"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.
Nah, Google was a thing by the time Napster was around. If you were hip enough to know about one you probably knew about the other. You’d get an idea by figuring out what genre the artist was, reading reviews, just seeing where discussion was taking place. Not by listening to it, you’d have to queue it up to download and wait while hoping your source didn’t go offline before it downloaded. And yes, even at 56k you could load and read text while downloading MP3s, it was just slow.
I dunno, I was active in piracy at this time and many, many more people knew about Napster than Google. Napster was news worthy in 1999; Google was not. Google is much more of a 00s phenomenon. You’ve got 9/11 between the two. Napster happened before all that.
It could be all in how I used it, but I’d herald the beginning of discovery right there with the widespread availability of 5Mbps cable broadband in the US, so early 00s, right there with the rise of Google. Napster is a bit early for that IMO. I understand you could but most people didn’t as 56k speeds really limited discovery by library browsing, not to mention poor tagging / file name etiquette.
By the time DC++ had risen in popularity, around 03-04, this was prime time library browsing piracy times.
Eh, whether or not we agree or disagree, it was fun to recall the early days of my journey. Have a good one.