It’s pretty dumb when record companies limit distribution by region like this.
Yeah, I once discovered an artist, even bought some albums, only to notice about a year later that the place I discovered them was now blocked in my country. If I would’ve come a year later, I would never have bought these albums.
It’s totally dumb because it’s not about getting a good deal for consumers or artists, purely about rights-holders maximising revenue. If they can’t negotiate a good enough deal in a region they’ll simply not allow it to be streamed. This is what happens when they separate the cultural value of “content” from the monetary value of it, the perceived desirability. Viewers and listeners want a good show to watch or album to hear, rights-holders simply want to get a good deal, regardless of what the stuff it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/7CDKvdlD6uQ?si=5AQ8Z5TbLTdUwCf1
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I bought an album off iTunes last year in September. I made the mistake of joining Apple Music and it completely fucked my offline music library. So I had to revert to a backup prior to September.
Went back to download that album and was told I couldn’t because it’s no longer available in my region.
It’s okay to buy it but you can somehow lose access to it because rights expired that had no bearing on you.
It’s fucking stupid and they wonder why people pirate when they pull shit like this.
I have the opposite experience. I have a heap of MP3s and flacs and those live on some hard drives.
Apple Music was like “wanna twy?” And I was like “aite sure”. I love having lossless of basically everything when I’m not at home, and iOS doesn’t touch my at-home collection.
I guess the problem is buying DRM music. I never trusted any of that.
It used to work for me for years and then it gave it up for some reason I can’t remember. Though this was under iTunes Match which is still sort of the same thing, just exclusively for uploading music but no streaming what you haven’t uploaded or purchased.
Though, it did replace some of my music for clean versions which I despise. Music I’ve had for decades and have no copies of any longer…I would be morally justified pirating the right copies, but it’s too many to go through.
What they did this last time was that they replaced more of my music with different versions. I’m talking very different versions to what my CDs had from back when these were CDs my dad let me rip when I was a teen decades ago and they replaced some of my music with versions that didn’t download correctly and couldn’t be played anymore. Almost like corrupt copies.
My offline music library was a mess. 60+ GB worth of music, most of it was inaccessible anymore and would give me strange errors like it wasn’t available in my region anymore despite it being music I uploaded. Apparently others have experienced similarly recently and the only fix was if you have a backup to restore from backup.
That is super fucked and I’m so sorry that happened.
Replacing for clean versions though, that’s hilarious. Like WHY?!
I’m not blaming you AT ALL because software should never fuck with your music irreparably. I’m just paranoid something is going to go wrong with my collection I’ve curated for 15+ years, I keep it backed up on multiple drives now.
…after I had a HDD die.
I do love Apple Music though. It’s super cheap for having lossless shit everywhere, and I’m not a shill I PROMISE I USE LINUX ALSO AND UNFORTUNATELY PREDOMINATELY WINDOWS 10 AAAAAAAAAA
Music purchased from the iTunes Store is DRM free though. I think they actually upgraded purchases made prior to this change to DRM free versions (called iTunes Plus or something).
That’s fair, but the only music I’d ever purchase are flac files I just can have, outside of an ecosystem of any sort. And I say this as an iOS lover!
My only reason besides stuff being free is that I want my music library offline. There are some services like Bandcamp that offer it, but it would not cover a meaningful percentage of all my library. Not gonna buy and rip CDs myself as well
It’s as if they’re asking to be pirated.
they’re asking for you to hand over your wallet, repeatedly
I try to buy all my music directly from the artist in CD form whenever possible. Whenever that’s not possible, I try to get a version that I can save locally & play offline…
Bandcamp is also good. You get flac downloads and the artists get money and more so than on other platforms
Never tried bandcamp, but will have to try it out soon…
Most of my music is “pirated” because you can’t find it on any streaming platform, it’s usually a YT download, often for game OSTs (often ones I own a copy of), and offline play allows stuff like Music Speed Changer to change the pitch and speed of the music!
If it was just for game OSTs and other less common music. Over time I noticed that my playlists on streaming services start losing songs, mainstream music. Sometimes this is because an artist leaves one label for another, but sometimes I have no explanation. And I don’t even notice that until “hey, I haven’t heard that song in years… wait, where is it? where are these albums??” It’s frustrating. This pushed me to pirate music again.
I see more often than I’d like to see retconned and greyed out releases in my playlist…
The fuck am I paying them.
God do I hate those publisher licensing agreements.Ahh remember the good ol times when you could insert a jrpg cd into a cd player and could listen to all the music.
Many games did this. Dungeon Keeper, Theme Hospital and the GTA games are the ones I can think of right now.
650MB CD media. The game itself was 40-50MB and the rest 500-600MB was the audio in wav (CD player compatible) type
I know but its still cool af
yeah I mostly commented that because the fact that the game itself is so much smaller than the audio is impressive and funny at the same time
This youtube link contains a tracking code ?si=… Remember to remove it next time.
Quick guide that’s been shared around online lately for those unsure what this is:
this bothered me for a long time about youtube links. thanks for the incredible infographic
Nice link you have there as an example :)
You know the rules and so do I
Just highly theoretical, how would one have the best possible experience pirating music via DDL (no torrenting) and organizing it?
Usenet and Soulseek
For me, I subscribe to Deezer (or you can do a trial) and run Deemix which is able to download the music in MP3 or FLAC. It directly downloads the music using Deezer’s API.
As far as organizing it goes, I typically just host it with Plex or a Subsonic player like Navidrome.
Any similar tool for Spotify so I don’t have to record a digital interface?
Zotify
What about using a VPN to bypass geographical restrictions? You will just need to search VPN into you favorite app store.
Some songs get completely yanked. You can list them, you can scrape them with the Spotify API. And you can see the available countries is empty.
Whenever I release music myself, I actively block it in Russia, because they relentlessly steal my trance / freeform releases and upload them in warez sites.
Of course geoblocking can be circumvented by a determined pirate but it helps to not be on their radar in first place as a lesser known artist.
As an example, once I released a freeform album. Freeform is a very niche, small scene. It was on Russian forums within a couple of days. Fortunately one of my fans notified me, I had a Russian friend contact the site on my behalf to explain that I’m a poor struggling artist, and they’re literally taking money out of my pocket; to my surprise they agreed to take the links down.
