To this day I still boycott anything Metallica. I loved Napster and would run out and buy CDs to support the artists. This makes me happy, but doubt they even care.
You realize how self-centered this is, right? How it isn't indicative of the general public? This is like saying "I love drunk driving. I live in Alaska where there's no one around so there's no one I can hurt."
If your buisness model requires large scale censorship of the internet to remain profitable, then your buisness model is broken. This was true in the 90s where downloading a few thousand mp3s was the most you could get out of your modem and it's true today for complete 4k blueray rips.
Spotify and co have obliterated music piracy on the internet. It's hard to find torrents for music these days and even the best private trackers can't compete with Spotifys ever growing catalog. Add to that the availability of Spotify on linux, android and basically every other device that has a DAC in my household and i wouldn't even bother trying to pirate music anymore. There was a time, when this was true for netflix, or at least it felt true to a degree. But the movie and tv industry chose to split their catalog between an ever growing number of competing offers, thus movie piracy is alive and well. The same is true for most games these days. Why bother pirating a game, requiring complicated installation, slow download speeds and a lack of updates when i can buy it on steam and get the convenience of fast downloads, automatic updates, reliable only gameplay etc.?
The reality is that copying bits of data has become so trivial, it's impossible to monetize it. That's why everything's a SaaS in the cloud these days. Trying to restrict that is a fools errand at best. For piracy to die, it has to become inconvenient and the legal alternatives have to be priced reasonable.
Eh? Maybe it depends on a musical genre, but from my experience musical piracy is about as popular as it ever was, with a lot of new releases every day (although I admit that it didn't really grow). I can still find anything I'm interested in less than a minute.
I also think, that having your own musical library is more convenient than spotify. As an example - https://ibb.co/VLTh5fD and https://ibb.co/fnxnMmG
1) Configure Environment
* In Spotify set quality to Very High (nominally 320kbps)
* Using some virtual patch cabling (I use Voice Meeter Banana), set Windows to use it's VAIO input as the Spotify output device.
* Make sure B1 channel (the virtual output) is enabled in VMB
* Set A1 channel (hardware out) in VMB to your speakers if you want to monitor music, otherwise set to nothing if you want it to do all this in the background
* Set Audacity to to use the VAIO Output as the recording source
2) Record
* hit play in spotify, hit record in audacity
* Audacity should stop recording after prolonged silence when playlist ends - you can tweak the sensitivity of this.
3) Process * Select all in Audacity, then Analyze/Detect Sounds, set silence threshold to whatever (e.g. -60). Spot check your results for accuracy.
* Export this track list from Audacity (txt file)
* Use a tool like https://watsonbox.github.io/exportify to export your playlist details from Spotify (csv file)
* Use Excel or Python (or whatever your hammer of choice is) to merge your spotify playlist data with the audacity label export file, basically creating a new label file for audacity. For example, your audacity label name could be "artist-trackname".
* Import your new label file to update the track names;
* "Export Multiple" from Audacity using track name as file name.
* Use some media management tool to clean up and download all the metadata for the file. I used MediaMonkey for this. Basically imported detecting artist and track name from filename, then let it do its thing to look up additional metadata and album covers.
I'd suggest downloading it now before it inevitably gets nuked again
I don’t know if I’d really notice quality[0] degradation too much, my use case would be the local storage in my vehicle for long trips with dodgy cell coverage. I’ve been burned a couple times by Spotify auto-clearing previously downloaded playlists, only to find out after I’m without data coverage / in the air.
I have a couple ideas about making the process more efficient, as in process running in the background. You are essentially restricted to a 1x rip speed, but I shouldn’t think I’d need to babysit it much and the post processing can be largely automated, perhaps less time than I remember it taking to find equivalent torrents, dl and clean those up. I mean, duration would be longer but level of effort on par or less.
Will report back.
[0] https://support.spotify.com/us/article/high-quality-streamin...
Emule and bittorent helped me get access to a culture i didn't even know existed, brought me awy from TV shows and helped me learn english and to books i now own. I'm sorry for Butcher, Feist and Sanderson early years, but i think i have the whole collection now, and i couldn't afford to buy those books anyway (i don't think i could even find them in my country)
Drunk driving just made me gain 40 minutes while probably endangering a dozen people (and i immediately stopped after the first time).
Also every time i buy storage i pay a tax to Universal and other CP owner while not having any licenced music (unless they own Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Pachelbel, and a lot of pre-63 music in general) on those storage. Also they should give 40% of that tax to the Linux foundation since packer and weird images are taking almost half my disk space?
Anyway, i know how prod works, more than half of them are parasites and don't add any value (well, not exactly, they add their daddy political connections, that's something). It does not surprise me, what is surprising to me is that this many people defend them.