"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.
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The strange bit is, even in the 80s,I was paying waaaay more than that per year for records and tapes.
It’s only the fact that someone suggested I had to pay them a subscription that causes me to download illegally
Don’t fucking tell me I need to keep paying every year for something I don’t own, I’m not buttoned up the back
Yah, I remember paying like $10-15 mid 1990s for a single CD album. And we liked it! Easily spent a few hundred bucks a year on music.
I swear if these stupid music labels just switched to 5 cents a song, no DRM, own it forever, global distribution, bill you once a month to manage transaction fees – they’d make more money than god.