Expect a cease and desist order

You’re not wrong and I’m happy that piracy communities exist in spaces where access is easily cheap and accessible if only for the days that those industries get greedier. But for now, I’m happy to pay when it’s affordable and easy to access.

I half agree with what Gabe Newell said in regards to piracy being a service issue and not about price. I think it largely is a service issue. Access is the greater problem. Price is secondary as long as it’s somewhat reasonable. I don’t pirate video games because I can get them reasonably, but he is a smidge wrong insofar as I don’t buy the outrageously expensive games. Steam’s major success is having good sales that keep me away from pirating because the possibility of games I want going on discount at some point is realistic. It’s telling that the only time I did dabble in video game piracy was to relive my childhood memories of Nazi Zombies from the Call of Duty video games. I dabbled in it then because Activision is selling their decades old games for outrageous prices considering their age and their “sales” are weak considering the already overinflated price. I refuse to pay for that. And so I sailed the high seas.

The music industry is still affordable and accessible, so I don’t feel that pressure at all. Back when Limewire was around the pressure was there partially because I was a kid and didn’t have much money and hunting down CDs I wanted for the obscure music I liked was challenging. It was mostly an accessibility issue that Spotify fixed. If their prices move beyond my means then that relationship will no longer benefit me and the sails will raise once more.

Can’t. I’m addicted to the algorithms. Music discovery guided by AI is too much fun. If I was only using streaming services to listen to music I already know or the new albums from artists I already like them I’d be with you, but now I’m hooked on finding new stuff.

If you close your eyes, you can metaphorically hear the tides changing on the music streaming industry. The fall of Netflix is such a stark reminder of how fast these convenient services can morph into user hostile experiences.

Plus, there is the added philosophical discussion about what it means to allow a centralized corporate media conglomerate to curate your music for you. I’d imagine that their insentivisation structure over what should be heard is different than yours.

For serious though, I hypothesize that your library/playlist data (xml, maybe? somewhere? I’m just starting the journey of offloading.) is more valuable to users than the music itself. Next step is figuring out how to export Spotify’s data.

Soulseak was king for screamo and emo rock in the mid 00s

Go on there and share some of your stuff, if you want. We’ll be glad if people help keep the network alive. ;)

Yeah but fuck those guys.

Because I actually, you know, like the artists I like.

Yes, the music there is drm free. Keep in mind it’s not ALL music. It’s mostly music from independent artists. But they are the ones that need the most support. So go all in!

Bandcamp is pretty great. I usually stream from their app but you can download music you buy in a bunch of formats.

I like their writeups they do sometimes (like a “best doom metal from Texas” deep dive)

They do Bandcamp Fridays sometimes where they yield their share of the sale to the artists.

I’ve also had artists write back a few times when I put a comment in the box when buying stuff. Most notably an invite to a show they were playing once.

They did get bought by epic though so they’re not indie anymore. A bummer. But epic hasn’t shit it up yet so far as I know.

IMO, Bandcamp is one of the best places to go if you actually want to support artists. Spotify and other streaming options tend to be the worst.

Yup that’s exactly why it has flourished in the past decade or so

I bought music from several artists on Bandcamp and could not download some of it 12 months later. Artist unresponsive, Bandcamp support unwilling to help. And now Tencent has it’s tendrils in the company so expect it to get worse.

Soulseek is p2p. I prefer to use a VPN but it is not necessary. What is necessary is port forwarding if you want to share your own files. You can either set that up in your router, or through your VPN if you’re using one (it must be a VPN that supports port forwarding)

its p2p download from other users, if you want to share your library you should probably use a VPN. You dont have to share your library but its kind of frowned upon to not do it.

It’s p2p, and the protocol is not very secure. You should probably use a VPN, yes. The content shared is really good, even if it has slowly decreased along the years. Just be selective about who you tell about slsk to help keep it under the radar, please. First rule of the blue bird is : don’t speak of the blue bird.

Nicotine is working fine for me. Although I’ll have to check out soulseek-qt myself to see if there is any difference in search results Up until now, I haven’t had problems finding anything unless it was something that was released within the week (usually singles)(which I just rip from youtube)

I’d recommend trying out XManager so you don’t have to download Spotify apks from shady websites. I don’t use Spotify so I don’t know how often it updates, but I’ve heard good things about it.

I am working on just the thing! Hopefully will manage to have some sort of music suggestion embedded into it as well without the need of Spotify or whatever algorithm people use. Currently working on making it accessible for people to export their libraries from whatever streaming service they’re using.

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I use it daily, they even have a mobile version called Seeker which is pretty nice.

Yep, still going strong

Traders are hardly just on Soulseek. Most probably aren’t since it’s so accessible. Most of the traders I’ve seen on Soulseek anyways are scammers who are just sharing RED repositories. Or they’re on dc++ hubs where you can’t have locked files anyways

The best thing good users can do is remain on the client for the long term, ensuring traders remain a small minority. The next best thing they can do is PM traders regularly with requests to share. Make their sessions a pain in the butt due to the private chat alert going off routinely. ‘Hey trader, please open up to non-buddies temporarily, even at a crippled speed. I’d like two items from you. You know Soulseek is a sharing platform, right?’ Some may realise the ridiculousness of their position and co-operate.

Don’t stoop to their level by blacklisting, either. They will take that as endorsement of their behaviour. (Set 20kb/s down if it makes you feel better.)

There’s plenty of flac on soulseek, I actually filter them out of my search results

youtube-dl has the ability to extract audio

I don’t want to link to anything directly, but it’s possible to use ReVanced to get YouTube Music for free.

The state of video streaming is hardly Netflix’s fault. When every channel starts a subscription service and pulls it’s content from the others everyone loses.

Music streaming on the other hand is a complete experience on every service. It’s kind of a miracle tbh.

VPN?