It’s pretty dumb when record companies limit distribution by region like this.
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.
In some cases some songs might even be only available in country specific versions of an album
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....
This youtube link contains a tracking code ?si=.... Remember to remove it next time.
It's as if they're asking to be pirated.
they're asking for you to hand over your wallet, repeatedly
Quoting Cyberpunk 2077: fuck corpos
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!
Ahh remember the good ol times when you could insert a jrpg cd into a cd player and could listen to all 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.
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.
they’re literally taking money out of my pocket
That'd be pretty hard to do over the internet.
Ah come on you know what I meant.
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
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.
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!
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.
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
Never tried bandcamp, but will have to try it out soon....
I am curious how they will continue their business now that they are for sale.
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.
What word did he keep bleeping out?
enshittification?
"Enshittification"
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.
bandcamp but pay the artists please it's really fun to do i promise
