After 15 Years, the Pirate Bay Still Can’t Be Killed
melmagazine.com
melmagazine.com
People do sign up for streaming services, but not for like, 10. Furthermore torrenting got really convenient and is very fast with adequate Internet (let's say 10MByte/s), so you get a decent quality movie in under 5 minutes (obviously only if there are enough seeders - but the availability of torrents completely dwarfs the availability of streaming providers - if it's really unpopular and maybe a little bit older you just won't find it on streaming services).
Beside the fact that BitTorrent is an interesting protocol in itself, imagine just how much simpler Netflix or Spotify could be implemented, if we wouldn't stream DRM encrypted blobs, but download files? You just need many big fat file-servers and put your media there - if we wouldn't have DRM (AFAIK all streaming providers enforce DRM), this is technically a solved problem.
Yes.
I guess people would even pay for Spotify, if it's DRM free (which means the stuff on it can be copied), but that is still considered "radical" (in the Overton window) for shareholders of media distributors.
That "Save your music offline" is a feature in 2019 is ridiculous.
In addition subtitles, secondary audio, descriptive video, and multi-view video etc. are all things which we mandate by law which do not work well in a file base expierenced.
Peer to peer as a distribution method is not only know, but there are plenty of providers that use peer to peer like streaming setups (see https://streamroot.io/streamroot-dna/). You may be using something like BitTorrent and _not even know it_.
Distribution is 1/10th the story and DRM is only a small part of it as well. BitTorrent does nothing to solve the other 9/10ths and removing DRM doesn't either.
The rest is your parent justifying their job/industry as if they're a Godsend–perhaps as compared to cable? It's an indefensible position thus far. The streaming services are all trash with pathetic bitrates; all streams average the same ridiculously low bitrate over the entire stream, without accounting for dark scenes that require orders of magnitude more bandwidth. Every Netflix (and competitors') 1080p streams with dark scenes are unwatchable. It's highway robbery to deliver what looks like 180p frames for a 1080p stream. We're supposed to be at 4K these days, yet they can't even deliver acceptable 1080p. Until the streaming services are willing to stop compressing everything far beyond watchable levels, they don't deserve anyone's business. Netflix, I believe, averages ~3-5 GB for a 90-120 minute movie? That number should be, at least via opt-in to those with the bandwidth for it, 20-40+ GB.
I don't necessarily expect fully uncompressed Blu-ray quality, but the standard should be to deliver something watchable, without banding artifacts. At a minimum that would mean massively variable bitrates, where the highest bitrate of a stream should be allowed to be 10-20x+ its minimum bitrate. Compressing a 60+ GB original file into a download of than 5 GB is flat out unacceptable and unjustifiable.
Complaining about the _size_ or _bitrate_ of encoded file isn't worthwhile. Encoding technology has advanced substantially since blue-ray days and we simply no longer needs the 40mbps bitrate.
Indeed HEVC can offer a mathematically lossless encode at around 90mbps for most content.
A concrete example: You say here that what Netflix provides is "visually indistinguishable from a lossless encode". Try actually doing this with an open mind and then make this claim again. It was definitely not the case when I last tried it (very recently).
Argumentation of this nature is sort of endemic in the tech industry: "You think you see or experience this, but I know what you see and experience and you are wrong". It happens in discussions about battery life, visual appeal of different encoding options, basically anything which is at some point subjective and while the people claiming to see a difference could be (factually) wrong in a lot of cases (I often cannot tell), it is very arrogant to sit/stand there and tell them that you know better than them what they see.
The way people perceive (and how to measure it) is in fact not a solved problem. There are studies done and we can often say with a high degree of certainty that something is probably not visible/distinguishable, but claiming something like that for everyone is too strong and also misrepresenting the state of our learning.
Secondary audio is not only additional languages but things like descriptive video services (narration for the blind). VLC does not generally support having multiple active audio tracks without flagging things on the command line.
I have never seen descriptive video services in any streaming service so I very much doubt it is a major issue, and even in that case why wouldn't you be able to mix it with the main track in a separate channel (which is what is done on TV, as TV does not support multiple active tracks either) ?
netflix has them
That's just not true - VLC has many more features than all the web-based (or "app"-based) popular streaming players. Granted, I checked and my VLC does not have "thumbnail scrubbing", but although that is nice, I don't think this is a big deal and if it's really popular, it will be added to VLC (or it may already be there, I did not check).
1. You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete. (Well, maybe 95% complete, depending on how tolerant you and your software are when it comes to malformed files)
That's the way it was designed to work. Otherwise, the bits at the beginning of the file would be much more common amongst your non-seeding peers and the bits at the end would be much rarer amongst your non-seeding peers. Your downloads would start crazy fast and would get progressively slower.
Some clients let you abuse the protocol and "stream" torrents sequentially, but if significant percentages of torrenters (such as literally every Netflix user, in an imaginary world where Netflix simply served everything via torrents) did that it would be an issue.
That's a great way to deliver big files in their entirety via P2P, but that is pretty much the pathological opposite of what is requred for streaming.
For streaming you obviously need that sequential access. You need to optimize for the beginning of the file, since people want to start watching right away. People do not want to wait 60 or 30 or even 10 seconds for a YouTube vid to start streaming.
2. Think about your actual viewing habits. How many times have you watched the first 1% of a video on YouTube or Netflix, and then decided to watch something else instead? Even if we (probably generously) assume most users watch an average of 50% of a given video (I suspect it's much less) that's still 2x wasted bandwidth per video, on average, if video providers blasted out entire files. Netflix's infrastructure (or rather, their AWS monthly bill) is massive already. Imagine it being asked to blast out 2 or 5 or 10x as much data per video as it's already doing.
3. There's also the rather important matter of many (most?) playback devices not having huge gobs of local storage with which to hold complete movie downloads. I've got probably 20TB of hard drives scattered around this place, but that's not the norm.
4. Can't adapt to changing bandwidth conditions by scaling video quality up and down midstream. Personally, I wish I had more control over this as a customer, as sometimes I'd rather just wait than watch a compromised stream, but Average Joe is not going to want to muck around with that sort of choice, or even understand what it means.
That's just not true.
I've used uTorrent, and I recall deciding whether I wanted to stream or not. It worked well too.
If everybody did it, that would be a big problem.
More to the original poster's point, my post answer's the posters question of "why doesn't YouTube just offer file downloads like Bittorrent?"
There are many clear reasons why; my post gave one of the more prominent ones.
i.e. I'll send block 1 to one peer, block 2 to another peer. Then I can send blocks 3 and 4 to them (respectively), while they each send each other blocks 1 and 2.
You're the seeder. Initially you're the only one with all 100. And everybody's gonna download things sequentially.
Imagine 300 peers grab block 1 from you. Gonna be pretty slow, each peer gets 1/300th of your bandwidth.
Imagine those 300 peers finish block 1 and move onto block 2. Same bandwidth crunch. Although new peers can at least get block 1 from that initial cohort of 300 peers. But nobody can blocks 2 through 100 from anybody but you. Not ideal.
Now repeat the process for 3 through 100. You're gonna be the bottleneck for a loooooooong time for those remaining pieces.
...
...
...now imagine we do it differently. Those 300 peers each grab a random block. This part's just as slow.
But once they have their initial randomly-chosen blocks, our bandwidth explodes. Each of those 100 blocks is now available from ~4 sources (you, and roughly 3 others). And you could even log off at this point, since there is a complete (distributed) copy of your file out there.
As more blocks are exchanged, the effective aggregate bandwidth rapidly increases even farther.
not saying it would not work, I actually like the idea of more peer to peer networking. But as the market is clearly focused on low consumption user devices with commonly little drive capacity seeding would be a damage to UX.
Theoretically, yes. But in practice, especially with "modern"/high-speed internet, I can open my torrent in VLC after the first few MB are present on my computer and read the entire file as it comes in, without me the user encountering stuttering or buffering of any kind.
In effect, from the user's perspective, you're streaming the torrent - without running into the often present decrease in quality from the "traditional" stream's encoding.
(In the case of ZIP archives, 7-Zip can't open partial files, but bsdtar can. Although in my case it was from a damaged floppy disk rather than torrent, but the same thing would do, if you are downloading ZIP files from torrent. But if you are downloading music, then presumably bsdtar is irrelevant.)
Not a single one of these things is true. In fact, file-based delivery offers a superior experience in several of them with proper implementation. Streaming is popular because it lowers distribution costs, decreases piracy, and allows rights holders to pull content whenever they want.
Personally, I hate streaming. Buffering sucks. Bitrates suck. Audio quality sucks. Never knowing how long something I like will actually be available sucks. It's just an all-around bad experience if you care about your media.
Fast forward for low power clients relies on an "iframe only" track as there decoders can't do many x realtime decode. This is not present in modern file based work flows.
Seeks use the same startup/segmentation requirements as video startup.
Thumbnail scrubbing requires a thumbnail track and is not supported by file based workflows at all.
Clip previews on sites load at low resolution/bitrates and can be poped up to "full resolution" via ABR. Doing a preview of 10x 4k streams without abr wouldn't work even on a modern gaming rig.
I'd love to hear how you'd do SSAI on top of a file based workflow.
You could of course build a "file based" implementation that had all of these features, but you would just be rebuilding DASH or HLS.
At any rate, I don't think users would balk at being given a choice.
A proper udp based streaming of course tears HLS to pieces
It worked well enough nobody can be bothered with real streaming now...
I'd love to hear how you'd do SSAI
on top of a file based workflow.
I do not even mind it is drm as long as I can get a good quality one in 10 minutes. Even if I contribute bandwidth (as long as controller and during my download) and paid.
There is always someone not paid. But it is those who can and willingly do which oddly leave out. Like Mp3 in 1990s.
It would have owned discovery, which would have badly damaged the big studios. And Netflix would probably have never happened.
It would have been a similar story in music.
But P2P was always about people who think a file is a file is a file, and creation costs are an externality, which can be ignored as irrelevant.
So now we have TPB limping along, and new creators are mostly owned by YT - which is legendary for draconian application of copyright in the favour of fellow corporates.
Since when are subtitles mandated by law? "Multi-view video"? Maybe I'm just missing something, but I've never heard of any law mandating any of the things you listed above (except maybe from a government-funded project, but I'm not sure either, that just seems more likely to require it).
One of these things is not like the others.
Still, there is many reason for having the streaming, although it should be a open protocol and not too complicated. And then, if you write a client software and program it to save the file to disk, it can do that too, possibly during playback, and you can program in other stuff too if you want to do.
I thought of idea of Live Audio Video Protocol (but have not actually written any part of it yet, but have some ideas about it), that you can use Ogg streams and you can initiate with file selection, format/quality negotiation, etc, and then receive the stream but you can also send commands to select a channel or subchannel, pause, seek, request data, rate of keyframes (if the server supports changing this, which it might not), and change other settings.
(Actually, I find a few problems with Ogg, and everything else is too complicated, so I made up something which is slightly more complicated than Ogg but not too much, which is called GLOGG; it is mostly like Ogg, but uses UUIDs to identify codecs, allows identifying how individual streams are related (the relation codes are specific to the codec, and are not defined by the container format; you can also specify if a program that does not understand it should ignore it), and a few other things, but still simple compared to most other container formats.)
And about ad insertion, they do that on television without any problem, so I don't know how that is a problem any differences whether it is a stream or file. (Although sometimes they put stuff within the show itself and damaging the picture, they should not do, but that is only my opinion and is unrelated to the protocols.)
Small nit: with that Internet speed you could only download a 3 GB file, which is definitely not enough for a quality film. Even iTunes, which is kind of infamous for how badly their films are encoded, is usually bigger than that.
The big picture though is that it really doesn't matter anymore because quite a few clients now allow you to download the first 10% or so of the file first, so you can start streaming it instantly. There's no reason a for-pay streaming service built on to of bittorrent wouldn't do the same.
A DVD ISO rip of a 2 hour movie usually clocks in at 8GB, since a dual layer disc can store 4GB per layer.
The expanded LOTR trilogy needs 2 discs per movie, no matter what definition because each break the two hour mark, and even blu-ray can't fit long movies onto a dual layer disc for its format in HD.
That's going to depend entirely on the codec. MPEG2? Sure. With H.264 a 4GB 720p rip from a Bluray is going to be much better than anything you can get on a DVD.
>The expanded LOTR trilogy needs 2 discs per movie, no matter what definition because each break the two hour mark, and even blu-ray can't fit long movies onto a dual layer disc for its format in HD.
I'm pretty skeptical of that. Regardless of what media LOTR actually comes on, the extended cut of Fellowship would have a bitrate of ~29 Mbits/sec on a dual-layer disc. That's entirely acceptable, if not exactly ideal. And I'm not sure what the "two hour mark" has to do with it: Fellowship is closer to 4 hours than 3, and there are tons of two hour long films that come on a single Bluray disc.
You really don't need more. And if you do and have enough computing power, h.265 goes even further in smaller package.
if you want to ruin yourself, try grabbing a Sparks and a Yify encode of your favorite movie and try watching one of the dark scenes in both files. the difference is plain as day on my 27" ips panel.
On the other hand if you really can't tell the difference between a 2 GB encode and an average sized encode, say 16 GB, it's a good hint to make an appointment with your eye doctor. (I'm nearsighted, so I can't even tell 576p from 1080p on my TV without glasses.)
- they all have rolling and incomplete catalogs. Pretty often I want to watch a duo or trilogy of movies. Only one of them is available on netflix, or I start watching a serie and it gets removed from their catalog.
- I saw the Lord of the Rings on Netflix. I thought it would be great since I had only watched it once in a theater. But the version that was there was just Netflix's version. Not extended cut, not director commentaries, not bonuses. Just what Netflix gives you and that's it.
- Maybe that's just me, but most of the new Netflix produced content seems to be of lower quality than what was launching 2 or 3 years ago. It seems that Netflix is focusing a lot more on delivering tons of original content even it means having duds.
Bitorrent does not have these issues. Pretty much all the movies are there, in whatever language and cut I would like to see. The irony is that I am ready to pay for a streaming service, even more than what I pay Netflix if necessary but still, while it might be more convenient to just push the netflix button on my remote, it just not up to the task compared to torrenting.
Software developers seem to be the first to adapt: you can't pirate a SaaS or a cloud. One can try and copy it, but will be always behind the first moved and the original creator, because they always seem to have good ideas.
Equating IP with real estate is bad for the society: why would someone keep producing and keep performing if they made a hit with a song, or a movie, or a game?
Example first pressings I have in flac: velvet underground, the doors, led zeppelin, etc
FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content.
It’s just a codec. It makes it smaller.
Unless you mean “lossy” by “traditional”, in which case, yes, lossless codecs have a lot of benefit over lossy ones.
A perfect example is when sampling or beatmixing; if the final product will be played on youtube or streamed on digital radio or compressed lossily in any form, you will have incurred two lossy compression steps if your source material is lossy. This is akin to subsequent generations of dubbing analog media; the quality degrades quickly with each generation.
You seem to have misunderstood FLAC with the sample rate / bit depth of a file. The vast majority of FLAC files are regular old 16 bit 44.1 kHz, and nobody is claiming that 24 bit 192 kHz (or whatever) files are better.
FLAC is a codec: simply a way to take all the audio on a CD and have it preserved indefinitely, without "generational" loss (where a mp3 is encoded from another mp3, and so on).
So a correctly encoded FLAC file will be using CD quality audio or better. (CD audio is transparent when correctly encoded in 100% of cases.) FLAC is just a way to reduce the file size of that raw CD data by about 50%.
Lossy codecs like mp3 and AAC (the codec usually found in the m4a container) are also tuned to compress music, but they do so by throwing away a some of the original information. When this is done correctly it should still be transparent to the original the vast majority of the time. No one, not even an "audiophile", can tell the difference under any listening conditions. For mp3 (depending on encoder), the bitrate that achieves transparency is about 256 kbits/sec, though there are so-called "killer samples" that can break certain encoders at that bitrate. AAC (again, depending on encoder) is transparent closer to 192 kbits/sec. The state of the art has advanced remarkably since either were released: Opus is transparent in the vast majority of cases all the way down to 128 kbits / sec, and still sounds great at bitrates below that.
The problem is that just seeing the file extension gives you no guarantees about what the bitrate is. A 128 kbits/sec mp3 is going to sound like mush on a good system. If you convert that mp3 to FLAC it's still going to sound like mush, because you're using a lossy source. But a FLAC made from a CD will sound much better, as will a 320 kbits/sec mp3.
So if all you care about is transparency, getting 320 kbits/sec mp3s or 128 kbits/sec Opus files is probably good enough for you. The issue with "generational loss" I was referring to is when a lossy file is used as a source for another lossy encode. This is kind of like saving a file as a jpeg twice: you always lose more than just saving it once, even if the "quality" setting in the encoder is the same. Plus if you convert an AAC file to mp3, there's an even worse problem, which is that the different codecs try to compress the file in slightly different ways, which can lead to unexpected interactions and sometimes end up sounding like crap.
The point of keeping around a FLAC file is that you have a permanent archive of what was on the CD, and you have a source that you can use to make future lossy encodes from without the generational loss problem. All my albums are ripped to FLAC, but from those FLAC files I encode Opus files that are small enough to take with me on my phone.
I have hundreds of albums bought and ripped to flac on my NAS server. They take about 300 GB out of the 40something terabytes available. I have real rarities stored in there and I pay about 1 euro a month for the cloud backup.
> FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content
Yes it does. It’s anywhere from 70-30% the size depending on genre. That’s a benefit.
> you might think that FLAC/lossless is audibly better.
No I think and expect it to sound audibly identical. That’s the whole point.
When I was a teenager (20 years ago), this wasn't possible and we torrented whole albums like hell. Some people got in jail back then, or had to pay huge fines for "unrealized profits", which was absurd.
I don't like spotify and similar services, and try to buy my favorite music online if I can, but invariably am forced to torrents because it's hard to get where I am.
I'm amazed the music and movie business is finding it so hard to adapt.
Does that count as piracy?
...and I've also noticed the content ID system still detects them, but they probably remain because the IP holders are content to monetise those videos and reap the profits rather than getting them taken down (and earning nothing.) That turns the question into "is adblocking piracy?" and that's a whole different can of worms...
Another angle that's nice about youtube are all the digitized LPs. An awful lot of music never made the jump to CD, I remember how huge the jazz album bins used to be at some record stores.
It's been a godsend for me in locations with extremely slow or intermittent connections.
The movie and TV industry have instead put great effort into building services that are significantly worse than piracy.
And nobody can understand why movie piracy is still rampant, while music piracy is receding.
The movie industry goal is to improve box office, not your experience, but these two are linked.
Music - Tidal covers about >95% of my music consumption.
TV shows - I have netflix and and prime, these cover maybe 75% of my tv consumption.
Films - Going to the cinema covers 10-20% maybe? I go to the cinema about 5-10 times a year and I pirate the rest because I don't have a good enough service to get those from legally.
It will only cost you a 35000 dollar setup fee and 500 dollar to watch a movie.
Can you imagine a music industry where, in order to listen to new releases, you are required to go to "listening parlours", or wait for radio, CD, streaming release|?
You aren't wrong though.
They no longer listen to customer feedback. Their categorization and search get worse by the day. They refuse to add an option to disable the autoplay previews that no one likes.
That'd all be ok, albeit disappointing, if they were still charging $8 a month. But they keep raising prices like Comcast or AT&T each year while the quality declines or stagnates.
(1) Start as a service provider, brokering sales from legacy producers who don't yet have distribution through this new market, (2) pivot to original supply, as legacy producers recognize how much money stands to be made and stand up their own distribution channels, (3, optimistic case) become so large that producers are forced to renegotiate with you, from a weaker position, because they must have distribution on your platform.
I don't think they're going to corner the market like Amazon or Apple did, as they lack the moats (respectively a hyperscale logistics system and first party hardware).
I'm kind of surprised Netflix isn't cross-licensing their back catalog to alternate channels. E.g. trading rebroadcast rights to the first season of Stranger Things to Comcast or a cable network in exchange for {insert popular program}.
That feels the most like an analog to Amazon Marketplace (context: remember, there was once an Amazon without third-party sellers).
https://www.polygon.com/2019/1/17/18187400/netflix-vs-fortni...
They lost all the big catalogs and deals as Fox, Disney etc. ended their licensing deals. And even though they’ve pumped billions into original content, this can’t make up for the hundreds of titles they lost.
So, the new UI is meant to make you overlook all that and make you watch Netflix original content. To quote myself [1] their selection is ridiculously tragically bad.
https://mobile.twitter.com/dmitriid/status/11204104799549931...
I'm not sure how this is the Apple playbook, unless you count podcasts (which they've never had an option to charge for) as Apple original audio content, or the upcoming Apple TV+ as a 15 year gap between selling third party video content and providing their own.
And I cannot begin to fathom why.
Fortunately, there is flixable.com for Netflix browsing. But why doesn't Netflix itself do that? IDK.
Now I'm stuck paying for all the music I've been paying for again. Or something else...
That's the beauty of the services: they have to compete with free and to do that they have to provide a superior enough experience to the user. If that ends, the music industry is the loser.
I disagree. As a listener, Bandcamp and Soundcloud fulfill my needs better. Artists are more willing to put their work on those services than they are with Spotify, and it's entirely understandable. With Bandcamp, there is a link to buy albums at their asking price while listening. Spotify listens will pay out fractions of a penny. The result is that other platforms will have new music that suits my tastes, and I will be lucky if rights holders will put the same content on Spotify within the next 5 years.
P2P
It's also easier for me to move to different devices, because all I have to do is sign into Spotify. Manually transferring songs like I used to with an iPod is something I don't want to have to go back to.
> Manually transferring songs like I used to with an iPod is something I don't want to have to go back to.
A minor price to pay for not being tethered to an inferior proprietary music player.
Reporting listening statistics for royalty payouts.
Spotify started off great but is now a total ripoff to artists since it got in bed with the major labels, trading stock for a larger cut of ad and subscription revenue.
You aren't any better for using Spotify and not torrenting. Make sure to support your favorite artists when they perform near you, and buy merch. Support small-time and local artists. That is the best thing you can do for the music industry.
My own take for getting surprised is to check out (usually) European jazz radio stations on internet radio.
I have mpd+emms set up with an always on emms playlist window and dedicated dired window for my music collection.
I can't say the same for my book collection though. I tried calibre but didn't like it. Been experimenting with some custom scripts that work but are in dire need of indexing and optimization.
foobar2000 handles my multi-TB library just fine, with very fast searching and playlist creation capabilities.
AirSonic provides streaming on the go, with a "Random Album" list which is an amazing way to explore your library.
That’s funny. I have much less music locally and that’s why I like listening to it over streaming services.
The cloud may have terabytes and terabytes of all kinds of music, but 99.99% of that does nothing for me.
The music I have purchased and curated locally is my collection and I know I like everything there. It’s a guaranteed 100% match.
I use cloud streaming only to discover new acts and albums, and then it’s right back to Plex.
I’m not using local stuff for discovering new music. That’s what’s the internet is for.
Blame your publishers and companies you sell your rights to: Warner Music, Sony etc. They demand up to 70% of revenue from “the likes of Spotify” in royalties.
Spotify just makes it so easy– click on "offline download", boom, done.
Also could you give examples of popular disabled artists that can’t perform on stage?
Because I don’t think I or anyone I know could list a single example.
Maybe they weren't 'disabled' but they had their reasons for not wanting to tour.
Also, this argument discounts second order effects. Who knows what new innovations might be brought on by the need to find an alternate revenue source.
Economies change. Everybody has to adapt and do work that people will pay for. In music, increasingly, that means performing live.
There might be other options too. Crowdfunding new albums, maybe. Merchandising. The more we accept the new reality, the more we'll figure out.
All your examples are the top of the top - most artists can't afford to not tour.
That's not the case. Dead artists do concerts. Artists that never physically existed do concerts. You could have a Steven Hawking concert now and people would pay for the tickets if music was good.
this is not entirely true; musicians also earn a significant amount of money based on how many times their songs are played on streaming services like Spotify.
Hasan Minhaj had a bit about this in Patriot Act, explaining that this is the reason artists like Li'l Pump are releasing albums with dozens of two-minute songs—shorter tracks means more plays means more $$.
What this means, and what trips me out about using Spotify (or even YouTube), is that I literally can't listen to music on their platform without putting money in someone's pocket. Great for artists I love, sad for cultural curiosities I want to understand but decidedly don't want to support, like Li'l Pump or Chris Brown.
make 60k/year in concerts and you'll live without problems in a country like Italy.
It looks like a lot, but it means 150 shows/year at around 400 euros each + expenses (mainly gas, road tolls, some lunch on the road - sleeping, eating and drinking are provided by the promoter or the venue).
I've worked with bands that played more than 200 shows/year that earned around 5k + merchandise per show.
They payed me 100 bucks per gig, just to sell their merchandise.
Provided it becomes a real job and you have to work hard to keep it going, it's totally doable.
This is a funny topic for me, I've always been a super music fan, but never played any instrument.
I've been more a "roadie" than just a merchandiser, I mean that I was with them all the time, loading, unloading, driving and helping out.
Sometimes I've also acted as tour manager, but only in venues we already knew.
Most of the largest shows have been with an Italian band throughout Italy, production was in the medium range, going between a few hundreds to thousands of people (less than 5 thousands).
Many of the smaller ones were in Europe, with american bands, where it usually was in the hundreds in undeground clubs - there 's a large variety of them in Europe, you can find the youth center in Switzerland that has hotel's level accomodations and the squat in east Germany where you sleep on the floor in the cold. But it's a good network to get a lot of shows close to each other, so you don't have to drive much and everyone is kind.
We've also been playing to many festivals: from desert fest to duna jam, from freak valley to roadburn, from up in smoke to hellfest. It's another great way to make connections and meet the bands.
I'm especially fond of what's called stoner rock (I prefer the name desert rock though) and I've toured a lot with bands from the Rome based Heavy Psych Sounds label.
I've been doing it for about 5 years, then the main band I was following took a sabbatical and I went back into tech as a programmer (my day to day job since 1997)
It's been the best part of my life, and, as crazy it might sound, the time of my life when I saved the most: I didn't have to pay for food, drinks, traveling or going to concerts, which basically is where most of my finances went anyway...
I had to pay the mortgage on my house, but if I was renting, I could have saved on that as well.
Best and worst memory is opening to Eagles of Death Metal in Milan, where I've spent the night smoking pot with Dave Catching, founder of Rancho de La Luna and one of my heroes.
I've also shared the merch booth with Nic, their merchandiser, that few days later was tragically killed in the Bataclan massacre.
TL;DR: I got to do it as a job just by answering "yes" to "we need a driver for this one date, are you interested?". I've been reliable so they kept calling me and I ended up being part of the crew, without even noticing.
And a night with Dave Catching sounds rad. I don't know how that could be a worst memory.
Is your estimate of ~150 annual shows being enough for a comfortable lifestyle meant to generally apply to overseas shows for American bands, or do you think the payout is more or less on par with ~150 domestic shows?
Many bands I know come here touring for at least a month, and when they're away rent their apartments or rooms back home because life here in Europe is cheaper, especially when touring, especially south or east.
Some of them moved here, to Berlin or Barcelona, some even moved here in Italy, I know of a band that moved in Sicily, on the Ortigia peninsula in Syracuse.
Depending on the cachet, 150 shows are enough to make a living and generally an overseas band have that exotic vibe that brings more people to the shows.
I can't make a comparison with the same number of shows in US, I've never toured that much in the States, but according to what bands said to me, touring US is harder, you have to drive a lot more and accommodations are usually worse (no food or drinks, sleep on a floor or in the van, hundreds of miles before reaching the next city) while Europe is easier.
if you plan your tours carefully and make the right connection, there's a good number of clubs that can guarantee packed shows and/or just a place to play and sleep on slow work days.
For stoner Germany, Sweden and somewhat Switzerland (they offer more than the average, be aware there's still customs in and out) are the best places in continental Europe.
A good way to do it is contact an european band or label and ask for advices. There are services that rent you the van for cheap directly in the airport, a good place is Belgium because it's exactly in the middle of EU, or they can provide you a communication channel with venues and/or services that rent backlines and stuff.
Last, but not least: be very careful with the gear, there have been numerous cases of stolen backlines, it would completely ruin the hard work (and the fun) you were putting in the tour.
Spotify is different however in that the cut artists get out of their streaming revenue is very insignificant compared to the slice that their record labels and Spotify are getting. I think it's important to keep this in mind. Spotify is negative force in the industry.
> sad for cultural curiosities I want to understand but decidedly don't want to support, like Li'l Pump or Chris Brown.
I don't think you should be concerned over the fraction of a cent you helped generate for Lil Pump.
the (overwhelmingly) vast majority of artists on Spotify see pennies.
you can be certain that you're not supporting anyone that kinda needs the money.
Basically you got to have a set-top box of at least 54 euros/month, and add 12 euro's extra to watch certain extra shows and movies (which includes Game of Thrones).
I found a solution without set-top box, but then you stream it on your mobile phone, and somehow need to remotely show it on your TV. This solution is 100 euros/month since it includes internet, tv, mobile provider, etc.
So yeah... I have Netflix, I have Spotify. I never need to download MP3's since they are all available on Spotify.
For movies and tv.... yeah...
And then people wonder why torrents are still so popular? Because it's the most convenient, not because it's free.
Not for TV and streaming services.
Except when they are not.
As for Pirate Buy, it's blocked in Netherland, so Kickass Torrents seems to be the place to go these days.
An HBO streaming service is on my wish-list since they consistently offer quality content. However, this is not easily possible, torrenting is quicker and more practical - so yeah...
But it seems the content owners haven't moved on, and so there is no legal way for me to get HBO. So even signing up is already the problem. I wish I had the problem of having 15 different services.
Basically, I buy good movies and shows that I actually enjoy rather than subscribing to crappy services that rotate through a dozen or so good movies and a mountain of complete crap. I also don't have to watch commercials, and I can watch my movies on my phone or through a chromecast/fire tv/roku whenever and wherever (as long as I have internet). Also, most of these platforms allow you to download to a mobile/tablet device for streaming on a flight or train or whatever.
This can get expensive, of course, doesn't work for live events and you're still relying on all these systems staying active, but I don't like the societal move away from ownership and towards renting. If I know I love Back to the Future, why do I need to pay Netflix/HBO/cable/etc subscription so that I can hope that they add it to their library on the days that I feel interested in watching it again.
Game of Thrones Season 8 is $27 on Google Play. And if it takes you more than a month to get around to watching it, or if you ever want to watch it again ever, it won't cost you more than that. I think that's pretty nice
The system still sucks but effectively there is enough available to keep me going.
In the meantime if some media isn't convenient for me to consume, it is off my radar. I don't don't bother either way.
For me we've reached a level I'm ok with, but it is very much based on usage.
Now we seem to be entering a time where, as media mega-corps have appeared and won us back to paying for content and having content easily accessible, they're starting to think they can ramp up the prices and lock away "their" content in a silo with a hefty price-tag for entry.
It seems as if we're going to move back towards a much higher price for taking part in the culture that surrounds current media; and that in turn is going to lead to more copyright infringement. Only this time the media corps have got the internet sewn up pretty well
It would be ideal if the reaction were to rest control of culture from the hands of big business a little with some statutory reform. But that in turn rests on whether countries get democratic reform to proportionalise representation and enable the tackling of smaller issues like disenfranchisement from culture and locking away of works so they can't ever enter the public domain.
Examples: any music from “nightvale presents”, and “dark compass” podcasts. DC has an epic best of 2019 as the current episode.
I’ve had mixed luck finding works from those sources on the big streaming services, but I listen to them legally nevertheless.
I had zero problems torrenting it, and no no moral qualms about it; I'm pretty sure all the actors & crew are dead by now and not recieving any more royalties, plus I have it on DVD but I hadn't ripped it to my NAS & don't have anything that can play DVD's connected to the TV.
There are simpler ways :)
It supports the importing of subscriptions but doesn't seem to handle playlist import currently.
I basically feel Netflix to be a rip off, and Prime's value proposition is faster deliveries, better discounts and a few free Kindle books.
And despite trying to use these services for a long time, I am still a fan and a proponent of torrents for such consumption as I get all the content, on time, on my terms and can consume it in a way I like.
Music, is sorted. TV and Movies isn't.
As a pretty large portion of the stuff seemed to not be available here this made it basically unusable.
- Even though the minimum wage here is half that of the UK, for some reason Netflix is more expensive, and has less selection.
- They have no content in the official language of the country, not even subtitles. When you go to the cinema, movies are dubbed or have subtitles.
- They push a lot of Russian language content, even though most people under 35 don't speak it, and it is not even a semi official language.
Amazon don't have operations here, you can sign up to Amazon Prime for video in another country, but it only shows their own content.
As an American in Europe last month, I experienced:
Watching Showtime through Playstation Vue was impossible from European IP, and impossible through US VPN. So I torrented Billions instead of trying a redundant unportable Showtime through Amazon Video subscription, or instead of trying a redundant Showtime subscription through their native app assuming they have one.
Watching Game of Thrones through HBO Now also had the same issues. But downloading torrents over VPN worked really fast. I only used VPNs partially out of habit, and partially not to get my host (hotel/airbnb) in trouble.
Because VPNs were so readily detected and blocked, it reminded me to consider buying a dedicated IP address in a few different countries for VPN, instead of having IP addresses that all the VPN users use. I have not done this yet, as I also heard that another way to detect VPNs is by knowing if the IP block is associated with a data center. I wonder if this is really done by the services I use.
Final note is that I did notice that alot of the torrent providers are doing "webrips" now instead of ripping in the highest quality their TV provides applying compression. The webrips are noticeable worse as the streaming service already is using compression.
Kind of weird outcome currently.
I found this out when I tried to show it to my daughters. Apparently the copyright agreements don't cover how to split the proceeds from streaming, so nobody can sell Amazon, Netflix, etc the right to stream it.
But it is on The Pirate Bay...
What a shame that the rights holders are so short sighted. The nostalgia those old tracks would create would surely sell more records. And it's not like anybody is going to be satisfied with replaying the video when they want the song, with the characters talking over the top of it.
It was not even available on dvd for a very long time. So much potential money lost.
It's weird; you can't watch it on demand, but you can virtually DVR it when it is "broadcast" at an arbitrary time.
This video describes the problem really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDF-S68kx5o
I was trying to show a tv show to my girlfriend last week, it was from 2007, not crazy long time ago, it's just 12 years ago and there was no way to find it legally.
Teh only place where I found it was Amazon prime video, as a per episode paid download, not in streaming, but it wasn't available in my country, even though I'm a primenow subscriber.
I ended up torrenting it (and the only torrent site where I found it was thepiratebay, nobody else had it)
We circled. Streaming services partially were about to solve the problem of not paying serious $$$ for a cable subscription (lots of programming that people don't care about/watch) by providing a cheap, affordable service with lost of content that is interesting and worth to watch. Today, streaming services are creating the very same problem they were trying to solve.
For anyone who has not seen the documentary, yet. One of my favourites.
For one, P2P is mostly a myth — most people (myself included, I will admit) are pure leechers that only seed at very low bandwidth while downloading. Seeders are either altruistic downloaders who rent a dedicated seedbox, or some servers in Russia whose incentive structure I fail to comprehend (or more honestly: haven't looked into).
Number two: because of this, the catalog is not amazing. Even popular recent shows have issues. Case from very recently: I gave up on finding 1080p versions of The Good Place season 1 & 2 (on public trackers at least). Anything not in English? Try your luck but mostly forget it.
It's worse for music — the system doesn't incentivize a lot of small uploads but rather grouping them. So finding rare tracks/b-sides is very hard. Back in the day, Kazaa and eMule were vastly better with rarities.
This is not an indictment of BitTorrent — it's still the best we have. But I wish we had better.
There's also Usenet.
Is this a 1080p rip of The Good Place, season 1 and 2? https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/24818297/The_Good_Place_-_S...
With that said, how do you address it? Probably by making software more affordable for those who pirate it, wish to buy it but cannot. Offering low cost subscriptions, e.g. instead of exorbitant one time fees. I don't necessarily want to buy a game.. I dont play games that much anymore, but I wouldn't mind subscribing to a service that offered it for a month or two, get my jollies and then leave when I'm not using it.
So rather than try to defeat it - and ideas are notoriously hard to defeat... try to "compete" with it and pray that people's conscience kicks in at some point.
I don't see what more past that one can do.
I couldn't disagree more. I pirated Adobe's products many years ago when I was a poor student who couldn't afford the price. I also wouldn't have been able to justify the price of a monthly subscription back then. Now though, I would pay any price up to a couple thousand dollars for a one-time purchase of CS6 Photoshop and Illustrator, but it's literally impossible to do this now.
Even Adobe does it sometimes: https://www.cnet.com/news/5-a-year-for-photoshop-and-other-c...
I want to put the subtitles where I want and pick the font, I want to be able to apply image filters to my movie (I use a monitor calibrated for photo, and it is not ideal for movies, it is much easier to apply a filter than to switch my monitor calibration), also I watch things while working and mpv is much lighter than any browser, I love to be able to seek with the mouse wheel, the stereo mixing on netflix is often horrible and I can't hear the dialogues... There are tons of argument in favor of a real video player.
You pay for a service you don't use. Why? That signals to Netflix that no matter how bad their service is, you'll pay for it.
Waffles didn't innovate. The site that launched after Oink shutdown is largely the same site that is up today (figuratively, I'm sure it'll be back at some point).
That said, I agree it was a music fan's heaven. Just as Oink was before it. It is sad how badly Apple Music's recommendation system is, how bloated it is with recording industry pushed crap.
The worst part isn't that What is gone, it's that What is gone and nothing can replace it. Like with older games that can't be purchased legally online, the rightsholders have kept us from consuming that content at all. In order to preserve their absolute right to distribute it for money!
The number of people here suggesting Apple Music would have killed it anyway or that Tidal etc is an adequate replacement shows just how effectively the rightsholders have deluded us all again. The currently available streaming services are almost entirely incomparable to the collection once available at What, it's like comparing your local library to the statewide database.
the recommendations were pretty well thought out even if not my cup of tea, and you could actually see what was new or active without having to worry about the piper being paid.
if you wanted to listen to your weirdly specific music tastes, it was perfect for that.
Taking this setup down would require someone to take every single person/node down, although it might have more issues with availability.
Citation needed.
Private trackers are and were always for data hoarders and bitrate freaks. The average Spotify subscriber was never the target audience of private trackers.
Another big change for me was the industry got wise to leaks. Now when an album leaks, the labels have a plan to immediately offer it for streaming on a major service or even media partner like NPR.
One of the major values of private Audio trackers was you got to hear stuff way before other people. Even this has been largely taken away. (Though sometimes the previews are now only a few songs)
EDIT: the loss of the forums, knowledge, metadata is truly heartbreaking... i really can't think about it too much
(I admit I too pirated music and sw during my college days, but I don't anymore..)
If you accidentally take a picture of my shitty origami art project you are not stealing
If you walk into a factory and take the mold for a military sonar device you are stealing.
At what point does changing the first story into the second story does it become stealing?
Either you can pinpoint a minimal set of changes in which it becomes stealing OR 'stealing' vs 'not stealing' is insufficient to accurately describe a situation
How is that different from society agreeing that it'll use taxpayers' money - through the police force, courts, etc - to uphold my right to keep control of my wallet, my car and my house, in the face of someone who might want to take them from me? My possession of these things is personal, yet society supports/enforces it when challenged.
In one case the condition is "I get paid", in the other "you have to contribute back your changes", but it's a similar underlying concept.
copyright doesn't mean "i get paid", it means "i get to withhold" (see all the out-of-print books, abandonware, etc).
GPL does not mean "you have to contribute back your changes" at all: "The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourc...
one is about taking access away (for whatever goal), the other is about taking that option away (for the benefit of users).
In a legislative regime where all software is free, that goal is achieved without GPL so GPL isn't needed anymore; I get the permission to use, modify and redistribute all software as if I had received it with the GPL.
It's a long time, but it's not infinite. New works started entering the public domain again on January 1, 2019.
Let's see what happens come 2024:
> On January 1, 2024, we'll see the expiration of the copyright for Steamboat Willie—and with it Disney's claim to the film's star, Mickey Mouse.
I'm well aware of Disney's role in copyright law.
Disney's opportunity to do extend the term was before Dec. 31, 2018. That's how they extended copyright durations in the past - preventing any new works from entering the public domain at all. It's much harder for them to retroactively amend the copyright term now that some of those works have begun to enter the public domain.
If the author is anonymous(or work for hire) or lives for 20 years after they published the work then it is effectively infinite for ~91% of people assuming the best case.
Say what you want about the old 14+14 system but at least it would have meant that by the time you were a parent you could almost certainly share the works that were influential with you as a kid with your kids. With the current system you have to cross your fingers that it was popular enough to remain in print rather than moving to some limbo of unable to be acquired except 2nd hand or illegally.
Short terms can make that hard. For example, suppose your childhood thing was "Calvin & Hobbes". With a 14 year term that would be public domain by the time you are an adult, and I have no doubt that advertisers would have immediately conscripted Calvin to push toys and cereals ("It's even better than Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs") and such and saturated children's media with this.
So then you go to share with your kid what was your favorite comic strip when you were a kid, and they have no interest in a strip about the Kellog's and Mattel and such spokes character that they've been bombarded with already for years.
Maybe it is time to consider different terms for different copyright rights? Shorter term for the right to make and distribute literal copies, but longer terms for the right to make and distribute derivative works?
I must be missing something. Why is must something be under copyright in order for you to share it with your kids?
Ramifications of the Boston Tea Party: https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/the-aftermath
India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_Sati_Regulation,_1829
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/eu-ministers-approve-copyright-dire...
Then you get the effect that everything from the 20th century becomes available on YouTube, which is likely to cause increased viewership of that content over newer content pirated or otherwise. Which I suspect is the main reason Hollywood is really against shorter copyright terms -- not just losing the revenue from past works but having to compete with them when they're free.
The same law that protects people from stealing GPL code also protects movie studios from having their content copied and redistributed without permission. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the GPL family of licenses' restrictions on exactly how you can use GPL software are legally difficult to discern from media companies' efforts to restrict how we are allowed to consume their works.
But there are things that I suspect would be easier to disentangle. I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of provision where copyrighted works can more easily fall into the public domain when they've been abandoned by their copyright holders, for example. We could also stand to roll back some of the power grabs that media companies have managed to get codified.
However, the second order effects would lead to, for example, significant decrease in investment of the creation of any work that has marginal production of near $0. Why would Disney/Marvel go to the effort of creating the Avengers movies when those movies could be shown freely by movie theaters? They, of course, would not as there would be no way to recoup their investments. Now the millions of "the many" who have freely exchanged their dollars for movie tickets are worse off. Nobody wins, not the few and not the many.
Why would GRRM write the next two works in ASOIAF if ANY publisher could take the text, print it and sell it without remuneration to GRRM? At best he would because he's already rich but would he ever have in the first place?
The winners in your world may very well be Amazon and others with the easiest/best distribution platforms at the cost of the creators and in turn at the cost of all as the creators no longer create.
1) To gain a crowdfunding base of sufficient size to replace the current models and achieve the necessary budgets in the first instance would require massive marketing spend. This would HAVE to be forked over prior to obtaining funding and therefore represents a major risk because with crowdfunding, it's all or nothing.
2) Tragedy of the commons/freeloading. Why agree to pony-up when I can wait/hope for some other saps to do so?
3) Crowdfunding means paying for something that doesn't exist to be created and trusting that the creators can/will create it at a level of quality that matches what you expected from their pitch. But wait, you've already committed your resources to them. Why should they actually strive to create an optimal good when they get your money regardless of the quality? This is a huge problem with crowdfunding. In today's world, you can rely on word of mouth, reviews, previews, etc.
So, no, the proposed world would be much worse. The set of above reasons are really showstoppers, imo, and they don't even cover the full scope of the problems with your proposal.
Maybe we could wait a bit for cool movies when technology advances to the point where they can be made by few dedicated people with off the shelf hardware instead hundred million budget that needs to be propped up with additional millions to trump up the hype so it can be earned back?
So many things made possible by copyright that we are accustomed to look like severe pathology when you look at them with fresh eye.
We aren't far away from that, but it's important to remember that creators now have the option to create without attaching copyright to a work. Copyright isn't mandatory. Creators tend to choose copyright because it is in their best interest.
Also, it isn't mandatory to consume copyrighted media. Just find something else that isn't encumbered by it if you wish.
> Creators tend to choose copyright because it is in their best interest.
And some peole choose to emit tons of CO2 because it's in their best intrest. The question is, is it in everybody's best interest.
A lot of people would be culturally poorer and more isolated if not for piracy and 100% secure copyrighted content wouldn't be as popular.
What does it mean to be culturally poorer? Attaching importance to pop culture knowledge sounds like the real problem.
Copyright is not just for popculture. Also learning materials, software and culture in general. Tonnes of people in the world got their higher education on pirated software and xeroxed books.
Long live capitalism, free choice and property rights: the greatest human forces of all time; the creators of prosperity.
Short copyright terms - someone mentioned 20 years max, with registration needed after 5 years. That sort of thing is better, far better than both longer copyright and no copyright.
The maximum term, IMO, should enable people to enjoy for free-gratis in their middle ages the media of their youth and build on that freely (libre) as inspiration to create cultural works for themselves and those that follow. Being able to have open, uninhibited access to one's own cultural inspirations well within one's working lifetime seems ideal to make sure that the demos get something worthwhile out of the deal.
Works restricted by DRM can't enter the public domain and so should be exempt from protection by copyright, though I'd allow some sort of deposit system whereby companies could put un-bound works in escrow, and so still be allowed to get copyright protections.
Anyone who is making a modest living producing their own original IP is not doing so because of IP protection laws, because they surely cannot afford to litigate (and they certainly can't afford to lobby to get the laws to favor them).
Curious to hear why you think OS and security software should be black boxes and not open.
In general, do you not find carrying this level of paranoia on a daily basis is simply oppressive to your own well being?
As far as my daily life, no not really. I just live a life where I grant very few people a view into the things I consider private, and ensure that every two or three people know contradictory things without knowing the parts that put them together. It leads to a robust but distant social web.
Sounds exhausting, I can't imagine using that much mental energy to keep up this web, but your life your rules.
I know I'm an extremist though(statistically speaking), even in this forum.
At the other end of the spectrum, everyone pirates the movies they want to see. The movie makers stop making movies because they won't make money on them.
In between the two ends is a large grey area. Pretending that it's always acceptable to pirate any movie you want to see is akin to saying that you don't want the movie studios to make movies anymore. But pretending that every movie pirated costs the studios a ROI equal to the cost of buying the movie is disingenuous, too.
It is always acceptable not to watch a movie. Does that mean one doesn't want studios to make movies? No, they can still keep making movies if others care enough to keep them going.
This is just saying that movies will be produced in proportion to the amount of people who want to watch movies bad enough to actually subsidise their production.
The same exact mechanism is in play in music (fans who go to gigs & buy swag etc. subsidise music for the masses who hardly put a penny in it), and many other parts of the economy. Enthusiasts, companies with deep pockets, everyone who pours big money into research & bleeding edge tech subsidise the things that will ripple down to the rest of us with lower and lower margins, often in such a way that the original inventor/researcher/producer gets cut out of the loop in that market.
The market will correct itself so it's kinda pointless to hypothesize about a world where nobody wants to pay for a movie yet somehow everyone wants movies real bad.
I think fireworks are a good analogy. On New Year's eve, many people buy them and fire them, but others just go for a walk or watch the show from their window or roof.
This is correct; income from services like Spotify are pitifully low. However, it highlights an important distinction between two types of movie piracy: cam-rips of movies currently playing in the theatre, and "normal" piracy, which is of stuff available through retail. The thing with music is that you can't pirate a live band performance: there's very rarely anything comparable to a cam. For one thing, too much of the value of a live performance comes from the experience. Second, it's usually too difficult to capture such a performance as an ordinary audience member. (Official recordings released after the tour are different, of course.)
While I, like some others here, don't believe in intellectual property at all, I do think that artists should be rewarded for their work. Until we can get a better system, I question the ethics of taking something for free when you are in a position to easily pay for something of equal or better quality. So I personally have never torrented anything that was playing in theaters, and I think that's a principle one could reasonably stick to.
However, I think there's a striking difference between what you might call "performance rights", and right to copy. In the latter case, while I think it still makes sense to give the artist some recompense for their success, the situation is in fact much different. Other people regularly make these points, so I'll only mention the top few most relevant for me:
* It's usually impossible to rent / purchase a movie at home at watch it instantly without DRM. Many movies aren't available for streaming at all.
* Quality is usually quite bad when streaming. Even if you get lucky and can get 1080p or above (which means you're not a Firefox or Chrome user watching Netflix), the encoding quality of the film is usually quite bad.
* Even if you have a video rental service nearby, and they have the movie you want to watch in Bluray, you then need to have a Bluray player to watch it (more DRM), as well as hope you have the latest AACS keys, or that your player can download them in a reasonable amount of time if you do not. (Even then there are quite often encoding problems on Blurays, which pirates take the time to fix more often than not.)
In other words, the value proposition of pirating retail products is pretty good. You can instantly (or nearly so) watch a larger selection of films in higher quality than you can get through any other means, with no technological limitations. I think in this case, the value of compensating artists is outweighed by the competing value of the incredible increase in convenience and quality that piracy represents to the public.
None of this is to say that compensating artists isn't important; the problem is that the current system for compensating them sets up a whole bunch of competing values. While your "fireworks" analogy probably works for films in theaters, it doesn't exactly capture the realities of the retail market for films. That reality is that we need a better system for distributing movies that makes it possible to compensate artists without neglecting other values.
Compare U.S. airlines before deregulation got rid of the price floors there. Incredibly appealing service, with great waiting areas at the airport, gourmet meals in-flight, young attractive air-hostesses, and so on and so forth - but only if you could afford it in the first place! Behind all that luxury, we were actually seeing rampant wastage of resources.
Counterexample:
fanfiction.net 13'293'677 works
archiveofourown.org 4'825'000 works
fimfiction.net 125'797 works
[assorted forums and individual websites that make up the other half of my bookmarks] ? works
It looks like people will in fact make things even when they know - due to copyright law even - that they cannot make money on them.
Any creative work that will only get made if the authors think they can extort money from the people who benfit from it is a work that society is better off without.
If everyone only pirated, it would mean nobody valued that stuff enough to sustain it. If people doesn't value it, let it die. Can you imagine a world where nobody values movies or music or books? I can't. And therefore I can't see them dying, no matter what. So this concern is irrelevant to me.
This is definitely not true when it comes to royalty-based models.
If even a single user goes out and buys a license to Windows, then there is a definite argument to be made that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.
However, such wishful thinking has no place in my worldview. Either a sale happened or it did not and it never was. Again, you can't lose something you never had, and calling it a loss is just wordplay. Doubly so when it's only a loss if such and such had been so and so and yada yada. It never was. If you lost something, you go find it or call your bank and have them explain how the account now has less money than yesterday.
And yes, thanks to piracy, you might make fewer sales. I don't have a problem with that. I also don't have a problem with pepsi resulting in coca cola having fewer sales.
Well, you can. We have entire legal systems dedicated to assessing economic harm based on similar hypothetical situations. For e.g. Loss of income due to injury.. loss of earnings due to defamation.. diminished earning capacity due to a handicap, etc, etc. You can't simply say - "it never was or you never had that money". All these things have well established economic and legal histories. I don't know if those are part of your worldview. If you wish to reject them, then be assured that you are well outside of mainstream economic and legal thought.
A loss is simply a reduction. I hope you realize that a positive claim that piracy results in zero loss of revenue, has to be substantiated. At best, you can claim "we don't know" and you might very well be right - we simply don't know exactly what would have happened. But that is not the same as saying - we know nothing. We can piece together a model based on basic economic principles of market value, supply and demand, opportunity cost, etc, etc. and come up with a reasonable analysis.
Is called piracy because it's theft.
Total IP abolition in combination with a strongly enshrined right to repair, which would necessitate access to source code of binaries given, would be perfectly in the spirit of the free software movement.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...
I think it is a rather nice trade to give up GPL if we get in return the right to repair to deal with DRM and no copyright to allow for sharing and modifying software.
What The Swedish Pirate Party Wants With Patents, Trademarks, And Copyright (2012):
> Copyright must be reformed. We’d like to keep the copyright monopoly for commercial use (but with shorter, more sensible terms of protection). The big problem is that copyright has expanded in the past 20 years, going from being something that only corporations needed to care about, into something that criminalizes the entire young generation (and more and more people who aren’t even particularly young anymore).
> The Swedish Pirate Party wants to; Legalize file-sharing and other non-commercial sharing [...] At most 20 years of protection from the publication of a work. [...] Registration after five years. [...] Sensible regulation for quotations, parodies, and remixes [...] A ban on DRM
http://falkvinge.net/2012/10/13/what-the-swedish-pirate-part...
Richard Stallman (2012):
> I agree with all three of these positions. I do suggest, however, that it would be better not to group together these three issues and only these three. Why would anyone group together these three unrelated laws? I suspect it reflects the mistaken concept of "intellectual property".
http://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-jul-oct.html#16_Octobe...
You can reform copyright without rendering the GPL unworkable. I asked Rick Falkvinge about this a number of years ago (2008-2010), and he seemed quite confident that the GPL would still be viable given their proposed reforms.
(Current Pirate Parties appear to use similar policies, such as Pirate Party UK:"A fair and balanced copyright regime that is suitable for the 21st century is an absolute necessity for the UK to remain competitive in a global economy that is built upon ideas and innovation. Copyright should give artists and innovators the chance to make money from their work; however, that needs to be balanced with the rights of society as a whole. We will work for copyright reform and reduce copyright terms to 10 years to balance everyone's needs." https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/policy/culture/home)
Not exactly. He doesn't want people modifying the recipe and keeping it a secret. Or atleast, not distributing food made from that recipe. (I know that analogy breaks down here.. but I tried!)
But Stallman and the pirate party have come up with a pretty nice proposal in the end: a much shorter time limit on copyright that can be extended if you give more rights to the user.
They're suggesting that we move to a different model.
We're demanding a better solution.
It's not just that. Society is still catching up to the ramifications of the additional value extracted by social media and tech media companies. People can't deny that automotive technology made much of the US population dependent in their daily lives on cars. (Whether this is a good or a bad thing is besides the point for this discussion. Probably bad in many ways, good in a few.) This gave the auto makers a certain responsibility for meeting minimum levels of safety, reliability, and environmental friendliness. Society eventually caught up to the implications of automotive technology, and this was reflected in laws codifying that social responsibility.
This is because those companies are the ones who bare the largest percentage of the risk. If a project completely falls flat on its face, software developers and writers, actors, directors, etc still collect their paycheck. It is the VC and production company that lose money.
Then it is also the "production company" which should bear the social responsibility for their impact on the media landscape and social discourse. As was the case for the appearance of laws and regulations covering the activities of the automotive industry, as that industry had ever greater impact upon the general public's life, so too is the case for social media tech companies.
If they reap the rewards, then they should take on the social responsibility.
What's the point?
This is how it should be - there is simply no rational case for mindless entertainment ("TV/Movies/Music") that costs on the order of $10M or $100M to make!
For some people. Believe me, there are lots and lots of people who do not share that experience.
That's what the public domain is for, of course. It's too bad that this limits us to 1923-or-before material (in the U.S., and ignoring non-copyright-renewed stuff from later in the 20th c.) but that still covers centuries of shared culture - even millennia, in some cases!
Absent an organizing effort, it’s unlikely you’ll catch someone who has read, say, Dracula for the first time recently just like you have and can share that initial enthusiasm for the material.
If we reach 100k we'll make sure Han Solo shoots first.
It doesn't make sense. People should be paid for providing a service, whether it's a hamburger or a movie. You don't pay someone before the goods are delivered. The modern system of pre-funding and patronization is absurd for many projects.
Strictly speaking, you don't have to do this. You could make the product, send it under a strict NDA to a variety of widely-trusted 3rd-party reviewers/critics, with whatever sort of protection against leaks you might require, then put the existing product for crowdfunded "ransom" (Like Blender was, after the original company went out of business), building in whatever return you might wish to ask for in exchange for bearing the ensuing risk. This doesn't require ordinary copyright protection at all, only a very limited-in-scope protection for private, unpublished stuff.
(The "ransom" model is in fact already potentially-applicable to a lot of existing content that's generally considered worthless, but that, much like Blender itself, might be valued more in the context of an open release. Transaction costs - namely, wrt. the exceedingly-common case of "orphan works", with unknown rights-holders - get in the way of it, however.)
You produce whatever small part of your work you can afford to on couch change, pizza favors and family support and sell it. Fund the next part from the proceeds of the first.
It lives on today in webisodes and patreonage, or, hell, TV shows, but some of what we now consider great literature was produced as serialized chapters in magazines, and only after the fact bundled together as a single volume novel.
Maybe box-office blockbusters funded as multi-million dollar investments and released all at once were just a temporary aberration, like the "album".
How is this not just outright snobbery about what people should enjoy?
I like high-scale, ambitious entertainment.
It may or may not be true that “high-scale, ambitious entertainment” is unsupportable without copyright. If it turns out to be not supportable, it would be like the pyramids: Large, impressive, and expensive things which the structure of our society and our economy can no longer support the constructions of. I.e. the society we live in could concievably be re-organized to again support the construction of pyramids, but we choose not to do that, in order to have a modern society and economy instead.
You are supporting an army of workers to make a decently budgeted film, for multiple years.
https://boingboing.net/2019/05/22/dont-pay-the-piper.html
This is, once again, the ethic of the existing model.
* People believe that you shouldn't be able to remix art to make money off it.
* People believe that you should be able to pirate games for free, often because they feel that the games makers are exploiting them (via DLCs, in-game purchases, whatever)
* People believe that essays, books, etc. should be pirateable
* People believe that business software shouldn't be pirateable because software engineers need to make money. You'll usually be downvoted if you suggest this on, say, a Jetbrains release or something.
All this taken together, to me, provides some amount of evidence to me that this stuff is just characteristic of the kinds of employment that most people on this forum have, rather than some sort of philosophical position people have on this issue. Hope this saves you some time in discussion.
We should focus more on how to incorporate the commons in all we do. Economics, politics, justice.
This is what John Locke was talking about when he suggested that not everything can be private property.
Yochai Benklers the Wealth of Networks is a good overview of the concept of commons based peer-production, and the tragedy of the anti commons.
Any talk by Lawrence Lessing from way back when the topic was hot is fantastic takes remix culture
Personally I add to that the thinking of Henry George on how an just society should divide the land rent as public dividend. Also checkout geo-libertarianism and surrounding ideologies.
Perhaps taking it a step further:
Locke argues that land becomes property when you mix it with your labor. But only if there is no contention, the land is after all for all to share.
I’ll restate that as this:
The commons is primary. We all have an equal claim to it all.
To take something from the commons and make it private requires a fair trade. It’s not enough to put a stake in the ground and just claim it. Instead what is lost to the commons must be repaid.
Hence the question should never be, “how should x get paid?” but rather “what value can we derive from granting x exclusivity?”
Just consider for a moment the amount of resources are spent on enforcing the artificial scarcity supposedly motivating copyright.
The primary costs of policing it. Employing people to fight legal battles over it. Implementing automatic enforcements. The cost to those getting caught in violation. The cost of practioners in negotiating rights (what would it cost TPB to secure rights for everything it facilitate access too?)
Then there is the secondary costs. The opportunity costs of not having free access, the Napster that could have been. The things all those people impacted by the primary costs could have done instead, what value could they have provided?
My mind boggles when contemplating it, and I can’t for a second believe that if that is what it takes to get Game of Thrones produced, that I couldn’t live without it for a freer world.
Say goodbye to a whole era of hiphop and electronic music.
Even if you pay $5 a month for <insert music streaming service> and only listen to my songs, I get literally $0.00 (up to significant figures). They pool everything together so essentially you are subsidising Justin Bieber; just putting it out there...
Exactly, yes. But many fans (of other artists; when referring to myself we'll have sampling bias) actually have no idea that their $5 doesn't go directly to the songs they listen to in a month.
> let's say
I would happily accept if we can cut out transaction costs. My idea of a "good" streaming platform for music is one with only a flat rate (say $5), no free option, and no pooling. That means that if I listen to Scatman once in the month and it is the only song I listened to, then John Larkin's estate should get exactly $5, min some small platform fee. (Sorry for picking a dead artist; royalties after death is complicated. Personally I guess I would limit mine to about 10 years, but then again I don't receive any royalties.)
You can easily check that your money goes where you want it to from a statement at the end of the month... If you see that Justin Bieber's Baby got $0.99 then of course it's plausible because your "friend" logged in and listened to the song 99 times out of your 500 listens that month.
In Canada, Pirate Party claims to stand for: - Increased privacy of citizens - Increased ability of citizens to own and control their data - Increased visibility and public discourse &debate of technology's impact on private lives, business climate, intellectual property, societal changes, etc
As such, it is the only party here to openly tackle, let alone make it their core platform, what I personally perceive to be the defining issues of the 21st century.
I feel that Pirate Party may end up like the Green party of few decades ago -- initially perceived as fringe, marginalized, irrelevant; until we realize they are tackling emerging core societal problems.
As such, while I'm extremely in favour of supporting creators (all my software, from OS to Photoshop is legally purchased; I duly pay my Netflix/Spotify/Prime, purchase photography and clipart when I need them, go to concerts, go to cinema, tip baskers, participate in Patreon, buy webcomic books, etc; and discussion on whether those appropriately pay artists is important but orthogonal to this one), I do support Pirate Party of Canada through my membership and might consider voting if they had a local candidate.
I don't know how much if at all the Canadian Green Party relates to the US Green Party, but the Green party south of the border is certainly still perceived as "fringe, marginalized, irrelevant". A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that the Canadian Green Party probably still fits that bill as well.
The Green Party here suffers from our poor electoral system (FPTP), but they definitly have supporters, even if their supporters don't vote for them for strategic reasons.
I think fan fiction is a clear example of the kind of vibrant art community that could emerge if the law got out of its way.
The right to piracy wouldn't kill art. It could cripple the art business, though, but that seems to me like a fair deal.
Look at game companies stopping fan made games. I remember hearing about a fan remake of PS1 Metal Gear Solid. Was gathering huge fan far and had kojima's blessing, but the studio shut it down.
https://gameranx.com/features/id/159002/article/10-incredibl...
A success story for one fan project though was Sonic Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Mania
I have also seen theories for movies on r/writingprompts that blow actual sequels out of the water.
But then again, this is nothing new: (nsfw) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_art#/media/File:Shuvalo...
NotLD entered the public domain because of a failure to apply a copyright indication. Largely due to this oversight, and entire genre of Zombie media has flourished unencumbered by restrictive IP.
Obviously your cynical take on fan-art is despicable and ignorant, but there's no shortage of examples of what the commons can produce.
Actually I am goign to vote for them more because of their proposals on liquid and direct democracy, I haven't followed their debate on copyrights in the last few years. When I was the most popular proposal to replace copyright was a global license, which actually exists in a very badly implemented form in France for bars and shops.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/german-parliam...
Ill bet it amounts to 'inappropriate remarks' and that not stating exactly what it is, instead using the 'sexual harassment' doublespeak is just a FUD tool to attempt to sabotage the Pirate Party.
Here's a link to what seems to be the party's response. From my reading, possibly tainted by translation, he agreed to step down if the European Parliament's Consultative Committee on Harassment at Work found that he had engaged in harassment, they did, and he resigned, but they were unable to remove him from the list due to regulations.
While I can't seem to find an account of what exactly transpired, it does appear that the European Parliament's Consultative Committee on Harassment at Work concluded that something did indeed transpire that falls under sexual harassment.
But even without details looking at Julia Redas track record and the fact that the German pirate party and European pirate party distanced themselves from him suggests more than a minor error in judgement. It’s unbelievable that he could successfully trick his party so he could get on the candidates list as number 2. And he will be there on election day! This is no FUD but something they have to blame on themselves.
(That blog entry is linked in this Buzzfeed article: https://www.buzzfeed.com/de/pascalemueller/europawahl-pirate... )
I rather have a rupt to the core bastard, which still prevents a catastrophic climate change, because he game of thrones whole industries.
Cause that's the only way climate change is going to slow down..
I mean, I'm certainly not going to vote for them because they are far, far away from me politically, but imho their reaction to the whole affair was correct and shouldn't be held against them.
Mostly, they campaign for things like police accountability and run candidates to force focus on certain issues like surveillance and net neutrality. They don't win, in those cases, but it's a good way to keep solidly-Democratic candidates from letting the issues slide. But there are some Pirates holding offices like town council seats, which is inspiring to me.
(And on a practical level, they seem to be way better at recognizing their position and making an impact than much bigger factions like the Libertarian Party. Perhaps ironically, they've got some great organization.)
A ranked-choice voting system would encourage the existence of more parties. Even a run off voting would help with the existence of more parties, while still preserving the simplicity of FPTP (though, getting people to vote is hard enough, forcing them to go vote a second time would probably be even harder).
https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_tabl...
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/gerrymandering-illegal-mathema...
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/03/maine-ranked-choice-voti...
They have effectively zero presence in New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, or Philadelphia
> But there are some Pirates holding offices like town council seats
Where? How many?
> And on a practical level, they seem to be way better at recognizing their position and making an impact than much bigger factions like the Libertarian Party.
As someone who's pretty tuned in to US politics, including local politics, I can't identify any impact that the Pirate Party has had. In fact, it's almost impossible to tell that they even exist, in 2019.
Has this been tried?
But we don't run that desktop software now. Open Source is better than closed source for many applications, then there is SaaS. I am not going to want to get excited about Microsoft Word as nobody uses word processors these days.
>By entering TPB you agree to XMR being mined using your CPU. If you don't agree please leave now or install an adBlocker
For many, perhaps most people, Pirate Bay is literally the ONLY solution available.
I'm using Pirate Bay in a general sense to refer to Bit-torrent but also in a more specific sense as it applies to their longevity.
I guess I always thought things would go back to IRC once all of these sites got taken down. While I was still getting everything I wanted on Undernet or Dalnet, I remember thinking it was brazen to have this stuff on a public website, and that it wouldn't last long if it was legit stuff. It's funny Pirate Bay is still proving me wrong after all these years.
My IRC revival just doesn't seem to be in the cards. I can't even find an active server outside of freenode, which is basically like a stack overflow chat.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pirate-party-rick-falkvinge-...
Now if what.cd came back...that would be a great time
“Of course I buy my songs and hit up Redbox and buy DVDs! That’s how it works!”
The tools will get easier to use and the outputs will continue to approach studio quality.
You hear the stories from folks in the industry: I grew up making movies with my parents camcorder.
Today’s kids will grow up using a computer and iPad to quickly make a movie, aided by ML tools that help edit and create CG content, and publish it instantly for free.
I grew up torrenting and was a proud member of what.cd when that tracker was still alive.
These days I listen to nearly all of my music on paid Spotify subscriptions. The number of people who have access to either Spotify, Amazon Prime, or Apple Music subscriptions must be huge. Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.
Video is a different beast, but I do like Netflix. Torrents live on for new releases and less available content, though.
I live in one of the poorer countries. I know not a single person with a paid subscription of any kind.
qBittorrent with an RSS feed is miles ahead of any paid offer anyway.
So if everyone decided to torrent, there won't be a market.
Most people working a full time job barely have free time.
At the same time you talk about pirating so you feel entitled to have the fruit of other people's labour whilst saying it has no value. Gleeful in your hypocrisy.
Why are you on this website to discuss technology? Most things made are pointless rubbish going off your definition.
What do you do for a living that in your opinion is actually worth money?
Look, if the companies are willing to look into a minimum wage and median salary when crafting prices for different countries, we might be easily convinced.
Do you know how much stuff you have available in Netflix? Now imagine having a choice between pirating and paying the same price as you do in a developed country for like 30% of the US catalogue. All that while earning much, much less.
Very very rarely does a movie not make money. Even flops make money years after release. The latest avengers movie cost 356m to make, including everyone's salary on the film. It made the studios 2.63 billion. There is no investment in the world that can give you that kind of return. Was that 2.3b in profit split among the cast and crew? Absolutely not. It was feasted upon by the executives of walt disney, those poor deserving souls.
Honestly I couldn't care less if Hollywood goes away with it's predictable formulaic cookie cutter focus-group movies.
It would be nice to see more movies where a director has an actual artistic vision and sees it through.
You don't need a billion dollars to make a movie with a good story, developed characters and good acting.
I'm sorry :/
Just the lock-in currently enjoyed by the companies that own the MPAA and RIAA. If all the work is done on a digital platform and can be published to a dozen websites with a few clicks, their traditional distribution arrangements hold less value.
I say own even though legally that’s not accurate. The studios effectively control MPAA/RIAA talking points. Those two groups exist to make lobbying for studio interests more economical. Again, the elite get what the labor class does not: unions.
I digress.
Things youtube don't have (I am french and I know that a lot of french punk/rock/metal I like is not easily found) Spotify is unlikely to have either.
Opus is transparent at that rate. Heck it's virtually transparent at 96 kbps, and does a great job at 64 kbps.
audio only DASH audio 53k , opus @ 50k, 1.01MiB
audio only DASH audio 69k , opus @ 70k, 1.34MiB
audio only DASH audio 130k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.2@128k, 2.63MiB
audio only DASH audio 136k , vorbis@128k, 2.59MiB
audio only DASH audio 140k , opus @160k, 2.69MiB
Seems pretty decent to me.
Newpipe also has the ability to download music for offline listening as well, that's a pretty good backup plan
What I would like is a rent-on-demand method. Xbox almost gets this right: they have plenty of titles you can rent for up to 24 hours. You typically pay between 3 - 6 dollars per film. More recent films are more expensive. However, I would like to see the cost go down, especially for older titles. Basically match any Redbox prices (1-2 dollars), and provide a way for me to stream it on-demand.
Have you tried Youtube? They have a pretty extensive catalog of rent-on-demand movies, and I rarely find a mainstream movie that I want to watch, that isn't in their catalog. Most of them range between $2.99 / $5.99 or so, with really recent releases going higher, and the rare oddball title that's $14.99 or something (presumably because that's what the rights-holder demanded?)
That was what fueled their move towards producing original content -- they knew they wouldn't be able to license third party content for much longer, and they needed to have something people would want to watch when that day came. They've explicitly said they see their future as being the next HBO, where what draws subscribers is access to Netflix-original content you can't get anywhere else rather than access to a deep catalog of content from lots of different sources.
> Basically match any Redbox prices (1-2 dollars)
Redbox has the same advantage that Netflix had back when they were shipping discs by mail, namely that discs are a physical artifact and thus subject to the first sale doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine), which says that the seller of a physical good can't put artificial restrictions on what the buyer of that artifact does with it after they buy it. As long as copyright holders sell movies and such on discs priced for everyday consumers, services like Redbox can also buy those discs at the same low price and then rent them out to people, and the copyright holders can't impose a post-sale restriction to stop them. They sold the disc, once they took the money they lost the right to say what it could be used for.
Stream the same movie instead of delivering it on disc, though, and now since there's no transfer of ownership of a physical artifact, the first sale doctrine no longer applies. Anyone who wants to stream that movie has to negotiate separate streaming rights with the copyright holder; the copyright holder is free to demand however much it wants to as part of that negotiation; and if that price is too rich, the would-be streamer doesn't have the option to just buy a bunch of licenses on the consumer market the way they would with discs. Their only options are to pay what the copyright holder demands, or not carry the title. So
All of which means that streaming services will always be at a severe disadvantage price-wise to services that rent out physical media -- even before you start factoring in the cost of all the infrastructure needed to stream video reliably to a global audience.
FWIW, Netflix has had a scattered selection of The Dark Knight and Lord of the Rings off-and-on recently. I guess that might be your point, though…
Or aren't interested in supporting closed corporations that benefit financially more than the artists who produced the music in the first place. It's a predatory system trying to get grandfathered in from the (g)olden music industry days, and to be fair involves bigger fish than streaming services (labels, promoters, etc.).
I'd provide a counter argument putting blame on artists: those who aren't selling and promoting themselves via a personal website or websites like Bandcamp probably aren't that interested in monetizing their music career.
As someone still paying monthly subscriptions to streaming services, I've recently begun to purchase more DRM-free music in lossless format. I get the best possible quality of audio, directly support the artist (or more directly than via streaming), and I get to keep the music indefinitely, as long as I can manage the storage requirements. It's not cheap nor easy, but I believe it's the fair approach for consuming music, and look forward to the day I disable my streaming subscriptions.
This is why I love Bandcamp. Lossless format for my good stereo at home, mp3's for my car, and streaming when I'm at work.
There is a whole class of people who are content listening to whatever is on the radio or the same 20 year old CD's they've had forever without ever seeking new music or even knowing what's playing. That's really what I meant by people without paid subscriptions not caring.
I prefer the subscription model. I rarely get hooked on an album, but when I do, I'll listen to it on repeat for 1- a few months - and then I'll might not ever listen to it much again. These albums might be the only ones that make sense for me to buy (and even though, maybe not - I might hate it in 3 months - but let's consider the expense like a circus ticket or something, pay to experience pleasure).
On the other hand, a bunch of the stuff I hear on Spotify, I never seek again, it's just background noise. Sometimes this turns into a relationship and they win a fan, sometimes they don't.
The best way to support artists is by attending shows.
I have been hooked on Mac Miller's album Swimming for the past few weeks. Sadly, he passed, but he's the first artist I've ordered merch for, maybe ever, because I liked the album so much. Highly recommended. Start on track one and play through.
Sorry I just don't buy into the spotify/applemusic/etc life. I adore music, but my first step is usually supporting the artist directly via bandcamp when possible. Luckily a huge amount of artists I follow have bandcamp pages. It's not as direct as going to a show and buying merch/albums there, but I don't get a lot of shows near me for the genre's I prefer.
This is absurd from my perspective; to go from the wealth of music created through history and countries available on what.cd such as the bootleg recordings of live music in a small Cairo bar to the limited and commercialized selection of what's on Spotify (and I do have experience with it), along with the fact you no longer "own" (in an informal sense) the music.
Music on the periphery, older releases and things people may not want to listen to are my lifeblood. I couldn't imagine being only able to access Spotify. It works for you and that's good - but for me (and I imagine quite a few other music enthusiasts) it's a totally different situation. Often if it's not on Soulseek or a torrent tracker then the only way for me to obtain it is through buying a physical copy, maybe from an online collector's marketplace like Discogs.
I might throw in an endorsement of the very new things one can find on Bandcamp too - I've profited greatly from that variety.
I love Spotify too! But it is a perfect example of how copyright law gatekeeps the creative media we can consume, for reasons purely inherent to the system and not attributable to any individual's malice. Nobody set out to create an ubiquitous streaming service that's missing music people could love, it's simply impossible to create something else legally.
Ugh, now that I am actually making music I wish I had access to what.cd. When I was using it all I really wanted was the best FLAC / best master of a nice Vinyl I could find.
I am a (hobbyist) musician and producer and my focuses have definitely narrowed inward the past several years. I wouldn't consider myself someone who listens to a lot of new music all the time and a bunch of unknown stuff. (but) I listen to more than most people - last.fm puts me at about 75-78% on number of artists, tracks, and albums listened to. Usually I jam an artist for a few months and learn all of their discography and when I am burnt out I move on. Sometimes I hit a dead patch and don't find a new artist that I love for a while.
The last albums (artists) I fell in love with were (mentioned in earlier comment) Mac Miller - Swimming, Caroline Rose - LONER, Kanye West - Life of Pablo. But really, I fell in love with these artists, and I like their earlier works as much as their more recent work, even when its much different.
With video, its awful. Networks and production companies are all to eager to cancel licenses and pull their content off of a service. The golden goose is that every network and production has their own service that they milk customers for $9.99 a month for (like Disney's B.S.). The end result is instead of you paying $100 a month for cable, you are paying $100 a month for 10 different services to get the same coverage. Back to piracy it is.
Compare with video where the market is fragmenting beyond repair and I get asked to pirate things for family and friends several times a week. In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too.
I hope more of these near-zero margin goods will go the cheap subscription route in the future. It makes this a much simpler time for consumers. Right now, I don't know what service even has a given TV show so it's easier to just click the button in Sonarr and watch it show up on my NAS a few minutes later.
Haven't they, though? In mobile, free-to-play model has solved most of the friction. For PC/console, Steam and Origin are doing a good job too. Most games on Steam cost less than $50, and that's weeks if not many months of entertainment.
Not really, this model is pretty awful as it creates motivations for developers to make the game repetitive or overly difficult in order to convince people to pay for stuff. Just look at the recent mobile Lemmings game, they lock you out of the game with a timer, offering only temporary timer bypasses in the store. A few developers sell a simple "get out of bullshit and ads pass" which does solve it though.
Overall though in the mobile world this hasn't been an issue as the expectation of prices for paid games is far lower.
> Most games on Steam cost less than $50
AAA titles are still $60 and in recent years often include "season passes" and similar, doubling their costs.
> that's weeks if not many months of entertainment.
I get over 50 hours out of probably 1/20 games.
So overall, I'd say far from solved still. Origin has attempted a subscription model but it's expensive and offers only trials of recent releases and significantly older titles. Humble Bundle actually has a decent subscription service going on, but it's not on the sort of "all access" model you get with music or movies.
Perhaps streaming game services will change this, but I do worry that they're a move in the wrong direction in other ways.
Or we run our own media streaming setup rather than pay Spotify $10/month. Spotify gives the illusion of supporting artists but the artists you listen to will never see a significant amount of money from your subscription fee.
I've downloaded thousands of albums over the years and have my own music library. Why should I pay Spotify for doing the same thing? This is literally how they seeded their library when they started out.
I have since mainly moved from torrenting to buying vinyl and using Bandcamp like others here have mentioned. I still see artists tour on occasion, but I'm not convinced that touring is sustainable for musicians, so I'd rather buy the album.
It's sad to me that so many have bought the lie that Spotify et al have pushed. They are no different from the music labels.
DIY 'til I die.
I don't know what your impression of Spotify is, but it seems quite different than mine. When I think Spotify, I think Discover Weekly, awesome machine learning that finds artists similar to whatever I was listening to every time I listen to an album / artist all the way through, often finding me new favorites, well made apps that integrate nicely between my iPhone / Mac desktop app - I can easily resume something on a different player. This seems like it's getting smarter. I don't really use it the way I used to use Foobar / Winamp / iTunes - but I probably abuse it. I create playlists for whatever I'm listening to lately, and just access those. I don't want to scroll 2000 artists in my library.
Downsides I've experienced - not many: - quality not quite as good as Apple Music or Tidal ( and definitely not as good as FLAC, lol ). This isn't really a problem for me unless I A/B something. Sometimes the library is missing something. These songs are probably not available from competitors either. - Lyrics view? WTH guys seriously, this was good at first and now it only occasionally shows "Behind the music with Genius'... assuming this is licensing problems but if you can work out streaming rights, can't you work out lyric sheet rights? - That might actually be all of them.
Buying vinyl is cool but I'll never listen to it. Inconvenient. It's a cool souvenir.
I used to have a big FLAC library. Somewhere along the road, it was lost, along with many other digital heirlooms.
I'm very interested in music but I won't pay for low-quality streaming and music I've paid for that could disappear at any time or be geoblocked.
If it's not DRM-free FLAC that I can easily convert to MP3 for the car/portable player, or whatever format I may choose in the future, then I'm not paying for it.
.. or find that the endless-firehose model doesn't suit them? I honestly just prefer to buy one album (either CD or digital download) or so per month. The affordances of that encourage me to choose carefully and listen with attention rather than vaguely skim. I'd rather get to know a few things well than lots superficially. It's a bit like web-skimming vs reading books. Of course you can read long form on the web, just as you can get to know bodies of music well on Spotify et al, but it's going against the grain.
[Edit: in fact on reflection, my view is almost the opposite to yours: streaming subscriptions suit a listening habit not that interested in music per se, that desires ongoing background novelty]
Am I willing to go to a local record store and buy a whole album for $14 every time I find a new song I like? Not really. Am I willing to pay $10/mo for unlimited streaming? Absolutely. Am I willing to make sure I'm home at 9pm sharp on a Thursday to watch a TV show? No. Am I willing to pay $30 to stream the whole season on demand? Definitely.
That time requirement will slow the artist down if he has to do it for free, or may even prohibit them. The idea of renumerating the artist is to enable them to produce higher quality work more often; if he has to spend a lot of time begging on Patreon, and half of his projects now are porn because it's the only way he can get cash for his passion projects, we all suffer.
Sorry, I know I get strident on this topic, and hope I come across as civil, but tools are not that important. You could make a TV show for free at your local cable company, remember public access?
Equating IP with real estate is bad for the society: why would someone keep producing and keep performing if they made a hit with a song, or a movie, or a game?
Some big ISPs probably get enough of these to have automated the process, hence the difference of minutes.
BitTorrent is peer-to-peer. Anyone can join a swarm and see the IP addresses of other computers they’re communicating with. Knowing the files came from a trusted a trusted uploader won’t hide your identity from that.
Like many others here, Steam/Netflix/Spotify have largely stopped me from torrenting anything. But we continue to slide toward needing a separate streaming service for every single TV series, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the piracy pendulum swing back the other way.
You can't download "pirated" torrents except through a VPN.
I mean, there are prominent warnings on TPB.
Yet that's the content which is always in the top downloads section. Well, that and porn. Lots of porn.
Not only that, spammers have taken over the site - probably, randsomware spreaders. Torrents few minutes old would have thousands of seeds with ridiculous file sizes.
It's sad. TPB's like the Github of torrents. TPB's reputation system and comments was a godsend. Till now, there's still no replacement for it.
I feel something's up with the current owners of site.
Lots of new ones all the time.
> Many times, the search bar claims zero result
Timeouts - very common. Just refresh. Maybe needs a few attempts.
> spammers have taken over the site ... Torrents few minutes old would have thousands of seeds with ridiculous file sizes
As has been the case for a decade, prefer torrents from users with the green or pink (trusted and VIP) icons. The spammy ones from unknowns get deleted often.
I lost track at .se !
Weirdly I’ll sometimes get tpb links from bing searches (google doesn’t work) that work on mobile but not desktop.
Figure it’s a proxy thing.
The only thing I torrent nowadays is the skyf1 and rocadirecta is great for that and has already prevailed on court in Spain if I remember correctly so not getting to Pirate Bay isn’t as big of deal as it would have been 5 years ago.
the wikipedia article has the official site.
I think I recall this with Adobe PhotoShop...