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from the rising-tide-lifts-all-ships dept.
Music piracy is on the increase worldwide, with 40 percent of users are accessing unlicensed music, up from 35 percent last year, the global recorded music industry group IFPI said.
Internet search engines are making piracy easier, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said in a report on Tuesday, calling for government action.
The increase in piracy follows a slump in recent years when policing of the digital music landscape appeared to be clamping down on the practice.
"Copyright infringement is still growing and evolving, with stream ripping the dominant method," said IPPI chief, Frances Moore.
"With the wealth of licensed music available to fans, these types of illegal sites have no justifiable place in the music world," she said, calling for greater regulation of the digital music sector.
If they defeat stream ripping, there's always the analog hole...
[Ed Note - OTOH "The report also revealed the continuing rise in audio streaming. It found that 45 percent of respondents were now listening to music through a licensed audio streaming service—up from 37 percent in 2016." ]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:02AM (13 children)
Every dumbfuck (this means you) gets music from YouTube.
Smarter-than-average dumbfucks use youtube-dl.
Dumber-than-average dumbfucks use shitty webapp youtube downloaders.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:15AM (12 children)
I'm in a 3 day a week aerobics class. Last year Halloween fell on a class day. I grabbed a bunch of youtube videos relating to halloween, converted them to MP3, burned a CD, and gave it to our fearless leader.
A couple weeks ago was another event I wanted to have a custom soundtrack for. Turned out, the youtube to mp3 converter I'd used last October now wanted to install a Chrome toolbar. Um, no. How about no.
Searching for other Youtube to MP3 converters resulted in a big fail.
Me? I peruse a couple music sites once or twice a week, when something comes down the pike I might like I grab it from pirate bay. Not found? I have a text file of stuff I want to listen to, every once in a while I pop those into Pirate Bay.
Now that I'm retired I listen to music maybe 20 minutes a day, and find I have more stuff to listen to than have time to listen to it. Most of my listening was while cranking out code. Now that I crank out cat luvins, which requires no music, I have more music than time.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:31AM
So you're a dumber-than-average dumbfuck. Got it.
Here's one.
http://www.convertfiles.com/ [convertfiles.com]
And that's just one example.
Go hardcore dumbfuck! Your choice of python or perl.
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/ [github.com] (python)
https://www.jwz.org/hacks/youtubedown [jwz.org] (one giant perl script)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:08AM (10 children)
My experience has been that I have stopped pirating anything because it all bores the crap out of me. There's scarcely a song out there that I haven't heard 10,000 times, and I can pretty much do without hearing it a 10,001st time. Same thing with movies or TV. If somebody happens to hand me a thumb drive with pirated shows or movies on it, I might watch them if there's absolutely nothing else to do, but even then I find myself skipping ahead or dropping out 10 minutes in to go do something more interesting.
Now if I want music, I play it myself. I never took lessons, never learned as a kid, but I've managed to get to a proficiency that suits me. It scratches the itch. If I want something more interactive, I do an RPG with my kids or go out and do something civic-minded.
When I return to the commercial media I was immersed in as a kid, it repels me. The volume (in both senses of the word) of commercials is crazy. The messages corporate-produced content peddles are anathema. Why does anybody subject himself to it? Go outside, go for a run or a hike. Go to your work bench and fix something broken in your house or create something you've always wanted but which has never shown up in the shelves at Walmart. Read a book. Write a book. Start a love affair. Something. Something other than whiling away your time on earth listening to corporations telling you what to think and what to do.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:15AM (9 children)
My experience has been that I have stopped pirating anything because it all bores the crap out of me. There's scarcely a song out there that I haven't heard 10,000 times, and I can pretty much do without hearing it a 10,001st time.
WTF? Maybe you've run out of music in your narrow preferred niche genre, but if you don't limit yourself that way, but you do limit yourself to music made before, say, 1990, there's so much music that's been recorded that there should be no way you could run out of new things to listen to. You'll have to venture beyond the Top 40 though. These days, there's a ridiculous amount of music available that's been recorded in just the past 10-15 years; you can find tons of it on YouTube, plus various other sites that cater to indie artists. Now that anyone with a laptop can record and mix decent-sounding music, there's just scads of music out there. Don't forget all the foreign music too. So I'm sorry, I don't buy this idea that you've run out of music to listen to.
Same thing with movies or TV.
This again is pretty silly. There's been literally thousands of movies made since the dawn of cinema, and countless hours of TV shows. Now if you're filtering them by some metric, like "good English-language sci-fi movies" or something very limiting like that, then sure, the supply is pretty limited and not growing very fast, but if you mean all movies and TV, then no way. You could spend months just watching old TV shows from the 70s-80s all day long.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:31AM (6 children)
I can actually relate to what Phoenix says. It is not so much that there is really no movie or music that I have not seen/hear before, but that I have perhaps aged enough to not significantly care about it. And a lot what is produced is actually similar enough to things I have listened to/seen that I do not really need it.
It is actually quite a wonderful experience. I no longer have a TV, do not need netflix or torrents, and spend my time in different ways.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:49PM (5 children)
I'm probably being a little too literalist, but again I feel that you and Phx are basically saying, "I've seen all the stuff that I liked when I was younger", and you haven't bothered branching out and look at stuff outside that bubble. Have you tried watching, for instance, Arabic- or Chinese-language movies? Or listening to traditional Indian music? Or even 80s rap? Now of course, I can understand trying some of these things out briefly and deciding that that entire genre is just not of interest (as is the case for me with rap), but I'm just pointing out there's a LOT of stuff out there that anyone with your attitude probably has not been exposed to. Personally, I've seen some really interesting movies when I've checked out foreign films, particularly European ones, but even some Arabic ones. Foreign films are totally different from Hollywood American ones (Michael Bay fans would not be impressed). Watch out for the French movies though; some of those are downright disturbing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:11PM (1 child)
It's like you're deliberately missing the point. The patterns and stories are not terribly new. Once you've seen 2-5 TV coo shows you've seen them all. Super hero movies? Done. Action? Done. Not a while lot of REALLY original stuff out there. I'm only in my mid 30s and already have trouble with a lot of stuff being boring. By 50/60 I'm sure it will be near impossible. Though it will probably be all the blockbuster hits from the last 40 years remade for VR or something.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:25PM
I'm not deliberately missing the point. Sure, if you just watch Hollywood movies, and you're intellectual, you're going to get bored because they really are all formulaic, especially these days with everything being a remake, reboot, or sequel/prequel. But there's a lot more to the universe of cinema than Hollywood. Try watching some movies from Europe or Asia. You might eventually get bored of that stuff too (Bollywood movies tend to be rather formulaic as well in their own way), but it should take longer because now you have many different cultures' worth of movies to look through instead of just one. European movies specifically tend to be very unique in my experience. There's a reason the most famous film festival is in Cannes, France.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:35PM
No, what you're saying might be true for others, but not for me. I have branched out to other musical genres and cultures for novelty. I have listened to Tuvan throat singing and Bollywood hits. For a time I had the dial set to Afro-Pop. For video I watched series like, "El Internado de la Laguna Negra," "La Reina del Sur," or "Parineeta." There are good things there.
But I've mined it all out. Re-watching old series seems like a double waste of time. Sure, I enjoyed watching "Airwolf" when I was a kid, but as an adult its storylines are dated, to say the least.
Once in a while something new and novel comes along, and I'll enjoy that, but there simply isn't enough of it to compel me to pay for anything. So I've lost the habit of paying for content.
And as that has happened, I've noticed a general loss of interest in passive entertainment. It's much more entertaining to undertake active hobbies. Also with many of them the price is right, because they're free. I've taken up flint-knapping, and all I gotta do for that is pick up rocks and reduce them to tools. As I've done that, I've found myself buying less and less and making more and more of what I need or desire. And as I do that more, I find I prefer it because I know exactly what goes into it, unlike any given thing you might buy in a store made by companies you shouldn't trust in places that will divert what you give them to ends you abhor.
I dunno. I haven't formulated any grand philosophy about it, but as I've been doing all that there has been a growing sense of freedom and confidence, and with that a greater sense of calm. Taking back control of the material side of life has conferred freedom, and being able to do that began with taking back control of my own time and mindshare. It's not just that 80 minutes of my evenings are no longer spent watching commercials, but that the entire evening is my own again. It's not just that my head isn't trapped playing a loop of a song in radio playlists, but that I can noodle around tunes nobody else has ever heard, but which I can now play because I taught myself the tools of making music. And it's perfectly fine if nobody else ever hears them or likes them or any of that, because it makes me happier than listening to anybody else's compositions ever did.
Anyway, all of which is to say I have really enjoyed that I have gone off the reservation with respect to media. Don't even have a desire to pirate anything anymore. I sort of suspect that therein lies the true nightmare for the *AA's, that people might do somewhat likewise and un-learn the habits that have been so profitable for the content industries.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Thursday September 21 2017, @09:56AM (1 child)
Good point.
Interesting you would mention that. I actually lived in China (and Japan) for several years.... So yes, I did watch Chinese, Japanese and Korean movies and series. And tried listening classical music. And while interesting for a while, I feel it still does not reach me anymore on the same emotional level as music or film could touch me when I was young, and I came to enjoy when it is quiet and I am reading or thinking, instead of being fed audio/visual content.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:30PM
And tried listening classical music. And while interesting for a while
Personally, I like baroque-era music better than the classical-era stuff (what people commonly call "classical" typically encompasses baroque, classical, and romantic), and I like the classical better than romantic.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:00PM (1 child)
Yeah, but Taylor Swift and Katy Perry are not interesting to me. I hear them and all I get are echoes of Tiffany or Debbie Gibson, which I didn't care about the first time around. R&B...it's an aesthetic that doesn't appeal to me, and its sensibility is callow. "Just like a tattoo, I'll always have you..." does not strike me as poetry. Okkervil River and indy bands like them my wife listens to, but it's dull to me. A couple years ago I was down at SXSW, one of the US's venues for cutting-edge music, and it was all a big meh.
And foreign music, that's not a real remedy. I appreciated Toumani Diabate and Boubacar Traore and Kodo, but it wears thin, too.
Everything is derivative unto tedium. Perhaps it's the access to the content that produced it, such that I grew sated more quickly in life than was ever possible for people before who had culture titrated toward maximum profit, dripped out in precious droplets. I've passed over the horizon of such things and can't find my way back, and my pocket money can't either.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:35PM
Yeah, but Taylor Swift and Katy Perry are not interesting to me.
I should hope not; that's corporate-manufactured crap.
I hear them and all I get are echoes of Tiffany or Debbie Gibson, which I didn't care about the first time around.
That stuff was crap too, but at least the mass-produced crap in the 80s was better than the mass-produced crap now: back then, they didn't have Autotune, so those pop singers actually had to have some talent.
I appreciated Toumani Diabate and Boubacar Traore and Kodo, but it wears thin, too.
Now that's more like what I'm talking about. If you've explored this far and wide, then I don't have any more advice for you.