Music Piracy Is Back in a Big Way
Music Piracy Is Back in a Big Way—Especially From YouTube
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 WISH I COULD HEAR YA OVER THESE HERE BANGING TUNES! 🏴☠️
But are they lossless 96kHz+? Only reason I use qobuz.
Flac and opus on soulseek?
Tidal? You can even download all your music in lossless flac format
Honestly the most complete source of high res music is private trackers like redacted. You can download all the stuff from qobuz and bandcamp, every CD rip you can think of in bit perfect quality of and even very good vinyl rips. You basically can download any version ever released from any album.
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 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!
I know this does not make me look good - but I am a YouTube Premium subscriber. I had Spotify, but they jacked up their family plan rate, and it was only a few bucks cheaper than Premium, then I got the ad-free (without adblockers). I mostly did it to help my kids avoid the toxic ads that are littered into the kid content. The main reason I stick with some of this stuff is for the discovery. Pandora was great, Spotify is ok.
Regardless - the smart playlists, and AI stuff on YouTube music is AWFUL. I cannot put into words how bad it is. Spotify got it right about 1/4-1/2 of the time. YouTube, maybe 1/100. Constantly recommending a country, which I cannot stand. When it isn't doing country, it recommends hard rock/metal which I also do not listen to. I feel like I need a new way to find music, then I could sever ties with all these trashy subscriptions.
I have started buying vinyl with the digital downloads when I find a great album. I feel better doing it this way. Most of my music is not super big name artists.
Not been my experience. Yt music playlists are really good for me and I've discovered a lot of new music through it.
That surprises me, but I suppose it had to work for some listeners or they wouldn't have gotten it past testing. I have even tried clearing my listen history and starting over - still comes up with country and (going to clarify) 'metal' . I like rock and alternative and some forms of pop, as well as a bit of hip hop. cannot fathom why it suggests what it does.
I just listen to playlists that people make or youtube videos of song genres or artists that I like.
Soulseek if you don't mind data hoarding.
I have yt premium for the same reason. Toddlers have little patience for ads on their Kindle fire, and they get upset when they click one to buy a luxury watch and can't figure out how to get back to cocomelon.
I actually like the service and feel it's fairly priced. So I don't mind paying for it. I stream yt music all day at work.
Same boat here. My God it's unbearable how bad YouTube premium is.
I get good value out of it...
.....That being said, I curate my own feed heavily, and still have to use a ton of add-ons to keep from going insane - fuck your shorts YouTube.
It is admittedly terrible.
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.
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)
wakes up in 2002
The Napster has you, Neo
Your comment just made me smile. Those were the days.
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.
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.
A few notes:
Own music, do not rent.
I'm buying CDs from smaller labels directly. Cheaper than Scamazon sometimes. A couple examples: https://metalblade.indiemerch.com/collections/cds https://metalonmetalrecords.com/shop/
My library has loaned me many CDs over the years. I still have an external CD burner I can connect to my PC. Thank you, library.
Used media stores are awesome. Give them your business.
ETA: Corrected link to Metal On Metal records shop.
Give me lidarr but with a smart daily generated playlist focus instead of collecting artist discographies
Yeah. I want a self-hosted Pandora alternative
Plex's specialty audio client Plexamp is pretty good if you want to make your own "radio stations." And if you have a Plex Pass, the server does "sonic analysis" of each track so it can do a good job of playing related music in its smart playlists.
Of course, Plex Pass ain't free, but if you are in it for the long haul the lifetime purchase may be worth it.
(Everyone's worried about Plex's future right now but I would be surprised if they killed self-hosting. That's another topic though.)
What was the service you could upload your own. Playlist and songs and share with friends? Last.fm? Something like that, shit was awesome.
There’s a federated platform called Funkwhale that’s very similar to that.
I think last.fm might still exist. I just used it for the 'scrobbling' — stats way before Spotify Wrapped was a thing
2023 was absolutely the year I dove back into music piracy. I started with downloading youtube playlists but the real game changer was soundiiz, which allowed me to import text, m3u, csv, spotify, xspf playlists into qobuz and deezer so i can download whole playlists of FLAC with qobuz-dl and deemix-gui. My collection went from 20,000 to 100,000, downloading playlists from qobuz and deezer, xspf playlists from my remaining lossy music. I used streamripper on a few web radio stations just to get a list of songs to pull down this way. I only bought music for years and years, but that got me a narrow type of collection.
Man, I never knew there was a way to download my entire spotify playlist.
That's been the biggest thing tethering me to their service, since they empty you out when you unsubscribe.
I'm getting my playlists out then ditching Spotify. It's the only service I pay for other than my ISP and VPN.
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 🥰
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.
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
Songs and albums that I’ve listened to for years have disappeared from my Apple Music subscription. I swapped completely to a paid service and never looked back until they removed things I could listen to last month.
Songs and albums that I’ve uploaded from my own collection have disappeared from Apple Music, despite my physically owning them on CD and Apple advertising the ability to store my CD rips in the cloud.
It’s unacceptable. I’m still on Apple Music for now, but moving my music library to Jellyfin looks more appealing by the day.
It may have been user error, for me. I’m pretty sure CDs I had bought and ripped to ITunes changed to ‘this song is not on your device’ cloud copies when Apple Music happened- then they disappeared entirely, even though they were files I added to OG iTunes almost 20 years ago.
Sadly, my iPod’s hard drive failed a while ago. I enjoyed the free streaming stuff for the few and fewer times I had music on. I’ll be upgrading the iPod and heading out to sea… again.
if there was a way to get spotify with at least CD quality and the artists getting the rest of the money that spotify doesn't already take, more people would probably pay for it.
i am in a spotify family plan already, but i get that paying 12 bucks a month for 320 kbit/s and getting the artist fucked over is too much.
it's a thing of morals for many people, like with steam. steam doesn't actively fuck both the developer and the user over, they just take a 30% cut. you could argue about if that's too much, but i'm fine with it.
In terms of cents per stream, Tidal definitely compansates the most at 4x more than Spotify and 10x more than Deezer. Plus if you VPN to Nigeria on account creation, it's only $4 a month. You can then use tidal-dl to download music and you can use *arr Scripts to download music using Lidarr.
Weirdly, that's bandcamp today. Apparently they're doing a thing where everything you buy today, they will give their usual cut to the artist too.
Shame it's not all the time, but I guess bandcamp needs to pay for servers, etc.
Shared a news about piracy, link to paywall Wired.com. the irony
How do I pirate the article?
Anyone have a private tracker invite they’d share with me? Lidarr is the only arr I haven’t set up yet. Wouldn’t mind upgrading my library which I haven’t looked at since college.
No one will give you one. Music trackers are more difficult than average to get into and harder than most to maintain ratio. I wouldn't risk my account on it.
You can give this script a go though to download from Dezeer or Tidal from Lidarr
Where is the scene to at least start being considered for private trackers?
I don't understand how the scene is supposed to stay alive when it's this exclusive. You have to be in a chat from a forum where you've spent years just to get the trackers, let alone do anything for the group other than seed.
Man it was so hard for me to maintain ratio on oink. I didn't have anything new to bring to the table and that was why. I had to invest time to target certain popular music in hopes to seed some of it. Then it got shut down.
I mainly use soulseek for music.
Whoopty doo 13% < shits crazy now, napsters back in business
apple killing ipods and deprioritising the itunes store probably contributed to this more than anything ironically
Link for you to view the article: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fmusic-piracy-way-up%2F
Thanks ill be honest I did not know it was a pay walled article I had no pop ups or anything on my phone.
13%!?!? WHOOOOOA!
sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs
you guys use sites for that? I just use vpn + yt-dlp
Well, no wonder, they took the Northern Boys off Spotify.
why would they do this
Does somebody know a good torrent music streaming app? Something like spotify but with data from musicbrainz or anything like that and the files from torrents.
Jellyfin works for me
Lidarr + Plex is the one for me
Lidarr + Navidrome works flawlessly for me. Navidrome also fetches data from LastFM, such as tending songs and artist info
Like.. Plex with plexamp? Or jellyfin with finamp?
I'm pretty current on technology but honestly never heard of Youtube-To-MP3 conversion.
Thinking this may be the ticket to cutting the cord with Spotify, but as others have suggested, I fully intend to buy tracks of my favorite indie folks too.
Do artists actually get a decent cut from Band Camp?
Bandcamp, according to their help page, takes a 15% cut from purchases until the artist makes 5k in sales, in which case they take 10%
Bandcamp was recently sold as far as I'm aware. Also, after a recent purchase I made from them I had my credit card frauded. Can't say with 100% assurance that it was because of something going on with bandcamp, but it's my belief it was them. Something seems off from before, so I've decided to take a break from buying anything from them for a while.
♫ Don't call it a comeback ♫
The only way
I already got a small server with sonarr and radarr. Is there any quick way to add up the music one?
Lidarr is the corresponding program for music, setup is almost identical to what you're already running. And if you use Prowlarr to manage your indexers, it also works with Lidarr.
I use Deemon for automatic music downloading from Deezer (free). Then I stream my music with Navidrome and some Subsonic compatible apps for mobile. I have this setup for over 3 years now and I have 3TB of music ;)
If you just want to download the songs you need, you can use Deemix (I use this Docker image, you can just install it as an application too)
Tip: if you don't want to setup a music server, you can use Syncthing to sync you music and playlists between devices :)
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.
That's super based. Pirate whoever's stuff you want, but small artists usually depend on that income.
I listen to hundreds of small artists. I can't buy every singles albums they have.
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.
I have never pirated music more in my life as I do now.
I have never purchased as much music as I do now.