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Music Doesn't Feature In the Pirate Bay's Top 100 Biggest Torrents
journovampire writes Good news for the industry's anti-piracy efforts? Or rather embarrassing for music's appeal in the big, wide world? No single music release features in the Top 100 most-torrented files. From the article: "MBW has analysed TPB’s Top 100 most-pirated files in the 48 hours since its re-emergence. And although you’ll find plenty of movies and a smattering of porn in there, you won’t see a single music release. The Top 4 most-pirated files over the weekend were all movies, led by new Jason Statham vehicle Wild Card. It was followed by three more Hollywood releases – The Interview, American Sniper and Nightcrawler."
You can find it on YouTube or Spotify, to name but two sources. Full-length movies are harder to come by in this fashion.
Current music sucks so bad Pirates don't even want it.
"Good news!" said Sony Music
"Oh shit" said Sony Motion Pictures.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
plenty of movies
its to be expected. Sitting through 20 minutes of mandatory trailer before my bluray starts actually playing the movie i paid for is nothing short of a war crime.
smattering of porn
ew.
but in all actuality the lack of music is likely due to spotify, soundcloud, and pandora not to mention bandcamp and the rise of unsigned, independent artists using a 'pay if you want' model. stream rips from Youtube are also popular. If you're expecting to see the top 40's in the pirate bay you're mistaken as to their purpose. Top 40 music is played 3 times a day 21 times a week for 5 months because you're being conditioned to like it. Katy perry and other artists write lyrics at the 3rd grade level not because theyre illiterate, but because their producers and writers are targeting the widest potential demographic for the song.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Could it be the music industry has adapted enough that the average joe doesn't feel the need to pirate music as much as other media?
Yes, the adaptation certainly isn't ideal, but most of my friends now pay $9 a month (or so) and stream all their music and stream most new music. They are letting their personal music libraries slowly bit rot away as they increasingly rely on the cloud and streaming services.
Plus most digital albums can be bought without DRM these days.
But movies are a different story. You have to wait before you can even watch a movie in your own home, and movie media is always DRMed.
A whole generation has grown up who believe that music is "free". This has reduced the perceived value of music - the latest album is not as "cool" as it used to be when music was artificially scarce.
The music industry have been too slow to adapt - Napster was 15 years ago. Now people can't even be bothered to "steal" the RIAA's music.
> A whole generation has grown up who believe that music is "free".
It's not just the current generation. This has been going on pretty much for as long as there has been broadcast media. This "it should be free" thing goes back to the genesis of radio.
There is nothing new about "payment avoidance" when it comes to Music.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Does music cost $20 a song and come with a 5 minute unskippable warning against piracy, and 10 minutes of unskippable trailers for other songs? But for some products if you want quality you have to pirate it. I know some people who will buy a movie to be legit/support the industry, and then pirate it because it is less trouble than the CD.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Yawn. Yeah, music was just so damned expensive back when I would tape songs my radio station would play, edit out the commercials and make my own mix tapes. Funny how the musicians never had trouble making too much money though. These little kiddies should pay through the nose for their music!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why would people bother to pirate music anymore? You can use Spotify for free, and get it ad-free and even with downloads allowed for a few dollars a month. There's no point.
Some might argue that this is a serious problem-- that the music industry is in a shambles and it's not clear this is all sustainable. Others might argue that this is evidence of where the problem was all along-- that piracy is the result of high prices and poor service, and when people are provided a cheap and convenient product, they're often willing to pay for it in some way. Either way, I don't see much of a reason to pirate music anymore unless it's somehow unavailable through legal channels.
As much as I dislike the whole subscription thing, for music it works out if they can offer almost all the music available (apart from small local bands, and even then, why not) for $10 a month. That's less than the cost of buying a single album every month. To buy 100 albums at $15, which would constitute a decent music library, it would cost $1500 (very easy math here, consult your grade 2 teacher if you can't follow). To spend the same amount on subscription fees at $10 a month, it would take $12.5 years. And from the day you pay your first subscription fee, you have access to thousands of albums. It really does work out better for the consumer in just about every way. The only problem is that you will lose all the music if you ever stop paying, but when I'm at the point where I can't afford $10 a month, I won't be worrying so much about whether or not I can listen to music.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I agree - I had a lot of tapes copied from LPs, tapes and the radio, and later I had hundreds of copied CDs.
But when MP3s came along, other music formats seemed big and clunky by comparison. I valued my MP3 collection more than my original CDs and LPs, because they were more useful. I would have happily paid for high quality MP3s, but there was no way to do this for many years. Eventually, MP3s became "free" to me, while the RIAA was still messing around with DRM and scattered lawsuits.
I still miss the sense that I "own" a piece of music. However, I don't miss it enough that I want to deal with hundreds of pieces of physical media.
There is a LOT that is not (yet) on the recently opened TPB website. For science I looked at Pr0n(*) and found much less content then what it was before.
So I guess they restarted with a non-complete database or even a complete new one.
When they were looking at what is now on TPB, it could be logical that a lot of things are not there yet. Also possible that now TV shows have a lot in the top 100. Many shows often have many different torrents (with identical content) so 20 popular tv shows and a few movies can easily populate the top 100.
Where people did not use to have the bandwith to download tv shows, many do so now. It could also be that people do not watch TV anymore, as that forced people to be home at a certain hour or record it. With faster Internet, downloading it when you want to see it is also nice and it saves you the money of having to buy the DVD/BueRay set later.
(*)company filter.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Or how about the following three factors:
1. I can buy the tracks I want for a sensible price with no DRM, so I can listen to it how and when I want.
2. Lots of streaming services if I don't want to buy.
3. An almost fanatical devotion to the pope.
Basically street years of getting brutalized by pirates, the music industry wised up and started selling people what they wanted to buy rather than treating people like criminals to be milked for as much cash as possible.
Oh that and YouTube.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In the mid 90s, a CD was worth $10-$15 to me. Today, a CD (or a high-quality rip) is worth $0 to me.
Music has lost its perceived value for me and almost everybody else. Why? Who knows, but that's the situation the RIAA are in right now.
Pretty much nailed it there. Music is easily available through enough other sources that I don't need to pirate it to listen to the song i want. I can stream it on youtube or grooveshark and not pay anything, or just buy it for much less (easier to justify forking out a dollar for a song you can play an infinite number of number, instead of a movie you'll likely watch once), and there's no waiting period for a song once it's been released. If I want to see a movie that's out, it's easier to pirate it than drag myself to a theatre and pay 10 bucks or more.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
I wonder what % is non-US downloaders who want to keep up on their favorite shows that have not yet reached their location? I have friends who have US/UK iTunes accounts to buy their favorite shows before they are released where they live. Does that hurt their viewership in locations where the show is reached later? Maybe, since some percentage will not watch it again but I'd bet quite a few do as well.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Seriously, I downloaded every bit of music I could ever want years ago and now I buy songs one at a time (mostly) through iTunes because it's easy and cheap. Music piracy in its mass-orgy like form was based on one thing. Decades of being fucked by record labels and an opportunity to fuck them right back. It was about artists or people being too cheap to buy music. It was about people who had spent money on music for years and years with no real way of backing them up. I bought music over and over again as formats changed and as crappy cassette tapes broke. I probably bought Permanent Waves by Rush 5 times if I bought it once! Initially I was OK with CD's but I didn't get excited about them until I realized that I could rip them. Naturally after that came realizing I could share the files I'd ripped and suddenly my music collection became one with all my friends music collections. Sneaker-net kicked in and then later the network at my office followed by the Internet. I'm now squatting on around 400GB of music, much of which I'd never gotten around to sampling if a friend or co-worker hadn't had it in their collection. Good stuff. When it comes to "what has gone before" I'm like the fat guy in the restaurant in Monty Python's Meaning of Life. "Fuck off! I'm stuffed!". Now, going forward I will buy what I want at a price I think is fair and in the format I choose. That's what I call freedom (even if I had to violate a bunch of people's copyrights to get it)!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I think it goes back before the radio, when you could buy sheet music. This was a way of distributing music and as you can imagine, it was pirated in several ways.
Wikipedia tells it goes back to 1575. As a copyright was needed, it means that there was something to copy. It is also clear that some people would not follow that law.
So since 1575 the music industry is going bankrupt due to piracy and some people will have said that 'it should be free', otherwise a law would not have been needed.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You can still buy CDs and they are completely un-DRMed. You can legally play the CDs, legally manufacturer players and traffic in the players, and legally copy them to your hard disk and play them from there instead, if that's what's most convenient for you. Everything's easy and legal, with no one ever contemptuously spitting in your face whenever you offer them money. The recorded music industry is open for business.
It's video where most of the sellers aren't really selling (e.g. streaming services) or they're selling things that you can't conveniently or legally use (e.g. Blu-Ray discs).
It's your obligation to pirate DRMed video. If you're paying instead of pirating, you're part of the problem, and you're a bad person who is retarding progress and rewarding evil. Shame on you.
But none of that extends to music, and if anything, the opposite is true. If you're pirating music then you're part of the problem.
I remember the time when having 20 records was already a lot of music to own. That is the average my friends had.
My parents had about 50. I had the same amount. That is 100 albums in our home or about 100x40 minutes or just under 3 days of music.
Or at 3MB on average per song, 12GB of songs.
That is the amount of music we had as a family and we had a lot of music. From what I saw with other people, about 10 times as much.
And having a 32GB music player is nothing special. How much does it cost to fill that? Say 30GB and 3MB per song gives you 10.000 songs at 1USD.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"+ 3 Insightful"
Really? Has your lawn been horribly trampled by kids lately? There's so much good stuff out there I don't even know where to begin. We're in a golden era of music choice and availability. Not only do we have a plethora of different types and combinations of sounds and rhythms that are available for the mixing (mostly due to electronic music and computers), but this generation has the ability to find any music from anywhere now - thanks to the internet you can find all kinds of obscure stuff from another corner of the world. You have millions of artists to choose from anywhere now - maybe it's your perception bias making you think it's off (because when you walked into a CD / record store 20-30 years ago, they tend to carry only the best material, and you don't have to wade through crap).
Maybe you meant to say "I don't like the top 40 stuff they constantly repeat on the radio or at sporting events or at the bars". Newsflash: every generation thinks their parents' music was lame, but my generation's music was the greatest ever, but my kids listen to complete shit. Talk to a 30-something and they'll think Pearl Jam or Nirvana were the greatest. Talk to a 60-something and they'll think Zeppelin and Queen were the greatest. Talk to a teenager now and they'll think Katy Perry or Taylor Swift are the best evar! Maybe this has to do more with the music you listed to as a teenager shaping your musical tastes (and associating good times with that music).
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Now that I can actually own my own music downloaded legally from iTunes and play it on all of my devices, I have no reason to pirate it. But I still pirate movies and will continue until the DRM issue is resolved.
Whole Generation? Your information is horribly out of date.
I was raised to believe that from my father who said, "it is OK to record FM radio" which I did all the time. I also Ripped friends CD's as well as record copies of Records...
I then taught my daughter the same except she found you can just rip friends CD's
Hopefully she teaches her 4 year old daughter the same. So there is 3 generations that know the fact that Music IS free.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This seems like a pretty bad manipulation of statistics to get the story you want... Considering the breadth of the music industry, it means there is more choice, so it stands to reason that different people with different tastes will torrent different stuff. The Movie industry on the other hand releases less than 100 blockbuster films per year... so it stands to reason that with less options to torrent, certain titles will rise to the top more quickly. This is of course based on the presumption that newer titles are more frequently torrented than older titles... but that also is a reasonable assumption given that new titles are widely advertised.
Anyways... I'm not defending RIAA or MPAA... I think they both suck and should be shut down, but I just feel like the premise of the article is suspect.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
you had me right up to this point "it would take $12.5 years."
What is a dollar/year?
Of course music isn't in the top 100. There's like, what, 50 movies a year, but thousands of albums? People's preference of music is far more specific, so each album will be downloaded by a smaller number of people.
I concede that music has always been free for people who want it badly enough, and are prepared to make some effort to copy it. Recording the radio or copying CDs requires some kind of effort. When you invest your time into doing something, the result is usually of value to you.
Firing up Youtube and searching for the song you want is effectively zero effort. A child today would be puzzled if you told them that people used to pay money for music.
Things that are trivially easy feel less valuable than things that take some work.
I'm a 20-something and a huge amount of my generation's pop music is terrible, and probably so is your's. You're right in that there's now a huge amount of selection, both of current and old music, but most of the good music is away from the bigger musical spotlights. Pop music of every generation is soulless garbage though.
No, seriously. The last full backup is nearly 2 years old. Somebody has to have a backup of TPB magnet links, and it's probably not that large.
Oh, and, um, I'm just asking for a friend.
It's not a dollar/year. It's like megawatthours and so on. One dollar year is paying one dollar per year. 12.5 dollaryears is 12.5 dollars for a year. Easy.
Problem is the blowback from piracy and the 99 cent track. Before that, bands were signed.
Now, record labels make their own bands, condition (by playing repeatedly) the listener to the same song over and over again, then change the band out every 3-5 years for another teen star who will eventually follow the same path of getting tattoos and doing stupid shit for scandals.
There is a reason why we don't have the Trent Reznors or genre-busting artists anymore, and you can thank piracy for that. We will only see Justin Bieber successors (male or female) from this point on since the labels want to build their "bands" from people they want, singing the music they design for maximum psychological/marketing impact, and aiming at teens/tweens who don't know what good music is.
Probably because music is small enough to download directly from websites rather than torrents.
"With 1828 ‘seeders’ and just 76 ‘leechers’, True is a fair distance behind the 100th most popular torrent overall: PC game Far Cry 4, which has 1604 ‘seeders’ plus 1260 ‘leechers’."
Keep in mind that:
1) Once a "leecher" finishes downloading, they become a "seeder"
2) Nearly all clients will stop being a "seeder" once a predetermined share ratio is reached
Considering a typical music album is FAR smaller than a game (probably 100-200MB at most, depending on bitrate for encoding, vs. multiple gigabytes for a game - FC4 is over 10GB I'd guess, I can't view TPB to check from my current location), "leechers" become "seeders" far faster, and "seeders" disconnect from the torrent due to hitting the share ratio cap of the client (kTorrent defaults to 1.30 for example) far faster.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Let's hope vinyl or increased quality isn't just a passing fad.
I'm old enough to remember when there was no such thing as a CD and vinyl or tape were your only options to get a full album. I do not miss for a moment vinyl records and all the hassles involved with them. If you think vinyl is great you either A) did not grow up with vinyl records or B) you have a fetish for obsolete technology which interferes with your ability to remember why we don't use it anymore.
Let me remind of just some of the reasons rational people gave up on vinyl records years ago:
1) Vinyl only sounds good when operating perfectly and most of the time it does not, particularly if the record has seen meaningful play.
2) Vinyl is absurdly easy to damage and virtually impossible to keep intact with meaningful use. They are flimsy and scratch easily. See point 1 above.
3) Vinyl is bulky increasing it's propensity to get damaged (see point 2 above) and takes up unnecessary space.
4) Vinyl record players rely on needles which wear out and regularly damage the very media they are intended to play.
5) Vinyl stores a relatively small amount of music and does so in a very bulky and non-portable media
6) Vinyl cannot easily or conveniently be copied to any portable player
7) Vinyl does not come with digital track data that can be copied conveniently to other players
8) Vinyl cannot easily be utilized in conjunction with other media such as putting a song into a video.
9) Vinyl cannot easily be used for other purposes. I can use a CD or flash memory to store other types of data. Not practical with vinyl.
10) There are non-lossy digital formats which are indistinguishable from even the best vinyl in double blind tests. (If you claim otherwise I'm going to call you a liar)
Increased quality? I'm on board unless it requires vinyl. If it does then screw increased quality because it is not worth the hassle of vinyl.
I stopped downloading music and picked up a sub to Spotify instead simply because it's more convenient. I share the same music library on my home PC, work PC and smartphone without having to fiddle with anything. When I'm in the car I plug the smartphone into the deck and listen to the playlists that I've downloaded. Even my AV receiver at home can stream from Spotify. It all just works and I'm always stumbling across new music that I end up liking a lot.
I've even set up a few collaborative playlists with friends. When one of us finds something new we add it to the list, then the others can have a listen and add it to their own private playlists if they like it.
Only two things bother me: not everything is available and some things that were available will simply disappear one day. Same old licensing BS that just doesn't work in a digitally connected world.
One thing is clear though. Previously the music industry made no money at all off me, now they do. Not because of some anti-piracy campaign but because someone was finally able to provide an acceptably priced product that's more convenient than pirating. Funny how that works.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Yes I am calling the Experts that mastered the top 100 songs out right now NO TALENT HACKS. if they mastered it that compressed, then they dont deserve any respect at all from anyone.
You do what the people paying the bills tell you to do. The people who pay the bills care about sales. If quality gets sales (it doesn't) then they'll demand quality. Otherwise they'll do what moves more product. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the competence or lack thereof of audio engineers.
Stand your ground and tell the executives that they are stupid and mix it right.
Big talk from someone posting semi-anonymously on the internet. Do you make a habit of being insubordinate to the people that sign your paychecks? If so then you are going to get fired a lot I'm afraid.
Streaming would be useful if it had some breadth. If I wanted to listen to what's popular, I have four good local radio stations to choose from. Most of my music listening happens from records purchased at the shop, radio and live concerts.
Yup. If you hear a new song, chances are very high that you can immediately acquire that song easily and legally through one of many different distribution channels available. If you see a movie trailer for a recently released movie, your only legal option is the theatre. The business model of the two mediums are wildly different.
Indeed. I grew up listening to a stack of Gospel music cassettes my Dad copied from friends around the country on his travels. I've downloaded some of the exact same albums on bittorrent.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
And ten years ago, I argued on TechDirt that people would pay $10 a month for an unlimited streaming service with everything and piracy would drop off the face of the earth. And an industry shill jumped on and told me I was full of crap, they wouldn't make any money that way and pirates would still pirate everything.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Must be that new math... correct answer is 4GB music.......
I think it more speaks to the diversity of content and genres. There is A LOT of music being produced all the time, the amount of new tv or movies that comes out is minuscule in comparison
Actual music doesn't feature in most of the RIAA's top 100 releases either.
WARNING: Old ‘The Pirate Bay’ Back Online, BUT Seized by FBI – Real TPB Website Has New Domain
It is more convenient to open youtube and what some clip. Music companies, adapt to this new world or get lost.
Seriously. The question kinda is whatever I wouldn't prefer to have 100 albums I like to listen to and forever rather than be able to listen to them for 12 years + some others but then they are gone / I have to pay even more to keep listening.
For $9 a month on google music, spotify, or several other services, I can listen to pretty much any song I want, new releases are instantly available, and I can download songs for offline listening. I pay $18 a month for Hulu Plus and Netflix, and access HBO go through my in-laws cable account. This still only gets me about half of the content I want to watch, and new content is available to torrent days, weeks or sometimes months before it is available to stream. Plus none of this content is available offline, where a torrented file is. The music industry is finally beating piracy by making streaming just as convenient.
All those retort bands in the 80s? Didn't exist.
Boygroups in the 90s? No such thing.
Yeah, totally a new phenomenon.
1 compressed movie is about the same space as 200 compressed songs.
If it takes you about 20 seconds to download a song, then it takes you about 1 hour to download a movie.
Movies could be an order of magnitude less "popular" than music and still appear an order of magnitude more "often".
What about Kickass Torrents?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
right around the same time movable type was developed for polyphonic sheet music. Gutenberg invented the metal movable type press a century earlier. The Sumerians had clay movable type three millennia before that.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
they're not selling music any more, they're selling sex.
Miley Cyrus: prancing around the stage in her underwear.
People talk about Jennifer Lopez, they're talking about her arse, not "Love Don't Cost A Thing".
Billie Piper: Or, how a twenty-something brings out the paedophiles by imitating Britney Spears gyrating suggestively through a school hallway.
Madonna: "Hung Up"? Not a great cover of a not-great-to-begin-with ABBA track, it's an excuse for a fifty-something to run around on stage at the VMA in her knickers.
Katy Perry, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj - the list goes on. In 2009, 160 of the 174 songs that featured in the Billboard music chart for that year contained explicit sexual content. It's not a recent thing, either. Tom Jones, The Beatles, Elvis, Oasis, The Proclaimers: throughout their careers, women and schoolgirls have been throwing soiled underwear and serious marriage proposals at them from the mosh pits of the world, and often as not screaming so loud during the performances that you could not hear what was being played.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I had forgotten TPB existed.
This is idiocy. There is an awful lot more variety of music out there than there are of blockbuster hollywood films. Therefore it follows that the relatively few films being released will have more individual downloads each, whereas the more diverse music releases will have to be content with a smaller share of potential 'customers'
> A whole generation has grown up who believe that music is "free".
It's not just the current generation. This has been going on pretty much for as long as there has been broadcast media. This "it should be free" thing goes back to the genesis of radio.
There is nothing new about "payment avoidance" when it comes to Music.
Most music in history probably has been "free" ... someone takes out their folk instrument and plays it, others sing along, someone else takes out their folk instrument and joins in ...
I once ventured in a place that sold CDs. It takes time to understand how the store is sorted, then I dug through versions of the same work, with just the cover to distinguish two recordings of the same Bach piece. Then I looked at the queue at the register and didn't understand how I was supposed to value those recordings so much.
About 88 of the "Top 100" (currently) are fakes, courtesy of the new improved "no human mods" TPB...
Ukrainian/Russian MP3 sites. They even have FLAC files for 30 cents each. Apparently those sites are legal in those countries.