"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.
It never left. My MP3 collection is getting kinda disgusting at this point. I really should delete a bunch of it, but you never know when I’m going to want to listen to that album I downloaded 15 years ago and haven’t gotten into yet!
Every few years I just create a new folder of the artists that I actively listen to and keep the older stuff out of my library but still in storage.
Sounds better than my method of having the first ten-fifteen years of collecting arranged neatly by artist names in folders labeled alphabetically followed by a few different folders labeled by the year I downloaded (not the year of release), a few genre folders, and a a few, uhh, folders sorted by how I acquired the music torrented or through Soulseekqt. Yeah, mine is a complete mess. Pulsar player for Android makes it incredibly easy to sort through stuff anyway. I did conveniently fail to put a lot of the stuff I rarely listen to on my current phone anyway. I’m not too egregiously awful. I do at least listen to everything I download at least once or twice. I had a friend in the 00s who just downloaded everything whether he listened or not. Yeah, I’ll keep comparing myself to his 20+ year old standard of digital hording.
I lost mine several times - I didn’t always use to have backups. Two were on MP3 players that stopped working. One was on an old smartphone, which worked but which I just didn’t bother copying most of the data from. Once I just wiped it accidentally. In hindsight - I don’t mind, that would’ve got cleaned up anyway.
I kinda wish I’d lost mine once or twice.