Most of the discussion and sources of content talk about movies and series.
I’ve been recently looking for psy and techno music, finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold. It’s definitely been a while since I’ve looked for active torrent sites and it feels more barren than ever.
Edit: Thank you all for all that valuable information. The reddit group really wasn’t this helpful and valued making fun over adding real use able knowledge.
Before Netflix started sucking there was even a brief moment in time when people thought movie piracy was dying.
Then the industry went ahead and shot itself in the foot by trying to compete by making the competition worse (pushing for exclusive content) rather than themselves better (developing a more appealing product).
Spotify has basically nothing I've ever tried to actively listen to. It's also missing tracks of larger artists. It's also still subject to licensing which means what you have saved isn't guaranteed to be there forever (unless you're using a spotify downloader, I guess. I don't know why you would if you feel comfortable enough paying for it but not enough that you won't still download them?). Personally, to me it seems crazy to pay $10 a month for music I'm probably going to listen to for each month for the rest of my life? People always say it's great for discovery but I don't see how it's any better than any other avenue of finding new artists and releases. The convenience of an online app isn't very convenient for me, it being streamed is something that affects me on road trips and I'd need to have the foresight to download something, vs permanently having the songs on my phone (or a step further, microSD cards filled with music.) Like it was before? Just like Google Photos, if I can host my own photo backup on my computer why am I paying someone else an exorbitant fee? I can take this even further, I have Plex setup (and other music servers) and use Plexamp which is essentially my curated Spotify. Bonus: I have my core music on my phone, I have extra music streaming to me.
It also doesn't seem to be sustainable, each yeah Spotify operates at a loss while artists get very little payout from it. More than if you pirated from them, sure, but much less than if you just buy the album directly from their options be it physical or digital, or buy just one concert ticket and one merch item.
All this said, as with most things these are subjective case by case freedoms. Many get what they need from it and that's good enough and they're happy. Others just like to rip it all themselves and setup bubbleuPnP servers, and some probably are still just only playing CD's through their car that doesn't have AUX or bluetooth. If your decision to listen to an artist with the intent to give them your money, you probably should buy things from them instead of listening to them exclusively on Spotify you pay for. If your decision to listen to music is to just hear stuff, discovery, and it has even just 60% of a catalog of songs you'd listen to, the convenience is probably worth paying for. Especially given that technically the alternatives I've mentioned have an upfront cost of a computer and hard drives - for what it's worth only the cost of 2 years of Spotify and ~2 to 4 hours of setup time, but still a larger cost nonetheless.
That's worth it for some, they just prefer having it all physical/digitally stored and accessible for sampling and playback, the discovery and library probably aren't as deep as what they're looking for.
This! I’ve seen people claim they like Spotify because it’s legal and you support the artist that way, but the actual money they get from each song-listening is comically miniscule compared to the profit from the traditional mediums (vinyl/CD).
I was watching an interview with Norwegian musicians Tellef and Sigrid Raabe last week and this question came up. Tellef had a pretty good explanation of the problem with Spotify (and related streaming services) as he sees it.
I pay for family spotify - we all use it a lot and the Daily Mixes, Release Radar, Discover Weekly playlists are unbeatble. I’ve used Tidal, Deezer, Youtube music before but their playlist creation is nowwhere near as good.
However I do download from Deemix as a backup . For me 128kbp is totally fine for what I need - yes its not the highest quality, but through bluetooth speakers in the car or bluetooth headphones it sounds absolutely fine for me. It might not be CD quality, but its better than broadcast radio, which is perfectly good enough for me.
People have different tolerancies for these sorts of things. I bet @plexnose is quite happy with the relatively lackluster bitrate of their audio, however others may whince at the quality and declare it unlistenable (is that a word?)
Like, I have a few years old 55" 4K HDR TV, its not OLED, but it was good at the time. However a lot of my archived content is 720p, and I really don’t mind. In fact I don’t hardly notice. Sure if I switch to a 4K Bluray, its better, but I enjoyed the 720p show just as much and it wasn’t like jarring or anything.
My Spotify generated playlists are still only about 50% of what I actually want to hear. Release Radar is a complete joke for me, almost nothing is remotely new. It’s just “new” versions of old songs. Been using Spotify for music almost exclusively for a few years too. I still miss the playlist creation from Google Play Music, haven’t really used YouTube Music enough to know if it’s the same after the switch. On Spotify I generally just find playlists I like that were created by other people.
I used to be like that. Most of my music was 128kbps MP3, even going down to 32kbps AAC with one particular song. What’s worse, many of those were multi-generation re-encodes.
One day I got the taste of real FLAC. No going back. Maybe with 320kbps MP3, but anyway. Hearing HIFI quality for the first time, I remember the song, Gazebo - I Like Chopin, that was awesome! “Holy flying fridge with tomato salad, I can feel the music coming inside of me!”
Pandora slowed a lot of my music collecting. Spotify and an unlimited data plan on my phone all but stopped it.
Don’t need to dedicate 500+gb on my phone to my music if I can just pull up whatever I want. The only stuff I keep on my phone now is Dwelling of Duels and some game remixes.
I mean vanced. I was too lazy to set up revanced and instead tried out NewPipe. I hate how I don’t have my really optimized suggested page on NewPipe but I get around that by using vanced to browse and then opening the video in NewPipe via the share button. A nice plus of NewPipe however is how my subscriptions now really are just the channels I really care about and not the 1000 random ones I’ve subbed to over the last few years.
Try revanced and that additional package recommended by them that allows it to use google account - I forgot the name - micro g perhaps? It works quite well for me at least. There are some discrepancies between homepage at home pc and phone, but it’s better than nothing or ads. Process was quite simple, download youtube apk, install revanced patcher and apply patch to the app.
Sounds very similar to the vanced installation. I might do this and keep NewPipe for subscribing to the really high quality channels and if google actually goes through with banning accounts that block adds I won’t be nearly as impacted :D
I personally like being able to use Spotify as my front-end, but it doesn't support flac. So I personally pay for Deezer's Flac option, I use xManager for listening to music on Spotify, and I have a script setup to automatically download all my liked Spotify songs from Deezer in lossless flac. It's not free by any means, but is the best/easiest way to download music I've found.
No, I just pay for Deezer Flac. xManager lets you use Spotify ad-free so the listening experience there is still 320 Kbps but I like the recommendation system better. it’s basically free Spotify premium. If I like any song a Spotify, spotify_sync will automatically grab it and download the flac file to my server. If I want to listen to lossless music, I just listen to my stored music using my Jellyfin server as a front-end. I never actually touch Deezer’s front-end at all.
I’ve been meaning to start a music collection for a bunch of old goth music from small bands that risks being lost to time. Thanks for this post I’m gonna get my ass moving on it.
I consider myself a rookie audiophile. I must have my music files in flac format and they must be directly on my hard drive. I buy a bit of stuff from bandcamp and qobuz, but for my methods, there’s a few routes I can take to get the majority through piracy.
The one I’ve chosen is called slav art, and it basically rips directly from streaming services and zips it in a downloadable file. It used to be on discord but got chased away, and it used to be on matrix after that but left there too for some reason. Now it’s on its own revolt instance.
I remember using SaveFrom for a few months after ClipConverter.cc banned downloading music and music videos from YouTube. However like you I then discovered youtube-dl (now yt-dlp) and I haven’t even looked back since. It’s truly the best out there.
I use satclubbing for electronic music and metal tracker metal. Something else I’ve started doing is getting second hand CDs. They are going really cheap right now and will likely become vintage and sought after in a decade odd. I basically buy them and rip them and keep them in storage.
At some point I wrote a docker container (with some help from a friend) which regularly executes yt-dlp to download my youtube playlists to my media server.
I mostly do that because I have limited mobile data and want offline copies of music
I actually built a stereo system that can play CDs recently and have stared buying used CDs to play on it.
I don’t really mind paying the equivalent of a drink or two from a vending machine for an album from a band that I like. And I get a neat physical thing that I can look at.
Yeah, I’m old enough to have grown up buying vinyl records. I want to buy a physical copy of the music I like.
The idea of depending on a streaming service to keep something available has always mades me uncomfortable, and given the recent removal of content from some of the studios’ services, it looks like my gut feeling was correct.
Music piracy is doing just fine, it’s just that the balance of opinion seems to be that M4A is fine. You can even download M4A files from YouTube nowadays.
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