The ads urge listeners to “join the mission to protect America” by becoming U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, but users of the music streaming giant have taken to social media and Spotify’s website to complain, and announce their withdrawal from the audio platform.

  • girlthing@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 days ago

    I only use Spotify to get song/album URLs (web client search w/o login), which I then pass to spotdl to download them off YouTube. Now I have all the music I could ever want, offline and without ads.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Holy shit what a find. I knew stuff like this existed, but I never knew I could install it in one command and download dozens of songs with one more. WOW. Thank you kind stranger!

    • BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      How much storage space do you need for your entire downloaded music library, that’s the only concern I have about downloading music

      • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 days ago

        Very much depends. I host the digital music collection for my entire family (6 people) all with very different tastes in music and very large music collections. According to Jellystat, I’m hosting roughly 52,000 tracks taking up just shy of 2 TB. I used to keep track of how many albums I had but I’ve long since lost track.

        On average, a CD ripped to FLAC seems to run around 300MB. MP3 or OGG would generally be smaller (but with quality loss), dependent on the bitrate, call it 50MB - 200MB.

        In short, a person hosting a normal sized personal music collection is unlikely to run into space issues.

      • girlthing@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 days ago

        Depends on how much music you want. I have about 3500 songs at the highest quality free YouTube will let me download songs at, and that comes to around 15GB.

      • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca
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        3 days ago

        it’s not 2008 anymore. audio file storage space is not a concern, we have larger storage drives now

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Followup – do you know if I should use my VPN when doing this? I have been doing that for torrents for a while, but I wasn’t sure if Spotify, YouTube, or anyone else will reach out with cease and desists like has happened to me with torrents in the past

      Also now I’m wondering if the URLs on Spotify identify me if I’m logged in (I have a bunch of music saved in playlists and libraries but I cancelled my subscription so it’s in free mode)

      • girlthing@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 days ago

        but I wasn’t sure if Spotify, YouTube, or anyone else will reach out with cease and desists like has happened to me with torrents in the past

        Right now Google is more focused on breaking the library that powers downloading from YouTube (yt-dlp). They haven’t succeeded yet, but that’s definitely an easier path for them than prosecuting piracy.

        I doubt Spotify will try to punish you for this since the content isn’t actually being stolen from them directly.