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.
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.