Hello! I’m new to piracy. I guess I’m an audiophile, but I hate that word because it makes you sound like a douche. I buy most music on vinyl, but that’s getting expensive, so I’m limiting the amount I buy. Most people either stream (no ownership), switch to cds (they are getting expensive to the point where I’d rather just buy the LP), or buy the FLAC/WAV files (what I want to do, minus the paying of $18.99 per album). Now onto the reason I made this post, what is the best way to pirate high quality WAV/FLAC albums? Again, I’m new to this, so I’m looking for ease of access and safety. Thanks!

It feels like a lot of stuff is unavailable on Usenet, and most of the bias is toward FLAC stuff over MP3s.

News: https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/11/music-piracy-keeps-rising/

I always assumed music piracy was dying out with all the streaming services we have now. But apparently it's actually going up in 2024, with billions of visits to piracy sites.

It also turns out that it's just because people are trying to avoid paying, although that's a big part of it especially with the recent price hikes, it's more on because of more problems with how streaming services are set up that's pushing people back to piracy.

I’m sick and tired of using Amazon music. I’m not going to use Spotify. I WILL NOT pay for YouTube premium shit so I can close my damn phone. Anyway, I want to start pirating stuff, but I think I want to start with music. Any tips?

I started out pirating music when Napster came out, and that has obviously spiraled into every form of media and collectively downloaded 50 Tb of data.

About 10 years ago, i gave up torrenting music and hosting. it just seems like so much work when Spotify and Apple music are so easy and convenient. what are your thoughts on pirating music. is it worth getting back into?

I get annoyed when I hear people encouraging piracy because they hate subscriptions like Netflix, Spotify etc. at no point do those people ever mention the impact on the movie/tv industry or musicians. I’m no fan of Spotify but I guess it’s better than piracy? It seems like they think they’re entitled to music and art for free. Some even say culture should be free for all, which I’m divided on. Obviously I’m not a musician for the money lol but the mentality and entitlement of free art/music annoys me.

Would like to know what you guys use/recommend when it comes to downloading music. Preferably, it would fullfil the following requirements:

- Ability to download Lossless files (.flac) but .mp3 files too.
- Full Metadata of songs (Album cover, album name, track number, etc.)
- Ability to import songs from Spotify/identify liked all liked songs from Spotify.
- (Optional) have integrated lyrics, like Spotify.

I feel like I'm missing something else, but can't quite put my finger on it. Anyway, please enlighten me dear booty lovers. What is da waey?

Title says it all. I was using vanced for two years until it died for good a week ago. Tried downloading the latest versions but it seemed sketchy, got some random ads while using my phone.

I used to use mediahuman to convert YouTube Music to mp3 but often noticed that the songs weren't great quality and some were louder than others. So i switched to a site called, free-mp3-download.net which might seem like some kind of suspicious site, but actually worked great and i was able to download songs at 320kbps without any problems. But somehow that site is having problems today and i hope its only temporary down.

Are there any easy or great ways to pirate music at 320 kbps and just high quality in general?

I use SnapTube to download music/videos from YouTube and I use the website ForHub.iO to download music from SoundCloud, and I've never missed any service that a paid app could offer to do the same thing. Is it piracy? Sure! Long live piracy! But I'd like to know if you would give up paying for a service to do the same thing and what the real advantages of using a paid service are.

This post got deleted on another subreddit. Hopefully it will be allowed here.

Until recently, I've always used streaming services like Spotify for my music needs, until I heard one of my favourite artists explain in an interview that payouts from streaming services represent the tiniest portion of their income stream. I started looking into it more, and found out that, on average, artists only get paid a fraction of a cent for each stream. This means the vast majority of the money I spend on music streaming is going straight to Spotify's pocket.

In light of this discovery, I stopped paying for Spotify and started downloading music. Artists who I'm not actively listening to will never earn more than a cent or two from me anyway, so me downloading their music isn't actually hurting them financially. Meanwhile, I started purchasing albums of my favourite artists on Qobuz. I also buy their merch and attend their concerts. These actions (even if we exclude buying albums, since this post is about piracy) allow them to earn substantially more than what they'd make from me streaming their music on Spotify.

Obviously, there are still good reasons to use a streaming service. They are much more convenient than managing a local music library, and allow you to discover new songs that you otherwise would not be exposed to. But from a moral standpoint, I'm now of the opinion that there's nothing wrong with pirating music, if streaming is the alternative.

At this point I will address a few points raised by members of the other subreddit before that post was deleted.

• Piracy is illegal therefore it's wrong. I don't believe that the law always dictates what's right or wrong. There are plenty of things that are illegal in some places but I consider morally right (e.g. abortion, weed, same sex marriage). Besides, it's completely legal where I live to download pirated content for personal use.

• I'm still depriving artists of an algorithmic advantage. That might be true for some people, but I downloaded the full history of my Spotify account in order to make an informed decision on whether to continue my subscription or not. Turns out I almost exclusively listen to 3 artists (they are the ones I purchase albums from), and I've only listened to my 4th place artists 80 times in the last 5 years. I'm not convinced that makes any difference whatsoever for the artist, both financially and algorithmically.

• I haven't addressed how it's morally right. Perhaps I should have been more clear. I believe that funding the profits of big corporations like Apple and Spotify is a negative for both the artist and the user. Everyone is better off if we stop paying for music streaming. Obviously, in an ideal world I'll pay for every music in my library, but that's simply not going to happen. Between streaming every music I ever listen to and buying some while pirating others, I choose latter. Feel free to disagree, but I believe that is the better choice.

So unfortunately I've also been affected by the spotify apk failure, now I can't listen to music, cause I don't really have the money to spend on spotify premium. So I've decided to go back to the roots ams just download all my music and listen offline, now I would like to get you Opinions on what are the best free or one time pay apps and programs for music. Best case scenario would be that I also can similar to spotify change the output device from PC to mobile, Thanks in advance.

Used to torrent all kinds of music and movies but it's been a while. I used to use pirate bay with bittorrent, is that still a thing? What has changed?

I know that this topic must have been asked before as well, but I am genuinely confused. Where do I get high quality music from? (preferably in FLAC). Ripping the audio straight from YouTube or Spotify gives low bitrate mp3 which sounds like I am listening to music from a tin can. I tried using Soulseek and yes I was able to find some titles, it takes time to find exactly the song I want to. Where are you people getting high quality FLACs from?

we have so many places to listen to hella high quality music for free, like youtube, soundcloud, musi etc. and u can easily take the link and download the song as a mp3

I've recently started to burn CDs for my stereo. To get the files I use VLC media player and I download the song from YouTube, but it requires a lot of steps and I have to do it manually for every video. Is there a more efficient way I don't know about? Especially for downloading an entire Album, I know there are entire albums on yt but they are a single long file so I can't select the track from my stereo

I need a better method of acquiring music. I'm old now and I'm embarrassed to admit my rudimentary technique. I've been using a youtube to mp3 converter online, and then using software on my computer to convert mp3 to m4a so I can play it on itunes and apple. But I find that when I play the music with headphones, I hear little high frequency glitches in the song that weren't there in the first version. I know this is an encoding problem related to my technique, but I don't know how to avoid it.

I'm basically poor and all my technology is old, hence m4a and why I'm going to such great lengths to rip music in the first place. Also I need to be able to convert to different extensions without having to re-purchase music because I have different kinds of devices.

How can I do things differently? Thanks in advice, fellow sailors.

EDIT: Windows user but I still use an ipod + ipad.