It should be "Spotify free users no longer feel the need to pirate the albums anymore".
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Spotify Set to Rival Apple Podcasts Subscriptions With New Service That Won't Charge Content Creators
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Except, people are using Spotify's free tier to stream rip making it easier to illegally obtain music without the risk of the RIAA tracking IPs of P2P services.
Recording - Mixonline
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There is no data to show widespread users who illegally obtain music are converting to Spotify's free tier specifically.
You must be oblivious of the music pirate community and how active and how common place it was, and how it is still relevant today. It's not just based on public trackers like the big names you know. They don't rub that in your face, but pirates have their own secret world hidden from view, you will not find it unless you are part of the community. There are private trackers and usenet groups specifically for Music, which you won't be able to access. The gate keeping is to keep people exactly like you, out. For real pirates, you will never get their IPs in a swarm, and they never get DMCAs. Those public trackers and search engines are there for the occasional pirates, they are not long-term users. If they are not lazy or tech-iliterate users, then, they would always torrent over a VPN, which shields them from DMCAs on public trackers. They may use certain types of remote downloading services, so their true IPs are never shown to the public trackers. They can then use sFTP or other transfer methods to fetch the downloaded files to their personal computer. Users who seed for long term, rip and release torrents are never on public trackers.
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NO! Spotify doesn’t actually have in-app purchases on iOS. What Spotify actually wants from all their political wrangling is the exact same thing Epic wants (to offer IAP without going through Apple). This is probably shortsighted of them (and especially so of Epic for reasons I’ll explain in a bit). I call it shortsighted because I think it’s likely that Apple users would still favor going through Apple, even if IAP through an outside processor was available in the app. It’s one less online account to manage, one less place to have to change cards when you move, lose a card, or have a card expire. It’s one less place to have to manage subscriptions at (and most non-Apple places make it very hard to end subscriptions outright, often making it hard to do so or by default only putting the account on hold for a limited period of time, often the easiest way to permanently get out of these subscriptions is to cancel the card you used to subscribe to them). I think that’s enough of a differentiation that many Apple users would pay a higher price to go through Apple than a third party processor (or one controlled directly by Spotify or Epic).
Epic’s stance is even more shortsighted considering how you can buy pre-paid vbucks cards in stores or on Amazon and redeem them within the game. They already have a major alternate network for selling in-game currency. I doubt many serious Fortnite players only play on iOS or Android, most also likely play on consoles or computers (with their own ways of purchasing vbucks), after all. So Epic would probably make just as much money if the mobile version of Fortnite didn’t have IAP at all.
Spotify’s regulatory filings for investors suggests that’s not exactly true. Spotify seems to lose money on most paid accounts, due to their price discounts in the developing world and due to their various discounts and service bundles in the developed world (for instance, Hulu+Disney+Spotify bundles). Also, I strongly suspect some large percentage of those free users are resistant to becoming paid users or are no longer active accounts (I think I technically have an unused free Spotify account, but I use Apple Music for streaming). App Store economies have taught us that people strongly resist paying for what was once free (look at the complaints when an app puts out a paid update or changes to a subscription model), and I’d imagine that’s particularly true on Android. (I play around with it on hobbyist devices, and I’ve noticed that, while most ad-supported iOS apps will have an ad-free option available as an IAP [obvious exceptions are social media services that don’t allow for ad-free access], on Android, most ad supported apps don’t have a way to remove ads via IAP. If you’re lucky, there might be a paid version of the free app as a separate app on the store, but that seems very rare, most ad supported Android apps, in my experience, have no way of removing advertising.)
Nope.
1. I'm well aware of the music pirate community. I've used dozens of early P2P software like Napster, Kazaa, Direct Connect, Morpheus, NewsLeecher etc...and I'm very aware of the current private trackers and using seedbox services. I personally know of someone who was a moderator of what cd (now shutdown) which was really hard to apply for.
2. You're not addressing how easy it is for a user to rip from Spotify free, using a free service to steal music.
3. Music pirate community being "still relevant today" (your words) means piracy was never essentially solved. So your statement "Spotify free users no longer feel the need to pirate the albums anymore" is irrelevant since Spotify free has been out for years and yet people are still pirating.
4. You're not showing any data of people who stopped piracy due to exclusively the Spotify free tier and not due to the overall streaming business.
No one rips from Spotify, are you mad? It's lossy-lossy transcode to mp3.
Steaming music services, at large, killed music piracy, that's a general consensus. You don't need to argue about that.
Music piracy was rampant, it was so common place that it was the preferred method of obtaining music and discussing music-related topics. Today, it's still relevant because it became a very niche community of highly-dedicated and self-selected group of people. Most people don't care about FLACs or Vinyl or anything that's not on Spotify. The dread of ripping, torrenting, and ratio whoring outweighs the saving of either a few bucks a months of using Spotify or free Spotify or a cheap Spotify premium account from Aliexpress with Spotify India or Spotify Thailand.
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Now unless Youtube somehow offered lossless playback that I'm not aware of, the fact that Youtube is the #1 source to stream rip from suggests that your assertion that people don't rip from these services because of double lossy encoding is flat out wrong. People don't care about audio quality as long as it sounds good enough.
And you say "no one rips form Spotify"? They just overtook Soundcloud's position for being one of the most stream-ripped services in the UK. Again, you're just wrong.
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When you rip from YouTube, you don’t need to transcode most of the time, but if you rip from Spotify, since Spotify is OGG, you need to transcode it because basically nothing can playback OGG.
Also, why would you rip from Spotify if you can rip from direct-download, CDs or Vinyls?
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- For one, Youtube's 1080p video setting has an audio bitrate of 128kbps vs Spotify free's 160kbps. Whatever benefit you get out of a single encode pass on a 128kbps vs a re-encoded Spotify 160kbps stream rip is probably not all that much better (that is, we're assuming it is better). I'm sure a Spotify 160kbps audio stream re-encoded to a 320kbps MP3 generates artifacts, but I highly doubt people can notice the difference between that and Youtube's 128kbps quality.
- Two, you have no idea if the person uploaded a video with a lossless audio track. If they uploaded a video with an AAC audio track, then it would literally be a re-encode since Youtube re-encodes all files no matter what format you encoded it in. Chances are, you are getting a "re-encoded" audio if you download directly from Youtube.
- Three, even if you assume all official music channels uploaded losslessly, people generally download Youtube videos from unofficial channels that upload the lossy album since music videos quite often have edits to the song. In other words, it's highly likely not all stream rips are from official losslessly-uploaded sources.
Ease of use. It's readily available the moment the album drops and you can easily download the entire library with one click.
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Interesting... that explains why when I "rip" songs from Youtube the maximum I can get is 128kbps
Has it always been like that?
Do certain "ripping" solutions generate a 320kbps MP3 even though the video only has 128kbps audio?
The ones that generate 320kbps are doing so because that’s what the user wants to see.
The site knows that if you’re ripping from a YouTube video, your concern for audio quality isn’t all that great. As a result, you’re unlikely to notice that there’s no qualitative difference between the 320 they send you and the 128 they send you, it’s just a bigger 128 file. However, based on the perceived notion of more = higher quality, you’ll hopefully keep returning to THAT site and view THEIR ads rather than going to the other site and viewing theirs
The ones that generate 320kbps are doing so because that’s what the user wants to see.
Yeah that's true!
I actually purchased a little Windows app to download Youtube video or audio. It has a setting for 320kbps or "best quality"... but all I ever get are 128kbps MP3 files.
Now I know why! Thank you for explaining it!
They used to use 192kbps but I believe they lowered it to 128kbps.
I've never heard of YouTube streaming at 320kbps. The max you can get is audio from a 4k video which is encoded using a different audio codec. I believe it's using a variable bit rate reaching as high as 160kbps.
But pretty much any 320kbps youtube ripper is a scam. Youtube has never streamed at that bit rate. These rippers are just "upscaling" a 128kbps audio file to 320kbps.
Why would you rip anything and waste time and storage if it’s on Spotify? People who can’t afford Spotify Premium aren‘t flying around the world, thus they don’t need the offline feature.
To bypass ads and to get around free tier limitations. Among other reasons.
Eh, in the US anyway, there are plenty of places where inter-city highway travel is important, and many of these highways don’t have great cell coverage (either there’s no coverage, voice only coverage, or mere 2G or 3G coverage). The underground lines of the NYC Subway also don’t have great cellular service outside of the stations (on the elevated lines, you get regular cell service, of course). Downtown cores, especially inside brick or steel buildings, often don’t get the best of reception due to signal absorption or multi path interference. Constant data coverage is not a given in large parts of even the developed world, even without jet-setting, due to the nature of data communications. Communications that are robust in a variety of circumstances inevitably require fairly narrow bandwidths on frequencies that can’t readily be reused, while very high bandwidth applications of a narrowcast or directcast (vs broadcast) nature are inherently not particularly robust.
Yeah, I get your point. I get this issue too in Canada, but I stay within the institutional or home wifi range, or within cell coverage region long enough for me to get by. If I need to wonder off to Northern Canada, then usually we get satellite phones. In Japan, Korea and China the coverage is usually spotless. You get great 4G LTE coverage even underground and on the mount Everest and other no-man lands. Of course, 5G only exist in median and large cities.
Most of the regions in the continental US with poor to no cell phone and broadband service are usually mountainous areas that have poor satellite service. This tends to not be places people live full time (but some are), but they are common vacation destinations (a family cabin up in the mountains, for instance). But I live in NYC, and I can tell you underground cell service just doesn’t exist between subway stations here. I would not be at all surprised to hear that quite a few people pirate music from Spotify to have it offline here in NYC, especially younger people and people with less disposable income.
Edit: And if underground cell service did exist between stations, it would probably be the cause of daily fights caused in part by people acting the fool for Snapchat, TikTok, or on FaceTime! I don’t even get why on-train cell phone use is a thing, let alone in-public video calls. Of course, this is meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek!