cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/726542
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!
The thing is, you barely support the artists you’re listening to when you use spotify.
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
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 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.
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.
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)
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 am supporting the artist to some extent. Stealing Spotify content would be adding insult to injury imo
If you primarily consume content through Spotify or streaming you are supporting office with fractions of a penny per stream.
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 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.
I’m really happy with just downloading directly from youtube
I guess that will do if the kind of music you listen to doesn’t need to be high quality.
You know, I don’t even comprehend what that means. Quality? you mean 720p?
As long as I can hear it, that’s fine to me, I’m not an audiophile so I really can’t tell the difference and I have cheap $20 headphones and $4 earphones, idk man.
Same concept as 720p vs 1080p but not exactly. Audio can be compressed in the same way that video can; certain flavour gets lost for the sake of smaller file size. In video, that means loss of colour spectrum, visuals aren’t as sharp and even artifacting when pushed too far. In audio that translates to loss of range so certain instruments can completely disappear from a song, other instruments aren’t as crisp and so on. Depending on those $20 headphones, you might be able to make out a difference. The earphones, it’s much less likely. There are some $20 earphones such as KBEars which are far better than they have any right to be and make being an audiophile more accessible, if it ever tickles your fancy.
Two simple facts of good audio: 1: Good audio stays good so no need to worry about age so long as equipment hasn’t been abused. 2: You can only spend so much before you get diminishing returns.
YouTube has audio in Opus format@~150kbit/s. Opus is a much better format than MP3. Almost all audio is completely transparent at that bitrate, where with MP3s, there are cases where audio is not transparent without using non standard >320kbit/s bitrates (a lot of content is transparent @320kbits/s though).
Now, sites/tools like the one you mentioned take the Opus (or AAC) file/stream from YouTube, and lossily re-encodes it again, probably to a file that is larger than the original, with at best the same quality, but probably worse quality. You obviously can’t get better output than the input in lossy compression.
So, the disk space argument is weird if you can play Opus/AAC (should be playable on every device nowadays).
This is the valid part for why you shouldn’t use YT-to-MP3 converters.
But there are also invalid reasons why people will tell you it’s shit:
- They think all MP3s sound like the shit ones from a decade (or two, or three) ago, using low bitrates and/or created with shit encoders. In reality, not all MP3s sound like shit, but vigilance is needed at every encoding step, as is the case with all lossy conversions.
- They are conflating the quality of the conversion, with the quality of the source, and think the bad quality of some user-uploaded YouTube content is due to the lossy conversion done by YouTube, and/or the MP3 converter re-encoding from YouTube. Content uploaded by the copyright holders (assuming basic competence) does not have that problem at all.
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.
yt-dlp is the way my friend, I got a command to download a specific playlist of mine every once in a while:
alias youtube-dl-playlist-guardar="yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args '-c -j 3 -x 3 -s 3 -k 1M' --ignore-errors --continue --audio-format mp3 'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=_______'"
You are very welcome! I use it with aria2, it’s opcional but recommended, in case you don’t want it you can strip the --external-downloader and -args part :)
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?
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.
