Forget spaceships; I just want my music(jeffgeerling.com) |
Forget spaceships; I just want my music(jeffgeerling.com) |
- Play on VLC.
Not complicated.
My guy, this has been solved for about 25 years.
Put on Plex/Jellyfin/Subsonic
Play in car
You can download all these from torrent trackers.
Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?
People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available. If I don't want to sell you something, then I'd entertain the argument that downloading it anyway is in some sense immoral or unethical.
But in your situation, you've already fucking bought it! It's as if you placed a pick-up order at the bookstore, showed up to pick up your books, and they told you to eat shit. In which case, acquiring it through other means is completely acceptable, morally and ethically.
But this gets complicated. I wanted to post a song from a somewhat obscure '80s band on my website and so tracked them down and asked for permission.
One of them (the songwriter) responded to say that the band has never had the rights to the music on that album and, in fact, they don't even have a recording of it themselves. In his words "as far as I'm concerned, you can do whatever you want with that stuff". I posted the song and sent him a high-quality copy of the album it came from.
I would say another key distinction is between "don't want to sell/can't sell" vs "don't want you to buy". In the former it may be because the owner does not want to go through the trouble of selling it or is no longer around to sell it. I know some people have given up because the effort to deal with "trolls" (particularly DMCA and fakes) has either turned their passion into a nightmare or it's not really their passion anymore and they don't want to deal with it.
To me, this is the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater in the whole NFT debacle.
Yes, yes just about the entire NFT thing was just the obvious financial scams you can’t pull off in the real economy anymore. But the idea of an independent way to show your receipts? I think that’s got some real value.
So you bought access to video X. Maybe on PlayStation (sorry). Maybe through a streaming service. Why does it matter how you get the bits that constitute video X? Why does it matter what software you use to consume those bits?
Unfortunately the answer is that IP rights treat the medium and the message as different things. You need that, to some extent, to encourage folks to package things well (eg 4k remaster an older movie). But what if we fixed that?
I want to live in a world where it’s obvious that I have a legal right to watch the Infinity Saga Supercut [0] when I have an active Disney+ subscription. And when I have the DVD of all the movies. And when I have a mix of BlueRay, dvd, digital purchases, movie channels, etc.
It should also be obviously ok for me to have the Infinity Saga stored locally, without DRM, and cached on a couple iPads. And if Infinity Saga is uploaded to YouTube, I should get to watch it with reduced or no ads.
[0] https://www.firstshowing.net/2021/the-infinity-saga-a-50-hou...
If I Johnny writer am like "Ok when I was 15 I thought that many consecutive slurs was funny, but now the alt-right is rallying around what was supposed to be satire, so I want it off the market" that's kind of reasonable. If James Writerson has classics that are kind of out of fashion and got converted to ebooks by Big Publisher™ which was then bought by Bigger Publisher™ who decides it's not worth the money to keep the classics on the market (but also refuses to release them back to the estate of James Writerson or to the general public), that's less reasonable.
https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader
I have a windows oriented “get past setup pain points” tutorial here: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader/issues/21
For generating a cookie file, I suggest just using https://github.com/hrdl-github/cookies-txt I should really write up a full Linux and windows setup guide and submit it.
Likewise, people who use bandcamp are likely to use GOG, which also has purchase archiving tools available on GitHub. I’ve used https://github.com/Kalanyr/gogrepoc for a long time, but there are actually multiple projects now.
My daughter, doing a journalism course assignment, once asked Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span (not a _huge_ artist, but reasonably well known towards the end of last century) about this. Maddy's comment was basically the same. She'd rather you bought something legally, but if it's not available (some of their back catalogue had disappeared) then Maddy thought it was fine to 'pirate' it.
This is were you went wrong.
That being said, when something is not sold anymore, I'd say it's fair game to torrent it or upload it wherever.
Always download the flac of the music you purchase on Bandcamp. Then your purchases won't ever go away.
RCA Lyra protected music? Gone.
Paid $10 to Harvey Danger for 'Little by Little' and hey, I can still get it. That's a surprise.
For context - we're a Polish family living in the UK(like 2 million other Polish people). We have a small child who loves Disney films, and because he is normally exposed to English(and speaks it fluently) I'd like him to at least watch cartoons in Polish. But Disney region locks most(not all, but majority) of Polish localisation to Poland only. When we visit Poland I can watch all Disney content in Polish on my UK account without any issue - but when we're in the UK these localisation options disappear. So Disney clearly has those options but chooses not to offer them.
So right now, at least we can still buy DVDs or have those shipped over. But it's clear that Disney wants to stop distribution of physical media - as they've already done in some regions.
What then for multilingual families? Just "suck it up" and don't have access to content in my language, because I don't happen to currently live in Poland?
The time spent re-ripping my CD collection to FLAC, my DVD collection to MKV, etc, has been well spent. I can rapidly enough transcode from that to "Whatever I happen to need for where I'm listening to it," and our vehicles have quite the range of local music and audiobook content for road trips that doesn't rely on streaming anything.
You can get CDs for (usually) very little on eBay, same for DVDs, and I don't have to worry about the pissing matches between a corporate conglomerate that views me as "a wallet with eyeballs" and another one that views me as "eyeballs with a wallet" getting in the way.
Meanwhile, vinyl sales continue to skyrocket, and more and more people are interested in records, growing collections, refurbishing old equipment (both to produce and play records), etc. I expect these are rather heavily correlated, because in 50 years from now, nobody is going to be able to play any of the streaming "content" that flows around. "This is my grandparents favorite Spotify playlist" won't be a thing, but you can certainly go cruising through old photo albums, old record collections, etc.
I remain optimistic that we're in the starting phases of a rejection of the online [handwaves at everything digital consumer tech], and it's going to be aided greatly by stuff exactly like this. Profits and corporate pissing matches over "actually doing something people want to pay money for."
Google and Disney both seem to be demonstrating that once people lose trust in you, it's basically impossible to get it back. Nobody trusts a new Google product will last more than a year or two, which leads to it getting killed off for lack of use, and Disney/Pixar seem to have forgotten that the purpose of the entertainment industry is to "entertain the people who might want to see your movie." Other studios are doing fine, so there's clearly a demand, but Disney has been dropping an impressive string of box office bombs lately, because a lot of people no longer trust them.
If I'm going to spend my money on music, I'm going to spend it on music in a form that isn't reliant on the ongoing operation of some service somewhere. I want to add it to my collection so I can actually listen to it anytime and anywhere.
I pre-ordered my new Peter Gabriel I/0 album two months ago on CD and enjoyed the anticipation of waiting. I steadfastly avoided his digital pre-releases. I was not disappointed! It a great album and a beautiful sonic experience.
I took a couple of my favorite tracks and mixed it into my Peter Gabriel minidisc mix-tape. I have numerous portable players to choose from in my collection to listen on the go including a few beautifully designed personal CD players.
I travel internationally frequently and I’ve noticed TSA occasionally doesn’t know what a CD player is. At least the younger agents.
Such an old system (written in Perl), but still runs great!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_Media_Server https://github.com/Logitech/slimserver https://hub.docker.com/r/lmscommunity/logitechmediaserver
I went to set the alarm on my Squeezebox Boom one night and the time picker widget was completely broken. By the next week they'd pushed out an update to fix it.
That kind of dedication in a developer is fantastic to see.
This is the kind of hardware I love. Stable over time, no dependencies. I moved all my music to squeezebox system in 2004 and everything works wonderfully today.
With how warm it was in standby I bet it cost more money in power bills than itself don'tcha know.
Granted, not always useful if what you want is from major labels, but still, keep in mind that there are options.
The difference with media today is that the control often stays in the hands of another party, often not the rights holder. I can accept that knowing that everything I buy I am just renting.
The thing that scares me is how a third party can make something effectively impossible to discover. In this generation that's done for profit. But you can imagine where that will lead when what everyone sees is curated in a way they aren't aware of.
To me, the notion that a transferrable market-monopoly ownership of intellectual rights to a creative work was ever about helping creators is the kind of ridiculous farce that people like economists can get away with because we've been trained to believe that fancy experts saying counterintuitive things about "incentives" must know something we don't, but even if you believe intellectual property has value, it is not of value for massive corporations to sit on a chokepoint between human beings and their access to their own cultural touchstones
Imagine having every book ever written, for free, all your life.
Imagine authors and inventors being compensated twice what they are usually paid in the USA, while the corporate lawyers panhandle.
I know the lawyers would end up as party higher-ups still screwing us, but I can dream.
I'm genuinely curious.
I've avoided iTunes and its descendants due to all of the horror stories about destroyed music libraries and music "helpfully" replaced in error. Similarly, I haven't signed up for any streaming music since I have an el-cheapo plan and these services sound like they tell you what to listen to.
I think having somewhat weird tastes in music and being particular about it has some overlap with having to seek technical solutions which are also not-mainsteam. I am reminded of Pictures for Sad Children, wherein a character's musical preference is "Whatever is on the radio, played a reasonable volume." and realize I am at the other end of that spectrum.
For fixing up metadata of your existing collection there is Picard.
At least on Windows (where iTunes currently still survives in its original form) and with no Apple Music or iTunes Match or whatever subscription to muddle things up, and with the option to let it manage the folder structure of my music library turned off I can't complain about it, though. It does what it's supposed to do and doesn't cause any problems.
Although I mostly keep using it for historical reasons, because I used to have an iPod, and when that got replaced by an Android phone, at that time the best solution for syncing music to it was to keep using iTunes together with some third party app which was able to not just sync the music, but also play counts and ratings, too.
"Please let me have the thing I want and reasonably should have"
to an open
"Eff it, the tech is here, I'm just taking copies now and you should too."
(not that I ought to support that sort of thing, since I am a lawyer and we have promulgated standards of professional behavior I shall tell all of you that that second thing is bad, very bad.)
I'm passionate about media ownership. When people question what I'm doing, wonder why anybody would want CDs, or tell me I should just give up, I think about all the transient services and missing media. I'm in this for the long haul, and I'm not going to give up. Media ownership means something, and I'm fighting to make it a reality.
So well done, giving your live music away for free. Made you some money, and made me feel like we were doing it right for a change.
Radio broadcast becomes popular in 1920-1930. While records playing speed standardizes in the late 1920s. Say Wikipedia.The vinyl single and LP are later but you easily buy records long before vinyl. If anything, I don't know that there were paying streaming formats in early radio.
There was probably quite a bit of content that was played live on the radio - and not available as recordings. And it would have been pretty hardcore to make your own recording of the stream.
For a while my ancient CD collection and healthy ecosystem of local used vinyl / CD stores had us in a nice routine in conjunction with youtube-dl and my posse of old Sony voice memo usb mp3 players.
Then youtube-dl wasn't a thing anymore (maybe it is again?)...
Then we had to get a new car (a Tacoma)...
No CD player, no aux cable.
I had really bad early experiences with apple music and Spotify not having stuff I wanted. Unclear artist support reputations also (Im no expert there). But it all had heavy Enshittification vibes early on IMHO.
Anyway somehow in my exhausted dad mental state I've concluded that buying albums on iTunes like a maniac is at least worth a try before augmenting my car to have an aux cable and / or peripheral CD player. I held off buying albums on iTunes literally until 2 months ago. Very strange but maybe working.
Anyway curious what other folks are doing as far as listening to music. This article was spot on but I needed a Solutions section...
Why spend any extra time, money, or energy making new products or services when you can instead make more money doing nothing but using your outsized political and economic power to coerce and extort consumers instead.
At this point it's impossible to see how any new merger or acquisition isn't just another step in the wrong direction, handing over yet more power to a small few.
At what point is a company too large to effectively serve the public interest? How can we turn this process around and redistribute the economic power of these gigantic corporations?
> But they're not just removing them from the store.
> They're removing them from people's libraries.
That's called fraud. Why in the world are we not prosecuting it?
How have purchases influenced copyright laws being pushed again and again as Disney demands ?
How have purchases changed improved working conditions? Biodiversity ? The climate ?
We can't buy a better future, because there'll always be someone richer than us. We need to build it directly and ban the illusion that is the market
Disintermediation killed the mom and pop music stores, streaming outright killed physical media. Kids starting university don't understand the concept of a file system; documents just live in the docs app, right?
Maybe we end up in a situation where there's no escape because the median user is held hostage by the lack of knowledge how the internet should have been.
Over the last 3 to 4 years though more and more of my music living in the cloud has gotten corrupted, to the point that something like 1 in 10 songs is unlistenable. The source material in my main library still plays fine, nothing wrong with it, but play it on any other device it pops and skips.
Doing some googling, I don't seem to be alone in this. It's honestly infuriating and has me potentially searching for some other service.
you know, my default stance is pirating is the way. i don't give a shit who "owns" the media. if it's in my harddisk, it should not go away unless I delete it or the system (fs / hw / what have you) is kill. good thing I don't enjoy entertainment like movies or music. but in the small chance I like it, I'd go to the store, get the disk, rip it or just torrent it.
but bro! that's immoral and you will suffer in hell!
nah bro, we're already in hell.
bro! them popos will catch your ass and put you in jail!
nah bro, if they don't know, it's not illegal.
Didn't realize Sony owned Discovery, oh wait they don't. So it's actually Discovery who's licensing caused Sony to be legally obligated to remove the shows.
Sucks if you bought it but yeah just like the games in your Steam library you never actually owned it, you merely licensed it.
They could have said, "we'll pay $0.XXX per stream" and media companies would have said, "yay, more money for old crap we don't care about any more" and that would have been that.
But because they didn't make it irrevocable, companies have been rug pulling customers ever since
But on the other hand......it's Disney. They should be able to consolidate, buy those rights back, and distribute all localizations they have globally.
raising bi-lingual kids is much easier when you can give them second language media, and it doesn't seem like it would be an expensive flag for Disney to flip...
might even be an opportunity to rebrand themselves as educational...
Your optimism is unfounded. Gen Z thinks it's cool to own an album or two, but they're not building collections. Scrap booking is popular right now, but it's not quite the same thing as photo albums. Everything is ephemeral and by and large they're just fine with that.
That's a good direction to see movement in. They're not doing "online scrapbooks" or something. And given the long standing records of "What you said 15 years ago online is used to ruin you today," ephemeral, or "not online in the first place," makes a lot of sense.
I'm certainly glad my entire school experience wasn't logged in great detail...
It remains to be seen once they enter the job market, and despite the cultural perspective inevitably many do succeed, and start making money.
I wouldn't be surprised if they absolutely do focus more on physical media. They are rejecting Instagram look-obsessive culture, and look fondly at what we did in the 2000s when every Party meant a 50-photo Facebook Photo dump, 49 of which would never be "good enough" to make it to Instagram these days.
Today.
Young people being fine with that when they are still in flux is not a new thing. A 21-year-old being nostalgic is almost the basis for a comedy sketch more than a serious concern. I'm not yet convinced they've broken any human patterns when they're still fitting fairly comfortably into the existing patterns on that. If anything I'd bet they're going to discover a larger desire for a foundation than anyone else because the "default" ones have been ripped away and they can't just sort of settle into an existing one easily.
The second sale was just a couple months ago, and while you can still buy music and download it, it's not true that "nothing has changed" since then. There have been quite a lot of changes, just not on that one front. And it's only been two months, so it's way too early to conclude that Songtradr won't gut it more thoroughly.
Not much changed during the time Epic owned Bandcamp, sure, but that's because Epic only bought it in order to gain standing for their lawsuits with Apple. It didn't fit into their business strategy otherwise, so they had no need to mess with it - they literally just needed it to be a legal subsidiary as a pawn for an unrelated legal battle. The same is not true with Songtradr, which has its own motives and objectives that relate to Bandcamp's actual operations and business.
I agree, the FLAC downloads are a major perk of it, and I'll happily buy music there. But I wouldn't trust it to be around long term at this point. It's too consumer-friendly to exist long term in this modern world we live in. :(
It got sold. Nothing changed. And again, you own the music, if it stops existing that sucks, but only for the future, everything you bought, you still have.
And fwiw, I don't think anything for Bandcamp will change.
And occasionally you can find one of their TLDs just by doing a search on DDG or Brave.
yt-dlp is definitely a thing: <https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp>
Plug it into a 12v socket (cigarette lighter socket) and plug the audio cable into the headphones jack. Tune the radio to the set frequency. Bob's your uncle.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=fm+transmitter+for+car&crid=XYUJ3...
In cases like this, a creator puts their own music on a service like Amuse. They or that service (acting as their "publisher") removed it, which removes Apple's right to stream it.
Apple didn't take away this guy's Ladybug Music.
The later half of the post is about Sony's deal with Paramount ending, resulting in paid content being revoked from Playstation consoles.
Whether Sony refused to pay the previously-agreed upon rate, or Paramount decided to unreasonably increase what Sony was paying, we may never know, but both of those are definitely large enough for the commenter's remark to be relevant.
I use the term "maxium tribe size" to describe the human capability (or incapability) of extending compassion and understanding to a group. Companies don't fail. People fail within companies. People fail other people and hide behind "limited liability" and the sham that is corporate personhood.
Every person has a different MaxT. You may not feel the pain of violating this constraint yourself, but lots of people under you will suffer. You may actually feel GREAT, look at all the respect I have gained! I can make things happen, people listen to me... or now I can just ignore them...
You don't care because you are blinded by success.
Money and power are the worst poisons this world offers. It turns otherwise intelligent and caring people into awful piles of human effluence. It is IMPOSSIBLE to gain sufficient power to drive a company and not lose your sense of humanity. The idea that you will not violate your maximum tribe size in this exercise is insulting. You will quickly be insulated from the consequences of your actions, and no matter how depraved your behavior there will be a line of people congratulating and cheering you on because they desperately want to be the next person in line to enjoy the ride you are on.
The people driving enshittification are not human. They may share our genes but they are not part of our society or species anymore.
It's about ~150 with some variance between individuals.
Doctorow's word "Enshittification" (which, amazingly, has a rather filled in Wikipedia page now - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification ) captures it quite well.
"Licensed" is a made up word. Did I buy it? It's mine. Did I rent it? It's no longer mine after the rental period is over. End of story.
Being able to articulate what exactly you are allowed to do with something you buy is a useful legal fiction, much like property rights, contracts, and all of the other useful legal fictions we enforce on the world.
If you're lied to about a "sale" and it's really just a shitty rental, we have a different word for that: FRAUD.
And the action that Sony hacked devices and removed said content? It mirrors the individual form of this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38614624 ), which is "horribly illegal". I argue it pales in comparison to Sony's actions.
Sure. But who enforces that receipt? Who still hosts the data? The people who purchased those things on Playstation have the receipts, there's no confusion about that - it's just that a different agreement made prior to purchase between two other parties means you can't watch that stuff anymore.
Putting the receipts on the blockchain or whatever doesn't solve this problem at all.
Oh, there's ways. In the 90s, there was a rental scheme with sealed discs that would degrade in air to become unusable within a week. (At least that was upfront, if wasteful). I've had one at least CD rot from the inside, and it's a major issue for LaserDiscs. Careful material science could make this the norm.
But people would probably be less likely to push the button, so I guess it's better to lie to customers about what they're paying for.
igg-games.com
eztv.re
1337x.tw
sci-hub.se
libgen.rs
torrentfreak.com
opensubtitles.org
nyaa.si
So is thepiratebay.org .
Search using yandex.com they dont filter torrents like scroogle or bingbong
Pirate libraries are this generation's libraries.
Brought to you by DaShareZone!
Perhaps you plan on taking a break for a couple of years and then sell the item again?
Just because someone else really wants your item, does not automatically give them the right to access it or make it available to others, if you as the rights holder disagree with that.
There's little I can imagine that would warrant a third party to just go ahead and access/use the item of the rights holder the way they would like, just based on some assumption.
The use of the phrase "their creations" led to to think that the people being discussed here were the artists, not the rightsholders. Only the artists are the creators.
My argument is that this is complex because the system of legal rights is complex. The people that you think have them are often not the artists. I'm not actually seeing how you have argued against this -- have I misunderstood what you're saying?
Side note: I used to co-run a small electronic record label, and almost all of the artists who we released music by were just ourselves (with a few exceptions made for close friends, who retained all rights to their music). Given our small size and low profile, it was shocking to see how quickly some of our releases were pirated. Sometimes albums would hit soulseek after we had only shipped out the first 30 or so CDs (and no MP3s). We weren't in it for the money... it was just a side-activity while we were still in school, and any money made was just funneled back into the label so we could release more music, so fortunately the piracy didn't affect us much as far as we cared. But it was still incredibly surprising.
There's no way to get these things perfectly, but I also want to add that I don't consider it ethical to pirate things made by indie creators, or books (with the exception of textbooks), and that I'm probably unusually prone to outright buying new books or indie games or legal first-party mp3s of music, because I consider it a bit of a duty to support media that I appreciate or want to see more of.
At the end of the day, I think I do more to contribute to creators I appreciate than the average consumer, but I don't lose much sleep when I literally cannot access an old classic at a reasonable price and I flip a coin between "stealing it" or just doing something else. Nobody was going to get my money either way, and I only have so much patience and willingness to try to do things "the right way" before I decide they've made it unreasonably expensive or complicated on purpose and screw 'em.
Only if you downloaded the mp3s/flacs, and also backed them up.
Told stories.
And what is TikTok and Instagram at the end of the day? The modern means for telling stories.
The 20th century was an aberration of human history. We don’t need to cling to it.
The 20th century is indeed an abberation; the 21st a bigger one.
If so, I would argue those are cultural stories.
I was thinking more along the lines of family stories, personal stories, friends stories and things like that.
If not, then what is a stable story?
In the human lifespan terms, our digital stuff is a lot more stupidly temporary than it has any good reason to be, and physical media (especially in the realm of music) has rather outlasted it.
Records (vinyl) from 60 years ago still play perfectly fine with a cleaning, and CDs are holding up quite well too in general. Because my ability to play a record from the 1960s or 1970s is not dependent on the company that created it still being around, and being willing to license it to the company that delivers it for me to play it, at favorable contract terms, etc, etc, etc.
I get paying to support artists and stay on the right side of the law/ethics.
I get downloading a copy of something without paying for a license because it's easier/unavailable to purchase/want to check it out first/it's free!!
But why pay for a bootleg copy?
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/2412fb/the_web...
https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-and-mpaa-report-notorious-pira...
The gist seems that buying stuff there may be legal if you are Ukrainian or are actually in Ukraine, and quite probably isn't if you are anywhere else.
The RIAA certainly considers them shipless pirates. You are probably paying criminals, and almost certainly are not paying artists.
1: There seem to be a bunch of them, which smells a bit like a coordinated effort.
I just think it might be better to not support sites like that and instead torrent directly for free. No need to sealion.
I'm lost. What do seals have to do with this? Is this a typo, or a turn of phrase I've never seen?
I was not endorsing anything. My intent was to tell an interesting anecdote that illustrated the complexity of rights. Sorry for the confusion.
My personal attitude (not endorsing it, though!) is that the artists are the only people who really count. That's why I contacted them for permission. Beyond the artists, everything is just legalisms and how seriously to take their desires is a legal consideration, not an ethical one. My anecdote does indicate this in action pretty clearly, but it conflates that attitude with the main point I was making (that this stuff isn't simple).
Why would the artists be the only people who really count, when they made an agreement to let the someone else handle the selling? Doesn't that by default mean that what the artist _wanted_ was to let someone else handle the selling?
If you want more proof, just look at mp3caprice.com itself. Where is the usual legal stuff like the procedure for reporting claimed infringement? Their single form of contact is a web form. Their privacy policy even lacks a way to contact them.
2. TorrentFreak is hardly a legitimate news source. A simple read of the Wikipedia page on them is pretty embarrassing.
3. Since mp3caprice is obviously not in the USA, they are not bound by our "legal stuff", which can be said of TorrentFreak also.
Expect no more from me. Have a great holiday!
The International Intellectual Property Alliance's 2016 Special report on Ukraine:
https://iipa.org/files/uploads/2017/12/2016SPEC301UKRAINE.pd...
(page 4)
Or their entry on the EU's Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190617061827/http://trade.ec.e...
(page 19)
> According to the music industry Mp3va.com and Mp3caprice.com are popular unlicensed pay per download websites hosted allegedly in Ukraine, which provide mainly music.
> […]
> These sites claim to have a copyright licence for their business from the Ukrainian collecting society called AVTOR, which reportedly has no mandate to represent foreign rightholders.
I'm sure you'll come up with another rationalization, but your money is definitely not going to the artists (unless perhaps you are listening exclusively to Ukranian bands). Just be honest with yourself: you find mp3caprice.com's service convenient and are willing to pay them for it. Just don't pretend that it is the legal route.
If you actually wish to know if they are legal today (rather than just pretend they are), why not ask your national recording industry association? They'll know.