Websites for illegally downloaded music are seeing a sharp rise, and YouTube plays a massive role in enabling modern-day piracy.

"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.

Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."

The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.

      • @kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
        43•5 months ago

        but yt audio quality is terrible.

        So are the bluetooth speakers and ear buds that most people use to listen to music these days.

        • @filcuk@lemmy.zipEnglish
          6•5 months ago

          LDAC codec seems enough for me to tell the difference for music i know in high-rez, and I don’t like it.
          I do have good quality android player and wired, but pointless to use with Spotify.

        • @psycho_driver@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3•5 months ago

          So are the bluetooth speakers and ear buds that most people use to listen to music these days.

          Heretic! Nothing that my Lord and Savior Apple bestows upon the unwashed is less than divine!

      • @scarilog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11•5 months ago

        Most people can’t tell the difference between low bitrate vs high bitrate. Usually just confirmation bias.

        Have you truly tested whether you can? I don’t mean playing each side by side and seeing whether you can tell the difference, but actually testing yourself in a way that you don’t know which is being played (like having someone else play it for you).

      • @FrameXX@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        0•5 months ago

        It’s very fine unless you decide you just must and have to convert that audio to MP3 (the audio loses quality with every lossy compression), because you are an old boomer and other formats scare you even though almost all modern device can play OPUS or at least M4A or you are one of those people who call themselves “Audiophiles” to feel more special, but wouldn’t recognize a shit if I played OPUS 192kbps on their 2000$ home audio setup instead of the 24 bit uncompressed FLAC that has over 30MB in size each. I have most of my library from YT Music which is ~128kbps OPUS and it has been transparent on all audio devices I have played it till now.

        • @NotPersonal@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1•4 months ago

          Look, we all have bad days, but there’s no need to be so aggressive to random people online. Everyone’s hearing is different. Some people are more sensitive to certain sounds than others. I tried youtube, spotify and tidal. And youtube is the audio quality I disliked the most. Just for clarification. I’m not a boomer, I’m a millenial, I work in computer science so I enjoy testing new formats. I have tried everything from atrac (sony) to DSD, I don’t have a $2000 home audio setup but I have a couple of decent pairs of cans, with mid-range DAC and amps. And I have tested multiple audio formats at different levels of compression and bitrate to find what I like the most. To me 128kbps feels like listening to the radio over the phone. If that’s enough for you, then great, more power to you. No need to be disrespectful.

          • @FrameXX@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            2•4 months ago

            I am sorry. I went to a little rant, but I meant it rather funny even though I realize it feels aggressive 🤣. I am just enthusiastic about this topic even though I don’t know that much.

      • @fakeman_pretendname@feddit.ukEnglish
        16•5 months ago

        If you use the NewPipe android app to watch youtube, you can download directly from there, as video or audio, in a selection of formats.

      • @CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5•5 months ago

        It’s a Python command line program, so yes. I use Termux (a Linux terminal emulator), and I installed yt-dlp using pip, a package manager for Python. I also have ffmpeg for command line video editing on my phone.

        I have it setup such that when I click “Share” on a URL from Firefox or YouTube, and I choose Termux as the receiving app, I am presented with a menu that let’s me choose if I want the video saved to a normal folder or a hidden folder (for reasons), or if I want to download just the audio and save it to an MP3. yt-dlp can download from much more than just YouTube.

        The script is just a bash script with a specific name in a specific folder that Termux knows to invoke when sent a URL. You can do anything you want with such a script.

        Only get Termux from F-Droid or Droid-ify. Not from the Play Store. The Play Store version is way out of date.

        Like the other person said, Newpipe can also download from YouTube. It’s a YouTube front-end that scrapes the public HTML website for YouTube. You can also download that from F-Droid or Droid-ify.

        Oh, and another person mentioned Seal, which is a yt-dlp front-end for Android. It’s pretty great! I just installed it. As usual, it’s on F-Droid and Droid-ify.