-1500 which had the issue that it’d only spin at 33rpm. 45rpm didn’t work. I opened it up and with some tuner spray I washed the switch (spraying it, switching it back and forth). Now as good as new. These things are built like tanks
Oh yeah that’s way out of my wheelhouse too lol. Hopefully someone online has or posts a video on fixing it (or at least a similar table with the same issue)!
Is t it funny how this seems to be happening in every industry possible? And it’s always reported with sUcH sURpRisE!
Like, we are being abused by capitalists. It feels good to steal. Because they can’t stop taking more and more from us, squeezing us harder and harder.
When you present us with ease of use and a reasonable price point, we are happy with the trade. But they need their returns to keep growing, so they keep squeezing us harder. Their investors demand the line go up. So they squeeze us harder. They need to cut costs, so they squeeze us harder.
It never stops. So we turn to theft. Because they’ve literally left us no choice.
To be fair we’ve never had more choice, and music has almost never been more affordable. We used to buy singles for like $10+. Albums for $20+. Now there are several competing streaming services where we can listen to almost unlimited music each month for less than the cost of one album. Hell, YouTube Premium includes unlimited music steaming for free. Being an independent artist has never been easier, and you can find and pay for any music you like directly with millions of your favourite artists all over the world. The industry used to be entirely controlled by large labels. Honestly, I consider the industry far healthier than it used to be.
I pirate movies and shows because they refuse to create a Spotify-like service. Content is fragmented across a dozen services, they’re infested with ads, content quality keeps declining, the interfaces suck, and prices are outpacing inflation. I pay for Spotify because it’s still a good service for a reasonable price.
on top of that music streaming services dont have exclusives like tv/film so you aren’t forced to get multiple
So right now, I have Radarr and Sonarr automate everything to plex.
Is there a way, I can automate:
I add to Spotify playlist (I would keep Spotify free as it is good at finding things for me)
Something detects it
Something downloads it
It shows up in PlexAmp
Ive been paying for Spotify premium because I need it for my job and I don’t want to spend a ton of time tweaking and naming things. I’d rather use PlexAmp and stop paying if possible but I’d like it to be easy (with a little work here and there) like my arr+plex setup.
Am I asking for something that doesn’t exist?
This is my time to shine !
I am currently working on this and have a prototype that I am testing : https://github.com/P6g9YHK6/SpotifyRipper
When I have the time to polish it I will dockerise the solution to have an automated spotify scraper ATM it is manually run but works pretty well 🥳
Pull requests are welcome for anything on the todo list 🫡 And github stars will help boost this project popularity 🥰
This looks cool!
Unfortunately I don’t know anything about Python or docker… Thanks for the link, maybe I’ll try and figure this out on my next holiday.
Just released an update that should take care of most of the libraries requirement for you. Just follow the instructions and it should work
Oh thank god, some songs for some reason are ONLY on Spotify and it drives me nuts
This was one of the issue I had too… I could not make lidarr work with my music tastes so I spent a couple of days prototyping with spotdl to get this working correctly and ended with the current version of the ripper I run it once a week to get the new favs and weekly playlist
I want to preface this by saying I have not tried this.
Lidarr is for music and their documentation says you can have import lists for spotify playlists.
I have done this. it can be quite messy but it will definitely import the albums of all the music you have either liked or followed or in playlist in Spotify.
I’m not 100% that it will actually organize it as it was originally on Spotify, though, just that it adds the list’s contents as “wanted tracks”. I assume there’s some way to do this but I haven’t looked into it enough yet.
It’s still on my list, along with figuring out how to get Critical Role working with my Sonarr so I can be done with YouTube frontends…
Hmmm… Maybe I’ll have to try this on my next holiday or long weekend and play around with it
Syncthing and Spotdl. Syncthing can sync folders over a network. Spotdl can download content from a playlist; it is multi-threaded and skips already existing or duplicate songs. It took me 20 minutes to automate everything. Syncthing and Spotdl start on startup and do their thing every 10 minutes.
Soulseek for life! There should be a documentary about this because…. how? How has this been able to go this strong for so long? One of the first installs on any new OS I spin up. And when it comes to supporting the artists? Live shows and merch, when possible.
Yes, word of mouth. I love my band shirts. It’s always a great conversation starter. I have SXM, that’s how I learned about Motionless in White, Beartooth, Starset, and Ice Nine Kills.
But I also have my own collection on my 1tb sd card in my phone.
Because they dont advertise the fact that theyre a music sharing platform. Its the most basic possible p2p platform that can exist and they dont seek the laws attention like Napster did.
They also comply with requests to blacklist certain artist search results. Try searching for the Beatles on slsk, you dont get any results.
My searches for Michael Jackson also gets zero hits which I thought was bizarre. This explains it
Search for album names
Weird… yt-dlp -f “ba” url
Never need to use one of those horrible malware laden download sites again…
That’s not how I would get a discography, a non YouTube artist (some international ones), a whole album or lossless though - or am I mistaken?
I think he is talking about this
The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
Makes sense, thanks for pointing it out!
Just FYI, yt-dlp does work with other sites, too. So you can get some pretty decent quality by downloading from bandcamp for example. But not all that what your asking for unfortunately…
Soulseek
Or Nicotine+ (a great Soulseek client)
What are the two things?
It’s a direct p2p connection to a single user for downloads. It’s not swarm style like bittorrent. It’s also a great resource for really rare / out of print stuff.
I used it without a vpn for years and never got a single nastygram from my ISP. I think I started with a beta release back around 2000 because I used to be cool like that.
Share your music library, download directly from other users library. Both are compatible, just different clients.
Soulseek still going strong yes.
If I cannot buy on Bandcamp or Boomkat or directly from the artist then I sail the high seas, proudly.
I refuse to stream.
I want to counter that buying individual songs and albums would get too expensive compared to streaming, but then I realized I’ve been listening to the same set of playlists in the past few years and the total cost of streaming subscription in those period is probably more than enough to buy those songs.
Heh. I never thought about it this way. I just need to finish downloading my Spotify playlists I guess, then plexamp l the way
My current favorites playlist, accumulated over 15+ years, is 4,235 songs. I don’t think I can afford to buy that.
Looks like you’ve paid 15 years * 12 months / year * $10 / month = $1800
Seems like you’re getting a pretty good deal!
Assuming each of those tracks is about 3.5 min long, that’s about 250 hours of music. Given your numbers they paid an average of 7 bucks per hour of music.
For context, 25 years ago a typical 45 minute album would fetch 15 bucks. And that’s not accounting for inflation adjustment.
I’m sure that’s totally sustainable for those artists…
One, this is just my favorites list, not every album I’ve listened to. And I’ve listened to my playlists on random quite a few times over the years.
Two, I don’t listen to pop music, so the average is probably closer to 4-5 minutes per song. (About 362 hrs of music on the playlist, if you must know.)
Three, you can’t just plug in a yearly rate, convert it to hours, and use it in any meaningful way.
Your first two paragraphs make the picture worse, not better.
As for your last, I’m not writing an economics thesis. It was a quick analysis to illustrate a problem no sane person disputes: streaming services have substantially driven down revenue for artists, to the point that for many it’s genuinely impossible to create their art while making a living wage.
Is it better than piracy? Sure. At least the artists are getting something (well, unless you drop below Spotify’s streaming cutoff, in which case you can get fucked). But it’s still a shitty deal and gives consumers someone else to blame as artists slowly bleed out.
I have 44k songs in 13 years
My philosophy goes like this: Pay for the hardware, get the content for free.
That’s how it is in Switzerland: you pay a small piracy tax on every storage medium, in return downloading films and series is legal (but not uploading, though I never got a problem with torrenting)
This is the way.
This is the way
wakes up in 2002
The Napster has you, Neo
Your comment just made me smile. Those were the days.
Shared a news about piracy, link to paywall Wired.com. the irony
How do I pirate the article?
Like this.
