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.
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.
When I was younger I had no income so pirating was how I got music. Now that I have income I buy vinyl records and subscribe to a streaming service.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years of pirating though is frequently the metadata for the classical music is a mess - relevant information such as conductor and orchestra performing are completely omitted, and these days I just don’t want to spend my free time fixing it. Plus, finding pirated lossless tracks remains a challenge, so I just pay my monthly bill and use Idagio.
I feel there is room for improvement over the soulseek network, though that’s about the best there is right now. It doesn’t take advantage of downloading from multiple peers (like torrents), quality is good in practice but hard to be sure until you listen, and is missing rare / non-western music.
While streaming apps offer a decent value, I don’t like the level of lock in. I have music from CDs and other sources that are a first class part of my library, and using only a streaming app would make them harder to access.
I’d love to hear about any places to look for this. I sometimes want to download some favourite songs, just in case they go down on any music services or youtube.
I think music & movies are widely available than ever before through the telegram app… There are so many apps for movies and music… what’s the point of using torrents then ?..
The thing is not every popular or moderately popular song is on any streaming site. I’m a fan of 90s and 00s trance music, and there are some notable songs that aren’t available on any of the most popular paid services, or are available only in newer, re-recorded versions or remixes - some of them are available on Spotify, but not all. YouTube Music has such an advantage that you can listen not only to the songs uploaded by record labels, but also to countless additional songs available on YouTube, however most of the time they are in worse quality (AFAIK max audio bit rate in YT videos is 128 kbps). So while streaming services are now affordable and have very extensive audio library, they have some shortcomings that one can only fill with physical media or piracy.
I prefer there not being any lag in-between songs, which most streaming services have.
I usually use a streaming service like YouTube (through piped) to find new artists, then use soulseek to download their entire discography.
The problem with streaming is that the companies will eventually figure out new ways to squeeze every penny out of you. The once ‘free’ YouTube is now blocking adblocks, and Spotify requires DRM to be installed for it to function.
For me, piracy isn’t just about convenience or price, it’s mainly about control over the media I have.
I have streamlined and automized my entire process with a Python program I made. It allows me to select a video, select the corresponding song from Spotify, select certain parts that have to be cut off (such as intros and outros) and then it will automatically download the video, transcode it, cut off any segments, merge the metadata.
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.
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.
For me it’s pretty much dead. Since I’ve got YT music subscription I don’t download music anymore, except some rare, obscure bands from past. Because modern, rare obscure I can support via Bandcamp and the likes. For real gold mine of music checkout soulseek. If it’s not there, you can assume it doesn’t exists
Yep. I’m paying like $11 a month and I can play nearly any song I want at anytime from anywhere I am. I haven’t pirated music in years. On a side note, I would happily pay some reasonable dollar amount to do the same with TV and movies and never pirate anything again!
Yep, if we could go back to having 1-2 streaming services that charged a reasonable fee, I feel like TV and movie piracy significantly drop. It was so nice being able to just, like, fucking watch a movie and not have to check which of the eleventy-billion streaming services it's on.
That’s what I can’t wrap my head around. If it’s possible with music and work well for all parties, then why not to do the same with movies. All I read are some bullshit non answers about different laws applied to music and movies. Even if it is so, same companies who lobbied for those laws should now lobby to change them again, problem solved. Instead they wade further in this sunken cost fallacy
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