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Comment by xmcp123 | Hacker News Reader

I'd have a lot more sympathy if the music industry didn't try all of the worst available options to handle piracy for years and years.

They had many opportunities to get out ahead of it, and they squandered it trying to cling to album sales where 11/13 tracks were trash. They are in a bed of their own making.

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You have been able to buy DRM free digital music from all of the record labels since 2009 from Apple and other stores.

> DRM free digital music from all of the record labels

Is this true? Can you show me where I can get DRM-free releases from Mountain Fever?

Better yet, can you add that information here? https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free

Your link doesn’t work. But I assume you are talking about this label? I looked at the first artist and I found the artist’s music on iTunes. Everything that Apple sells on the iTunes Music Store has been DRM free AAC or ALAC (Apple lossless) since 2009.

https://mountainfever.com/colin-kathleen-ray/

While ALAC is an Apple proprietary format, it is DRM free and can be converted to FLAC using ffmeg. AAC is not an Apple format

ALAC is open source and royalty free since 2011. https://macosforge.github.io/alac/

Wow. How did I miss that!!!

The "iTunes going DRM free" was a big deal around 2008.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/may/15/drm.apple

I remember trying to use music I had bought in a slideshow that year and finding out that I couldn’t load tracks with DRM into the editor I was using; it was very frustrating.

A way to strip the DRM was built into the iTunes app - burn the song to a CD and rip it.

Is burning to a CD and ripping it lossless?

If the source and target are both lossless, then yes. ALAC was available in iTunes since 2004 AFAIK.

Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.

I don’t know about Mountain Fever, but for anything I haven’t been able to find on Bandcamp, I’ve been able to find on Qobuz.

You've been able to buy DRM free digital music since the 1980s.

Technically not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System

I think OP was referring to CDs, which AFAIK don't have DRM.

My link is to the CD DRM!

This is rather misleading. Standard CDs as sold had (and have) no DRM.

The scheme you link to is intended to prevent further copies of CD-Rs but you can copy a CD you bought as often as you like.

Unless the CD comes with a root kit that interferes with that copying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Is that still the case? The option to do that quietly disappeared from Amazon Music a couple of months ago, for example, and they were one of the last few holdouts where you still could. It might be only Apple now?

There's still plenty of options around, Qobuz and 7digital in particular offer drm-free flac downloads.

I still buy DRM free music from Amazon.

Quboz, bandcamp, etc.

Bandcamp is still my go to for owning music. Nice platform, just works.

“I only pirate because evil corporations make it too hard to pay for my favorite content” is a multi-decade ever-shifting goalpost. Some people just like to steal shit and will justify it to themselves on the thinnest of pretenses.

It is factually true though, music piracy DID drop once ad supported music streaming became available, the opposite is also true, video/movie piracy is now on the rise due to the amount of streaming subscriptions one has to juggle and their rising prices. Ofcourse there will always be those who yearn for the pirates life, but the vast majority just do it for convenience.

And Netflix’s profits have been on the rise for over a decade. I retired my plex server over six years ago. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of finding decent quality torrents. Everything ends up on streaming anyway.

I don't even know the last time I pirated music. Gotta be at least 10 years.

Meanwhile, I pirate movies/TV on a regular basis for the reasons you gave. At one point, I was subbed to 5 services, and decided enough was enough. Cancelled all but Netflix and went back to torrenting anything they didn't have.

I've used spotify for a decade. But the other day I opened one of my playlists and noticed that almost all the songs were greyed out as "unavailable" despite a quick search showing those songs still existed.

Spotify rotted my playlists because it didn't feel like updating a database row somewhere when some licensing agreement got updated. Apple will do the opposite: Rot your music collection by replacing songs with "identical" songs that aren't at all.

So I'm thinking it's time to buy music again.

Piracy went down quite a bit since that is possible.

they made cd singles and single song purchases long before streaming

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