Most of the discussion and sources of content talk about movies and series.
I’ve been recently looking for psy and techno music, finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold. It’s definitely been a while since I’ve looked for active torrent sites and it feels more barren than ever.
Edit: Thank you all for all that valuable information. The reddit group really wasn’t this helpful and valued making fun over adding real use able knowledge.
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It’s certainly alive and exists.
But access to music is easy and affordable. It’s more inconvenient for me to pirate it than just use a streaming service.
I also listen to a lot of independent artists and rather buy their stuff to support them.
Yup, I buy what I like on Bandcamp.
The only music I pirate is stuff that isn’t on Spotify, namely Nintendo game soundtracks
Expect a cease and desist order
Doug Bowser will be at their doorstep shortly
Knock knock, open up the door, it’s real
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Haha I mean it’s not like I share it with anyone else. I just have it on my Plex server in an enormous video game music playlist I shuffle through when I’m reading or working
I prefer there not being any lag in-between songs, which most streaming services have.
I usually use a streaming service like YouTube (through piped) to find new artists, then use soulseek to download their entire discography.
The problem with streaming is that the companies will eventually figure out new ways to squeeze every penny out of you. The once ‘free’ YouTube is now blocking adblocks, and Spotify requires DRM to be installed for it to function.
For me, piracy isn’t just about convenience or price, it’s mainly about control over the media I have.
The thing is not every popular or moderately popular song is on any streaming site. I’m a fan of 90s and 00s trance music, and there are some notable songs that aren’t available on any of the most popular paid services, or are available only in newer, re-recorded versions or remixes - some of them are available on Spotify, but not all. YouTube Music has such an advantage that you can listen not only to the songs uploaded by record labels, but also to countless additional songs available on YouTube, however most of the time they are in worse quality (AFAIK max audio bit rate in YT videos is 128 kbps). So while streaming services are now affordable and have very extensive audio library, they have some shortcomings that one can only fill with physical media or piracy.
The soulseek network is still alive and well.
I agree, Nicotine+ and Soulseek is the way to get music these days.
And for those saying using streaming services is easy and affordable so they don’t bother, I would remind you, it is… for now.
Look at what has happened time and time again with all these companies and how they just slowly squeeze their users over time or just flat out kill the service entirely. As someone that is really into selfhosting, and prefers to be in control of my data and privacy I would urge you to move away from those services. Setup Airsonic, Funkwhale, or some other streaming music service and control it yourselves.
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.
You can do both - pay for music when it comes from sources like Bandcamp, Qobuz, etc where you get to own the FLAC file. Don’t pay for things like Spotify where the music you’ve “purchased” is not yours to keep.
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.
Funkwhale is federated. I have discovered lots of good stuff on there via other servers. Not algorithmic, but once you find a server that appeals to you, there’s a lot to dig into.
There’s also https://libre.fm and https://listenbrainz.org/ and https://openwhyd.org/
+1 to ListenBrainz. It’s an awesome tool for tracking your listening habits (kinda like Last.fm). Combined with Pano Scrobbler, I can create collage pics of my most listened-to artists or albums of a given time period (per week/month/year). It’s a great service and I want to donate to that project in the future, because I get so much value out of it.
“Guided by AI” I think you mean algorithms programmed according to strict music licensing contracts from the labels that say a service needs to suggest label-preferred “complimentary” artists over actual similar music that you would like based on a collection of characteristics in a given song/band’s sound signature.
You have evidence this is happening on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist?
Richard Stallman wrote a quick page on the shady things Spotify does (3 minute read not counting the linked articles). Although only loosely related to what you asked for. According to the info I found online, Discover Weekly should be safe from the kinds of sponsorships you talk about (the whole article takes about 8-15 minutes to read, but I quoted the important part below).
A representative for Spotify tells Vox that the user experience of Discover Weekly will not change — e.g., Nike can’t buy the playlist for the week and serve everyone a Frank Ocean song — and reiterates, “Discover Weekly is, and will remain, a powerful means of artists winning new fans.
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.
Alive and well is doing some heavy lifting if you consider being a husk of your former glory “alive and well”. Yes you can definitely find stuff there that can’t be found anywhere else, even through conventional means. But it’s certainly not the soulseek of yesterday.
Oh wow! I’ve exclusively streamed for a number of years now, but used to be pretty active on Soulseek (+10 years ago). Totally forgot the name until you mentioned it. Glad to hear it’s still up and running fine.
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. ;)
It’s pretty amazing but I listen to a curated stream of Goth and EDM. I buy what I really like on Bandcamp.
why pirate when bandcamp has everything I want on FLAC for pennies
The album prices are pretty high sometimes and many artists are not on bandcamp
Yeah but fuck those guys.
why pay pennies when you can pay 0
Because I actually, you know, like the artists I like.
so you support them by giving them $0.000000000000001
Most of the proceeds from sales goes directly to the band for bandcamp sales. Roughly 82% apparently: https://bandcamp.com/about
I buy on Bandcamp and pirate through Soulseek (specifically Nicotine+).
I also buy Vinyls.
Torrenting music has been pretty trash for me so I haven’t bothered in ages.
bandcamp
I didn’t know about bandcamp. I’m gonna buy some albums there. The music is drm-free? I think that what bandcamp and itch.io are doing should be the future of the industry.
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.
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.
what exactly is soulseek? is it p2p or download from a server? Is using a VPN recomended?
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.
Is nicotine working good for you? Last time I tried it, it was missing some search results that were instead appearing in soulseek-qt client
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)
Bandcamp is great. Fuck corporate labels who prevent artists from releasing their music privately on the platform. It’s an abhorrent business practice.
This is exactly what I do, music is just too messy to find every song
Since Apple Music / Spotify I don’t find it necessary. Far more likely to pirate TV / movies because they’re spread out across so many different services and require so many different subscriptions.
Yeah except I use Spicetify on windows and some “premium unlocked” APK on android because the ads are (intentionally) annoying as hell
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.
thanks for the suggestion!
Same. I would love for someone to create a real debrid - stremio equivalent for music instead of video.
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 have Spotify through a family plan but I do download backups for when the enshitification happens to them.
I just use lidarr with the deezloader script. Sign up for a month of deezer premium every six months and just download my back log. For $30/yr I always have a relatively up to date, lossless quality, music library backup.
I’ma get hate for this but I’m not pirating out of principle but when I think something it’s to expensive for it’s price. I live in a country with good salaries and have to work less than one hour for one month of endless music. To me that is a good deal but I am aware that it is not to everyone especially those from other countries. I mostly pirate Movies and TV Shows because you would need to pay over 50€/month to get access to all services.
Those are cheap in my country and we don’t have access to high quality service like tidal either
Soulseek is the goto piracy thing for music.
Streaming service ripping is alive and well.
Youtube scrapers like Newpipe and alternative frontend makes listening easy if you aren’t quality obsessed. This has been adequate for my levels of listening.
Some private trackers have massive music collection dumps.
However, I’d say directly supporting artists through storefronts like bandcamp is the best way to go, where it’s available. No DRM, no bullshit, the artist benefits. This, to me, is the best alternative to piracy.
Napster, Deezer, Tidal aren’t terrible offerings either FWIW.
Sorry to ask a dumb question but how do I rip from streaming services? It’s worth buying a subscription for this ability
youtube-dl has the ability to extract audio
And there are similar apps for my streaming services.
I don’t want to link to anything directly, but it’s possible to use ReVanced to get YouTube Music for free.
Would you be able to DM me?
I have people download my files on soulseek/nicotine+ daily. Plus anyone that would pirate music probably already know how to rip it straight from streaming services.
Soulseek is still around? It’s been like 10 years since I’ve used it
I use it daily, they even have a mobile version called Seeker which is pretty nice.
Omg you’re amazing! I’ve been searching for an Android version of soulseek for ages, and somehow never got recommended Seeker. The only app I found was dead by the time I downloaded it.
Awesome, enjoy! I was in the same position and super happy to find it.
Yep, still going strong
As the normies went to streaming it became more gatekept and toxic. I’m mainly familiar with the attitude of trades only or straight up selling tracks (eg groupbuys with kids paying thousands of dollars for some shitty Kanye mumble demo). The game didn’t used to be like that. The days of the blogs with mega/rapid share links are long gone
I mean you got all the stream rippers eg SlavArt which is super nice. Soulseek is still alright but getting taken over by traders. RED/OPS around but you can’t just waltz in and I’d argue they don’t compare to what.cd or even OinK. RuTracker still got stuff going on
But when you’re after actual rare stuff that you can’t just buy or stream it can be real tough nowadays. Scene archives can be nice but very hard to get access and it’s mostly mp3s.
Fuck traders, if you’re on Soulseek do the right thing and blacklist them.
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.)
‘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?’
Will try it, thanks. Seems more civilized.
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.)
Thanks for the tip. That seems like a better punishment.
Soulseek is very much alive, try there. But please try to share your stuff too.
Yes for sure, I am seeder #2 for most of the gold I’ve struck in the past few weeks
Slow downloads. Downloads infinitely queued. No flac available. No thank you.
There’s plenty of flac on soulseek, I actually filter them out of my search results
The one time I searched for something it failed me. That’s not good.
What are you talking about i have tens of gigabytes worth of flacs from slsk
Of course there are flac. But not everything. And some are locked or very slow or just dont start downloading. Its a bad solution. Way better solutions exist
Spotify is very affordable and provides pretty much all music on earth. I’m not interested in jumping through hoops to download songs if I can just conveniently stream them all from one legit service.
Yep its basically like Netflix before it shit the bed.
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.
Still no word on the hifi tier though
We share our spotify account with friends and halve the cost.
Personally, I tend to only pirate music files that I just can’t find anywhere else. For example, audiophile quality 45rpm vinyl rips of albums that might have only been sold in that format once, and for a very limited run. In cases like that, I almost feel a responsibility to maintain a copy because it is something that could very easily disappear from existence.
The guys doing the rips understand that they might own one of maybe a few hundred copies of a certain album, so they rip at audiophile quality and share.
I feel you, I have one of two known sources of obscure Russian albums in FLAC and I’m more than happy to secure its future by sharing.
You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.
Not accessible in my country
VPN?
I know deezer doesnt allow vpns on their site
I don’t think it’s dying at all. Check out private music trackers like https://redacted.ch/index.php or https://interview.orpheus.network/
OiNK -> WHAT.CD -> RED
