"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.
Yeah, that is true for video steaming, but not music. Spotify has almost every song on the planet, and with a family account it’s very cheap. Unless you only listen to a very small music library it’s vastly cheaper than buying all the music
Until a contract negotiation with UMG goes south and they lose half the catalog overnight. See what’s happening on tiktok right now for a good example of this.
I understand the convenience draw, but I’m not a fan of continually paying for content that can disappear at any moment.
I do use streaming (although for free) to find new tracks. But I cannot imagine having my PRIMARY collection there, mostly because it’s so locked-down. You can’t use it on a dumb MP3 player, you can’t use a player application of your choice, etc.
Their android app is total garbage and frustrates me to no end. I’m seriously considering just going back to pirating my music just because I hate spotifys music app…