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Music Streaming Service Exclusives Make Pirating Tempting Again (theverge.com)
The advent of online music streaming service has made it easier for millions of people worldwide to listen to all of their favorite songs, and convinced plenty to pay for music. But with the space of music streaming service getting increasingly crowded and artists beginning to do exclusive with select platforms, it has again become inconvenient for people to get everything they want with one subscription. The Verge's Ashley Carman writes that this is pushing many people to resort to piracy. Carman writes: Rampant piracy could make a comeback, solely because streaming service exclusives, and complete artist opt-outs, make it impossible to get all music in one place. Last week, Drake dropped two new singles off his upcoming album Views from the 6. The tracks are currently only available on Apple Music. Last month, Kanye West released his newest album The Life of Pablo on Tidal only. It came to Spotify this month after an estimated 500,000 people had already torrented it. Big Sean and Jhen's Aiko released their collaboration album TWENTY88 on only Tidal at first. Beyonce and Nicki Minaj released a Tidal-only music video for Feeling Myself. More than a million people signed up for Tidal over the course of a day just to get Kanye's new album, though it's assumed that most won't stick around. At what cost to listeners are these exclusives being made and where does it leave fans? If users wanted to subscribe to only one service, it would come out to approximately $120 per year. Two services will cost $240, and three services, say, Apple Music, Tidal, and Spotify, will cost $360, which will be a substantial cost to casual listeners.
I post this every time the subject of music comes up. If you are an avid collector of music, forget about downloads and streaming (unless it's truly free of course). Instead, keep a running list of music you're interested in, and every so often, visit an online used cd store like secondspin.com (not affiliated) and order a handful of used cds to add to your collection. Limit your purchases to about $5 or $6 per album. When they arrive, record them to flac format and store the discs away. Now you have a master archive which you can convert to any lossy format at any time, while leaving the masters untouched. Chown the archive to root to ensure that it can't be touched by your rogue music player.
I have been doing this for almost 15 years, and have amassed a collection of hundreds of albums, and yet I still have a "wanted cds" list over 300 artists long. All of this is 100% legal, and you get the real deal (the original cd album), not some re-sampled mp3. Furthermore, you completely side-step the crooked music industry. (When I really want to support an artist, I buy tickets to the show.)
The only pitfall is that you won't find much new music at $5/cd. But that's OK, once you realize that the amount of new music coming out that's worth keeping is only a fraction of a percent.
Piracy stopped being tempting for me when my income became sufficient to allow subscribing to a music streaming service, buying a couple (okay, maybe 5) games a month, subscribing to Netflix from my country and subscribing to some SaaS offers (e.g. Adobe products) whenever needed.
Since then, I bought all the software I needed and I only visited torrent websites to download exactly 3 games, the reason being that watching "Let's play"s and trailers and screenshots as well as reading opinions came out inconclusive. With no demos available, it was the only way to make sure my money wasn't wasted. Turned out 2 of 3 games were actually shit, so it was a good choice. The third I bought after finding out I liked it.
Ten years ago I was pirating literally everything. Today I am pirating nothing - actually I am encouraging others to "buy that shit" instead of pirating it.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
"I do not care, I only listen to the good stuff which is usually at least ten years old but more often older."
You're falling prey to Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap". It's just that with the old stuff, the crap has been rightfully forgotten. There's lots of good new music, you just need to find a good way to filter out the crap.
some would call "the primary goal is 'optimizing or maximizing their income'" a good definition of greed. Your mileage may vary.
> Some people are freeloading asshats and will never pay anything. But you can't get money out of those people.
I would take some exception to this and say that some of those people are broke kids who have little or no money but scads of time on their hands that they use to track down things they want. Then those kids grow up as fans of the artists, get an income and shift to paying customers because they no longer have the time and energy to search things down like they used to. So you can get money out of them with time.
Personally I really like streaming services like Spotify and Netflix, but I'm starting to think that maybe having local copies of some things is a good thing as one of the problems with streaming services is the ephemeral nature of availability. For example I queued up Fringe a while back to watch when I got through some of my other backlog, and when I go to watch it, suddenly it's not part of the Netflix catalog for my country any longer (!). Or I made a playlist on Spotify for work and sometime in the last month or so a half dozen songs just vanished from it and only appear in the playlist greyed out if I activate the "show content no longer available" option.