"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.
Spotify was OK back when I used it after Google Music died. YouTube Music’s algorithm sucked so I used Spotify for about a year. Then I installed Plex for movies and TV but also found it was also great at streaming music. PlexAmp gives me access to a good suggestion algorithm. I made the decision to give them my $$ instead. Now with lidarr+scripts I can have any music I want with almost zero effort. Plus, as the OP said, I get the fun little side hobby of music curation.
I’m curious about where you find your music. When I looked into an indexer for music ~3 years ago, it was slim pickings. I recently found that there a method to download from Spotify, but haven’t had a chance to try it out
Not sure if you mean find recommendations of new stuff to listen to, or the download source? Recommendations from Last.fm Download source is currently Deezer. Lidarr+ scripts has a bit of a learning curve https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts
Man piracy is so complex nowadays with this script and Plex stuff, all I know is downloading .flac of albums from rutracker haha no docker container home server required