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Stream-ripping Is 'Fastest Growing' Music Piracy (bbc.com)
Stream-ripping is now the fastest-growing form of music piracy in the UK, new research has suggested. From a report: Several sites and apps allow users to turn Spotify songs, YouTube videos and other streaming content into permanent files to store on phones and computers. Record labels claim that "tens, or even hundreds of millions of tracks are illegally copied and distributed by stream-ripping services each month." One service alone is thought to have more than 60 million monthly users. According to research by the Intellectual Property Office and PRS For Music, 15 percent of adults in the UK regularly use these services, with 33 percent of them coming from the 16-24 age bracket. Overall usage of stream-ripping sites increased by 141.3 percent between 2014 and 2016, overshadowing all other illegal music services.
How many PCs are equipped with a Dell cup holder?
I bought an app last night in Microsoft's Windows App Store to rip content from YouTube. It isn't underground and you don't need to even use dubious apps or warez anymore to rip.
do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
if you checked out the quality of the average ear-buds that people use with their phones, you would have the answer to that question.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
My mp3 player has a burnished walnut knob.
I know the difference between an integrated amp and a "receiver."
But that Grateful Dead you listen to with your pristine Dynaco amp and vintage Klipsh speakers was originally recorded on cassette.
I'm guessing they're getting FAR less than even dismal mp3 quality music ripping off of streaming services, that aren't putting out very high quality music at all....
I would guess this wouldn't sound very good even on a portable player or in a car, much less even a modestly decent home sound system....
Or, do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
I can only speak for YouTube as I don't use Spotify, etc., but YouTube vides have MPA audio at 128 kbps at the lower resolutions and 192 kbps at 720p and up. It's arguable, but 128 kbps should be roughly equivalent to 192 kbps MP3. So it's not as bad as you think. But honestly, no, no young people care at all about sound quality. If it's not terrible, it's good enough for them. One thing my conversations with young people has made clear is that they are simply not ever going to buy music in a physical format, like CDs, ever. They'd rather not have music than do that. And streaming meets their needs because they prefer to listen to pretty random selections of songs rather than being fans of specific artists.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/Asus-Xonar-D2-Sound-Card-review-asus-xonar-d2-sound-card-page-2
ASUS call ALT DRM backup, which lets you record what you are hearing, circumnavigating DRM restrictions."
I did this VERY briefly early on...but also, early on, I noticed the sound sucked, and well...hard to always get the intro/outro of the song without the fscking DJ talking over it, or starting a new song over top of the last one....
But at a young age...I and most of my friends were sold on good quality audio.
We all worked, mowing lawns, baby sitting...later we got jobs washing dishes and bussing tables in HS.
But starting about 12 years old...I went into a high end audio shop, and heard a McIntosh tube amp hooked to Klipschorn speakers and my jaw hit the floor.
Starting from then...I earned and bought piece by piece as good of audio equipment as I could save and afford at the time...and have been trading up over all these years, till I now essentially have that first system I heard as a kid.
Of course, too many loud concerts have made my hearing not quite as sharp as back then, but still...I love good audio.
For the gym or car, sure..high quality mp3 is just fine, but for home...I want CD quality...usually I rip my stuff to FLAC and listen on the good stereo to that....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Technically, it's not "piracy" even in the idiotic sense in those jurisdictions where recording is allowed.
Ezekiel 23:20
This is no different than recording a broadcast off of the TV or radio and they are still in business.
Stream ripping has been going on since Shoutcast days with programs like Odd Sock Streamripper https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Nothing new...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Which makes it all the more memorable. I grew up in Northern Ohio, and (back before FM) we listened to CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario, because they were a 50kW powerhouse, and they played 'popular' music. To this day, I can't hear the final notes of American Pie (the day the music died....) without chiming in "See, Kay, Ell, Dubble Yooooooooo" Yeah, it wasn't pristine, clean, antiseptic MP3's like they have now, but it was what was available (on my Radio Shack cassette recorder, no less) and it's fond memories. Now, GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
youtube-dl FTW. Hint: it handles more than youtube, and has one cajillion command line options to suit you necessities.
My cellphone ringtone is a ring tone.
Several sites and apps allow users to turn Spotify songs, YouTube videos and other streaming content into permanent files to store on phones and computers.
You mean "time shifting". This has been litigated already.
Overall usage of stream-ripping sites increased by 141.3 percent between 2014 and 2016, overshadowing all other illegal music services.
Except that this isn't actually illegal. So now I wonder how many other apps services are incorrectly called "illegal" by this group.
Nope, no sig
People don't care about anything but 'FREE'. So who cares about paying for the product any longer.
Then their favorite artist stops touring and producing music and they complain because "They were my favorite band".
I don't pirate music- but I don't exactly think the music artists of large bands are really struggling for money. They tour because THAT's where they make most of their money.
Smaller bands probably aren't going to be on most streaming sites anyway.
In reality, stream ripping isn't really much different to copying to cassette from the radio like everyone was doing in the 80's.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If you think the earbuds are bad, some of the crap over-produced loudness wars inspired music they put through those headphones couldn't sound good even if gold-plated monster cables actually worked. Hell, Wikipedia even has a nice image of how more recent releases of old songs suffer the same problem: Waveforms for 3 releases of Black or White by Michael Jackson
Look at classic rock songs before that era to get a good idea how much its changed and how much it affects music. Here's Stairway to Heaven which I'm sure most people are familiar with. That song would be practically impossible today since whatever dick weevil would be put in charge of mastering the album would have maxed it out immediately, removing any ability for the song to build-up musically as well as lyrically.
Any song being crafted for mainstream radio play just isn't going to be as good of a listen (I'm not even talking about whether the song is good lyrically or musically) because the shit stain producers utterly rob it of expressivity in order to make it stand out more amidst all the other noise. There needs to be something like a Director's Cut for albums that give us something other than the radio mix.
Plus, Spotify lets you store songs on your phone so they can be played offline. Most people I know pirate stuff for convenience or to play stuff offline, and services like Spotify have made that mostly unneccesary
Perhaps this is just the studios making yet another case that
- DRM is still needed
- Streaming is evil and needs to die (because they have wrested control from the studios), or at least these companies should give them a bigger slice of the pie
- Every pirate is a thief who deserves some old fashioned sharia justice.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Thats because the X-2's uses gold plated connections.
"His name was James Damore."
Depends.
I'm an old person. But back when I was a teenager, I used to record stuff off the radio to listen to--the AM Radio. Why? Because it's free. Yeah, the quality sucked. Yeah, I sometimes ended up with some DJ talking up the song. But I was willing to forgo all that because it was free.
I assume it's a similar thing here.
They're still bent out of shape that their old business model just isn't working anymore. As has been said many times in *every* slashdot post about music piracy - it's the industries fault. They cling to physical sales when their audience wants to stream. They sell full albums when their audience wants variety and selection. They push their own distribution instead of going to the consumer via Amazon or Apple (in many cases, anyway). They insist on $1 a song, or more... then full albums at $9.99 or more to 'match' a physical CD sale. We no longer live in an era where the way to discover music was FM radio, and to keep listening to a song was to buy the album.
If the record labels would instead make their *entire* catalogs available, searchable, and "similar artists" reachable; then drop the prices for individual songs to impulse buy territory (say, $0.25) they could make a lot more money due to the sheer volume of sales. They make the same amount if it's 1 person spending a dollar or 4 people spending a quarter.. or even 10 people spending a dime. I for one think $1 is too much for one song, particularly since I get bored of most songs after 4-5 plays.
Close...
They emit gold particles that when ionized create a gold nano-filament between the ear buds and the device -- allowing for perfect signal transmission. It gets kind of expensive having to refill the reservoir with fresh gold (i don't have the money to invest in the recycling adapter), but still miles and miles better than wired headphones.
Songs with high dynamic range are annoying to listen to in a lot of everyday situations, such as in a car or while working out at the gym, as volume has to constantly be adjusted. Not everyone listens to music in an underground bunker with perfect noise isolation, $10000 speakers, etc. Also, I doubt anyone here can truly differentiate between a lossless audio file and a reasonable MP3/AAC, most of you are just full of yourselves (many blind AB tests out there that people tend to ignore due to bias). Most people really just care about the music; sound quality is secondary. Heck, people can't even differentiate between a modern violin and a Stradivarius, let alone the difference between MP3/lossless.
The last few cars that I've owned boosted the volume as you sped up or slowed down. This is a much better technical solution than ramming saturated music down everyone's throats.
And even my old-ass Sony tube TV has a dynamic range compression feature to help watch movies at low volume.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Ever more draconian laws and technology will never get piracy under control so stop expecting it.
I work for a living. I get paid, and that's the end of it. I don't get paid every time someone uses a window I installed or a door I made or lung I transplanted.
To hell with the entertainment industry and with IP in general.
Hey, people will ride standing up in an airplane if the price is right.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Speeding up/slowing down isn't the issue; it's the ~70 dB noise floor of driving that makes anything quiet in the music impossible to hear (without going deaf during the loud parts). The simplest technical solution, which the industry has adopted, is to normalize the loudness in the track. No special music playback hardware required, works for all makes & models & years of cars/whatever playback device. Sure there may be better technical ways to do it, but cost and adoption will be a problem.
No, cost is not a problem. The circuit is trivial and the trick can likely already be pulled off with the DSP electronics already present for tone control/equalization. This was even available in the analog days as a "loudness" knob.
"Adoption" would happen more or less immediately if the music wasn't already compressed. It was widely adopted in ye olden days.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I certainly hope it doesn't kill the music industry. Y'know, like it did last time. And the time before that.
I doubt anyone here can truly differentiate between a lossless audio file and a reasonable MP3/AAC
As someone who did professional audio engineering for quite a few years, I have to disagree --- sort of.
First, you say a "reasonable" MP3. A "reasonable" MP3 is indeed hard to tell from a lossless file, but most MP3s aren't all that "reasonable" and can be pretty easily distinguished.
My second caveat has to do with the listening environment. If you're listening on the Apple earbuds that came with your phone, you surely can't tell good from bad. If you listen on the JBL professional setup I had in my studio control room, you sure as heck can hear small differences.
I do agree that many modern (and many somewhat older) mixes are way over-engineered. The engineers try to get them to sound acceptable in loud environments, in stereo and in mono, on crappy car systems and crappier earbuds, and so on ... and what loses out is listening in a good environment on good equipment. Note that I say "many" mixes, not "all" mixes. In particular, New Age seems to be mixed with more of a view to quality listening.
Of course, taste is subjective. I'm sure some people like the sound of their Apple earbuds.
...you can pirate it. So obviously they need to sell CDs and MP3s that won't play and music players without speakers or any audio outs.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
A good friend of mine got his CPA as an older college student. Then he went to work for the big CPA firms in NYC. They used him for auditing and then spit him out at the end of audit season (after having told him, "You play your cards right and we'll put you on track to be a partner." Yeah, as if!). One audit he did is worth noting.
It seems this one former rocker whose group was filling the stadiums "back in the day" was accosted by a paparazzi and the rocker may have struck the paparazzi. He called his attorney when he got a letter from the alleged victim of his fist and asked for him to defend him. His attorney told him what it would cost to defend. The former rocker said, "But I'm broke!" His attorney said, "That's crazy—your music is still selling. In fact, my daughter just told me that she got your entire album from 1970-something on iTunes."
"I haven't received a royalty check for five years from anyone!" replied the former rocker.
His attorney, who drew up the contracts informed him that he had the "right to audit" the sales of his recordings. So, my friend Jim was hired to do the audit.
Here is what he found out:
To say the least, after the audit, the record company agreed to arbitration and wound up paying the members of the group unpaid moneys and had to pay interest to keep the story from the press. Jim never told me who the band was, but he did tell me that I would know right away who they were.
So, the next time you see the recording industry whining about people stealing "their" music, understand that it's the artist's music you are stealing—if you are, indeed, illegally copying music. But also understand that the recording industry, themselves, are just as guilty—they blame you for what they, themselves do.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
If it wasn't for music piracy, I would have never heard of any of my favourite bands. I've spent thousands of dollars going to gigs and buying merch from bands whose music I haven't paid for.
You could certainly make an argument that piracy hurts music sales: some people who would have bought it will get it for free instead, but some who wouldn't have heard it otherwise might buy it. Which side you think is a bigger influence is definitely up for debate.
Tours, however, are only ever HELPED by piracy. "A band I love is in town, but I won't bother going to a gig because I can just listen to the MP3s at home" said no one ever in the history of live music. The availability of free music is what got people interested in these bands to begin with; nobody I know buys music from someone they have never listened to. Scalping, third-party fees (looking at you, Ticketmaster) and high venue-mandated pricing are what's dangerous to live music at the moment, but sorting out those would require getting in the way of the rent-seeking middle-men and their sweet talent-free, work-free, risk-free profits.
The music "industry" isn't about music; it's about taking as much money as possible from fans and giving as little of it as possible to artists. The music is just a byproduct, and is treated as such unless it can be further monetised without actually doing any work. The PRS who published this "report" are just a cancerous cog in that infernal machine, demanding money with menaces under the guise of supporting artists, whilst passing on virtually no money to any actual talent.
In reality, stream ripping isn't really much different to copying to cassette from the radio like everyone was doing in the 80's.
"But *this time around*, home taping will be killing the music. For sure. Honest !"
-- brought to you by the industry that keep crying "wolf".
(Under the command of CEOs who would like to outlaw the huming of copyrighted music)
{...} but I don't exactly think the music artists of large bands are really struggling for money.
The large bands aren't struggling for money anyway and won't feel the impact of piracy much.
The smaller bands are actually under horrendous contracts where they don't actually make that much money anyway. Piracy at least helps getting their music known, and might actually help them getting invited to play in some festivals. Helping them raise on the ladder.
(I don't have a concrete *music* example right of the top of my head, but lots of organisers are watching music popularity trends close to determine up going bands to invite. That also includes watching what happens on the piracy maket. /. )
Netflix is a well known *movie* example : they have admitted to also watch piracy popularity to determine which series to license. - there are even articles about this on
They tour because THAT's where they make most of their money.
It used to be that *discs* are where they made money, and concerts were glorified ads campaign for new discs.
Currently it's the opposite : there isn't much money in CDs (most of the money end up in the pockets of the label), or streaming, but it helps getting the band known, and then subsequently get invited to play at concerts).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The solution to that is for a mastered track with good dynamic range have a corresponding 'gain adjustment info' file (basically bounce the audio before smashing the crap out if it with a compressor - then record what the final stage of compression does to it - using standardised and publicly known algorithms). A playback device could then easily give the overcompressed output.
John_Chalisque
Please report to the Thought Police to pay your fine and purchase your non-exclusive performance rights to the song. That will be $15,000 per "performance," payable immediately and retroactive to your great grandparents' time.
I can only speak for YouTube as I don't use Spotify,
Spotify do the compression themselves from original audio (so there aren't many copy-generational problems).
Spotify uses Vorbis (better quality than MP3 at same bitrate according to A/B test. Definitely better than WMA), because back when they started, that was the best license-free codec guaranteed to be available in the largest set of browsers (it was an IETF standard), and a permissive free library (easy to embed into apps).
(This was back before OPUS, the current IETF standard came and basically killed nearly every other codec performance wise - with the sole exception of some extremely low-bandwidth usage that are not found on internet)
Spotify uses bitrates of
- 96kbps for its low quality setting (around the same quality as MP3 @~128kbps. So clearly audible, but still largely acceptable quality)
- 160kbps for its normal quality settings (very good quality for vorbis, hard to tell appart in most typical settings)
-. ~320 for the high quality settings for paying customer for local saves (should sound lossless nearly everywhere).
Spotify has mentionned thinking of adding lossless codecs for local saves (I think it was FLAC ? I'm not sure. But it was recently mentionned on /.)
I think they have considered OPUS now that its a IETF standar (like nearly every one else online is doing) (and even the industry is doing informally/experimentally with Digital Radio Mondial).
If you rip the high quality streams from Spotify it means that you have access to an extremely good quality stream (but it also means that you're a paying customer, at which point ripping doesn't make that much sense, as opposed to simply locally saving on the smartphone's SD card with the app and having your music offline everywhere you want it)
At least that's for DRM-busting the cache/local saves and for high quality setting.
Regular settings are of lower (but still very good) quality.
S/PDIF loop is going to add copy-generationnal loss of whatever you use to re-encode the raw S/PDIF stream (unless you go lossless, e.g.: FLAC).
Analog loop is in practice going to add even more artefacts specially with poor analog connections in an electrically noisy environment (cue in jokes about Apple's shitty audio jacks)
but YouTube vides have MPA audio at 128 kbps at the lower resolutions and 192 kbps at 720p and up. It's arguable, but 128 kbps should be roughly equivalent to 192 kbps MP3. So it's not as bad as you think.
the quality of AAC is *extremely* dependent on the quality of the encoder. See FFMPEG's older codec. (though in this case, it's google. so I would assume that their codec doesn't suck too much).
That's just one of the available codecs on youtube. Youtube will actually generate lots of different formats for each video (that also include completely different codecs), so there is much variability depending on which alternative format one descides to use. e.g. they also provide OPUS @160kbps which is the same kind of "hard to tell appart in A/B/X test" as AAC@192kbps.
But the main problem is in the process itself :
Youtube *generates* lots of different formats, from whatever the user has uploaded.
In theory, it's possible to upload an MKV using h264 lossless for video and FLAC for audio (been doing that).
But in practice, people will upload whatever the "export" button of their video editor does.
Which is very often MP4 file with AAC for the audio.
So you have copy-generationnal artifacts due to recoding from one lossy format into another.
Also add to the factor that the AAC codec of the video editor might be crappy.
(This is part of the reasons why official youtube recommendations for MP4 and AAC audio are 384 kbps - just to be sure that even crappy codecs manage to make a high enough quality compression).
So that 192 kbps AAC audio you get on
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In the late 70’s and early 80’s I worked as a DJ in a roller rink. Kids would line up their boom-boxes along the wall and record our whole show. Then they’d play it back to their friends in the parking lot. The recorded sound was awful (those built in mics were crap, not that the speakers were much better), but they didn’t care. They had their music – the quality of which must have been augmented by the memories of it when they heard it over our actually pretty good Altec-Lansing sound system. They would have totally shit their pants to have the quality of a YouTube rip.
A shout out to anyone that ever skated at The Skate Ranch in Milan Illinois. I’m the guy that designed and built an Apple ][ controlled scoreboard style sign in the parking light with 8,556 light bulbs (in four colors none the less). I’m talking full text scrolling, animation, and WYSIWYG on the monitor. Circa 1980. I was the shiz before I went to college (self taught programming and TTL logic circuit design). Now I'm struggling to keep up with the new kids.
Letter To Iran
Songs with high dynamic range are annoying to listen to in a lot of everyday situations, such as in a car or while working out at the gym, as volume has to constantly be adjusted.
That's why there are technical solutions available to these people who need to destroy the sound to make it listenable, e.g. the "loudness" option on my car radio which dials in the amount of dynamic range compression I get.
No need to mess up the source material. You can always compress. You can never uncompress.
The reason they tour is that they make a pittance from music sales. It was bad enough when record companies sold CDs, which were lose-lose propositions for both artists & customers: one had to sink something like $20 for a CD w/ just 1 song worth listening, while the record company took the biggest cut and the artists were left w/ crumbs. It didn't help that most songs were quickly in & out of favor w/ the public.
Once Apple entered, they introduced granularity by allowing people to buy 1 song at a time, which enabled one to buy exactly what s/he liked and nothing more. Which made things better for consumers, but didn't resolve the issue from the artists' end. Which is why they still tour.
What the hell were people expecting? Mobile data costs a shitload. Why would anyone stream over their portable device (aka the most convenient/commonly used device), when they can download to it and replay as often as they want and save on data usage charges.