"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.
Bandcamp first, if you can pay for what you want and then, surprisingly, still Soulseek.
I started using Soulseek nearly 20 years ago. Throughout my life I have seen p2p sharing platforms disappear one by one. But Soulseek? I’m amazed every day that I use it and discover that it’s still alive. It is the eternal soldier that continues the fight to this day.
Amusingly there are a few search terms which come up blank, but just throw in alternative key words and all is fine. I discovered this when searching Franz Ferdinand came up with none of their music!
Bandcamp was sold off. I stopped buying off them on that day.