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Music Piracy Is Back, Baby (gizmodo.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"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.

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (9 children)

One of the main reasons I still pay for Spotify is because it is very cheap in my country, specially when splitting a family plan. However I noticed that the user experience has gone downhill over the past years.

I remember when I could seamlessly switch playback devices, from my car to my phone, to my computer and them a Chromecast almost instantaneously. Now I'm lucky if my devices recognise each other even if they are on the same network.

And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable because it tries yo grab online content first before checking whatever is downloaded. Time and time again I have to put my phone on aeroplane mode just for the main menu to load, it is so frustrating and this didn't happen some 5-6 years ago

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (4 children)

All of those things are 100% legitimate criticisms, I want to add that the UX experience has become more and more horrible. They've regressed terribly in most aspects of their apps, wether PC or Mobile. Absolutely unbelievable, this is the thing I see from Google search where marketing takes over from engineering/customer needs/market reality/I don't know what. Stop shoving shit into the services. You beat piracy for a minute, you can keep that lead, you're slowly losing it.

Honestly, if this was any other product this would be unacceptable. It'd be like all books went back to only black and white, all movies were only 480p, all music was only mono.

[–] ramblinguy 1 points 10 months ago

At first I was confused about the books comment, since most books are just black text on white paper, but then I realized you were probably including comic books and manga in that too (and probably textbooks that include a lot of graphics)

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