Piracy(blog.cobanov.cloud) |
I have seen so many songs disappear from Spotify lately that I am considering to hoard music again. Gladly I have most of those that disappeared on my HDD anyways, since it's been mostly old songs, but yeah. Was kinda frustrating. Maybe it's the task for this winter to go through my spotify playlists and find out which music I do not own yet
Years ago I had several huge music video playlists which today stand at 80% of what they previously were.
For anyone stuck in this situation and willing to spend a few (many) hours to recover the titles of their YouTube playlist: On the playlist page, in the (...) menu there is a "Show unavailable videos" button. After clicking that, you can right-click all the unavailable videos and copy their URLs. Then you can either try the wayback machine, or google the video ID. Usually you will find some forum posts talking about the video and mentioning the title.
Of course, it's not guaranteed that you'll find anything this way. But I have recovered multiple playlists this way.
There is an effort that it takes to get on the airwaves that is not there if just anyone can play music online. The effort acts as a quality filter on the person's taste and passion.
Beyond that, I always check out what Pitchfork thinks is good new music.
The youtube algorithm has also recommended me some of my favorite, more obscure artists but that happens like once every 2-3 years.
But yeah that ease to find new things is one positive aspect of Spotify. Also to have it everywhere available. So maybe going both ways would be the solution. Using Spotify while buying/ripping/whatever the music that I really deeply value
Sure musicians would love to sell albums, but those days are long over. Musicians don’t see squat from ticket sales except in rare circumstances. It’s mostly all guarantees and with live nation owning 100% of the music industry atm good luck to any artist actually going into points. How you can sell out a show and lose money is the most corrupt bs I’ve ever encountered.
- a bitter old tour manger
There is a catch though: venue merch fees [1]. Which may in turn explain why the merch is often crap: The profit margin becomes tiny if you need to pay the merch fee. So you need to choose between exorbitant prices (think $60 for a tshirt) or crap quality to make a profit.
*I hope this is an American thing, which would explain why on average it appears that American bands have worse merch than European ones.
[1] https://variety.com/2023/music/opinion/venue-service-fees-me...
Nintendo, take note.
I must be the last person that does then. All my music is ripped from youtube
I wanted to re-watch Dune Part 1 before Part 2 came to theaters, so I rented the film on Youtube Movies which said it would be HD $3.99. I paid, but when the movie started playing it was NOT HD. The quality selector didn't even let me choose a HD resolution. I tried different browsers, I tried Safari on my Mac, Chrome on my Mac, disconnecting from my 4K display... was it a some bug? Was it a haywire copy protection because I opened the film on a 4K display over Displayport? I have no idea, but I felt cheated. I haven't paid for a movie since.
Secondly, though, Spotify is just as bad if you are into proper records rather than concert marketing. Want to listen to Queen? Well, I hope you like the god awful remasters, because that's all that is available on Spotify. And whatever is available right now could change at any moment. It's not a music collection.
The only way the record companies could have kept selling records is with vinyl. But they killed that to get more profits decades ago. Good luck convincing people music is worth sitting down for like people do with books, movies and games. Yeah, let me sit down and listen to Cardi B for the next 40 minutes, said no one. The youth just press play on a playlist and whatever comes out doesn't matter, it's all basically the same anyway.
People also pretend like owning media means they'll one day, decades down the line, still be able to play it but in my experience this is rare. I have CD roms from the 90s that I just can't play. I'd likely need to find a windows 98 machine and do all sorts of magic to get them actually running. How much is any media of value me 8 years after I consume it? It wasn't too long ago that the only way you could watch a movie again is if a theature decided to show it again. You didn't see Attack of the Green monster in it's brief run in 1956? Oh well, too bad. It's only VHSs came out was owning a movie even a concept.
So, i've just learned to shrug it off. Ok, so i don't have a solid physical copies of all the Star Trek TNG, but I can stream them and it's not costly. In fact I've never really paid less for media in my life. Hypothetically they could take it from me, and leave me to never see it again. That'd be annoying but just annoying.
Piracy is as it ever was: annoying to setup, navigate, some level of danger and, now, nowhere near as well integrated or easy to use as the "legal" infrastructure. Maybe i'm just renting my shows but i'll take that over torrents that stop at 99%, missing epsides and dodgy subtitles.
One is preservation and ownership (or lack of), which is a huge problem. Live service games aside, even if you buy physical, what’s on the disc is often unplayable or incomplete without a day-one patch, so you’re just as screwed when the servers go offline. I’ve heard this period described as a future dark ages for games due to how many will be lost, and I think I agree. It’s thanks to the work of “pirates” and true hackers that I’m able to still play digital-only 3DS games for example, because I literally have no legal way to purchase them anymore.
The other is cost. It seems like the author is in Turkey so I can’t comment on local affordability, but if anything many games are too cheap, not too expensive. Your typical triple-A game now is unfathomably expensive to make and needs thousands of people to do so. Now personally, I’m not big into those sorts of games. I think trying to create huge games rammed with endless shallow side-quests just for the sake of being bigger than the last one is a pointless endeavour and makes for a worse product, but evidently enough people think otherwise cause they keep getting made.
Yes, it is bullshit that digital versions are not only the same price, but often more expensive than physical counterparts (at least here in the UK). But new games were £50/$60USD for so long, which neither kept up with inflation or the rising scale and costs of production. Even today’s typical £60/$70 is far below what games cost in the 90s when you factor in inflation. I dunno what to do here besides keep supporting smaller, less expensive indie output, of which there is a wonderful volume.
It's not so much a technical issue as it is a legal one: the only way to reliably preserve content is to ensure it can be shared. One solution might be to limit IP duration to only a few years.
Why? Because contrary to the opinion of a couple of online aficionados, the masses don't care that much about preserving media after they have consumed them once, or once the trend has subsided. The market has spoken, the affordability and convenience of not having to manage one's own collection beats the slight lack of guarantee.
You buy individual games on Steam and it stays on your account indefinitely - you do have to pick and choose what you buy.
Something like Microsoft’s Game Pass is closer to Netflix and Spotify than Steam.
Steam is more like the old iTunes Music Store model.
This is true, you don't need to pay an ongoing subscription for continued access to the games.
> You buy individual games on Steam and it stays on your account indefinitely - you do have to pick and choose what you buy.
But I'm very wary of that "indefinitely". Steam doesn't set an expiration date but they can do it at a moment's notice. Save goes for any store where the purchase (rental?) is permanently tied to the store.
For now. Everything Everywhere All At Once never got a physical release here in the UK. Considering it won best picture that is insane to me.
Similarly, a lot of prestige shows that are either produced by streaming companies or distributed by streaming companies outside the US never get physical releases.
I’m not saying you’re wrong—you’re dead right—but it bums me out.
Is using hacked streaming apps or sharing accounts in violation of ToS considered piracy?
Just. Don't. Buy. This. Crap. There are other games which you can play.
Maybe that's to be expected from SaaS B2B software or something, but there's no reason to settle for this kind of garbage in games. Tons of alternatives exist in older games, indie games, and even some AAA games where there is a creative vision with a goal that isn't to empty your wallet or waste your time as much as possible.
Or just get Factorio. You'll never have time for any other game ever again — or a social life for that matter.
Have you considered alternative ideas now that benevolent capitalism and resposible consumer are falling apart?
The FTC should consider this fraud. Customers should be allowed refunds if existing functionality goes away.
I'm sorry, but these are not comparable. One side - the pirates - are doing something that is illegal, unethical, and explicitly disallowed by the other side. It's not a voluntary arrangement - it is the opposite.
The game companies, on the other hand, are offering a voluntary arrangement. You don't like it, you don't have to agree to it. No one is forcing you.
If companies don't like it they can "sell" their products in countries without customer protection. No one is forcing them to participate in the market.
If you're worried about your games aging out, CD-ROMs did not protect you because the average Windows 98 game won't run on modern computers without significant modifications.
> How can the boxed price of a game (or software) be the same as its Steam or digital version?
In Capitalist economies, prices are set by producers and are significantly influenced by supply and demand. Prices are justified by people's willingness to pay them, and competition creates downward pressure. Games priced at $60 have to compete with $9.99 indie games on Steam, and justify their higher price through quality.
> When you buy a game digitally, it never truly belongs to you; services like Steam or PS Store only allow you to download and play it.
We're still grappling with what "ownership" means in a digital economy, but Steam's model is clearly good enough for 99% of customers. Even Nintendo (which always loved its physical carts) eventually had to admit that most buyers prefer digital downloads. They're willing to take the risk of losing access in the future in return for convenience here, today.
> 20 years later, you can plug in your Atari cartridge and play, but you can’t be sure that Steam won’t go bankrupt and deactivate its servers. (Nintendo recently closed its shops, including for the 3DS, PSP servers are shut down, etc.)
I have Steam games from 15 years ago that I could still play. But that's just it: I could still play them. Do I? No, I'm done with them and I'm playing something else now. I heard about the 3DS shop shutting down, but so what? I've got my Switch and I haven't touched the 3DS in many years.
> The companies, with their excessive pricing, instead of selling their products once, turn them into SaaS with lifetime monthly subscriptions.
Excessive compared to what? Also, most modern software buyers expect continuous updates, patches, security fixes, etc. after the initial purchase, so monthly payments for ongoing labor seem like a natural fit. When you buy a toaster, you don't expect the manufacturer to come into your house a year later and make improvements.
> They sell games for $60 and then add microtransactions, turning them into service games.
Some games do that, many do not. Our choices influence future behavior by game makers. I totally agree with you that microtransactions suck, and I try not to buy games that have them.
> Without the people who dump and archive these contents, the old series you love so much could disappear forever.
Beloved classics rarely disappear. Nintendo Online still offers lots of them on the Switch. But when you describe something as "forgotten software" (as the article did early on), you're admitting that hardly anyone wants to play it.
2. So you are pro-Spotify but anti-Steam? All the arguments you gave above against Steam apply to Spotify as well.
Sounds to me you are trying to justify your decision to pirate to yourself.
Per first-sale doctrine, if a license was included with the original medium, then it's irrevocably transferrable to subsequent buyers, without manufacturer being able to sever it, no?
Which is why SaaS and "cloud features" did all they could to danced around and obscure this.
Steam is better value for me over more than a couple of months, and so was eMusic until Sony ruined it.
> An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost
Kind of ironic that you're saying that.
Gamedev is just hard and there are very few exceptions like Epic or Rockstar that even get an option to become "greedy".
The design and blame of microtransaction/gambling is more on the game developer, but even here we keep hearing stories on how such design is being pushed by the publisher (who act as investors) rather than the game developers.
The discussion is not about developers with passion for the profession.
Take mobile games for example. I am not sure how much passion goes into majority of products in that space.
They take a long time to make games, but it's always very good quality.
At least enough for people to want to buy them over and over. Their game are not cheap but aren't more expensive than others triple A, yet they make a ton of money and Take 2 interactive stocks are doing great.
I'd say it's more that the gaming market is extremely concurrentiel, either you're very good at what you do, or you got load of money for marketing campaign, but if you got neither it's barely profitable. Increasing the price of your games in that case won't solve the issue, people would buy even less of your company's game.
Yet for decades before the forced-online/micro-transaction ecosystem, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of games were made, sold for a singular price and the industry spun on.
Nobody is complaining about the price, the complaint is about the indentured nature of modern game sales and the ephemeral state of the online elements that most players don't want or care about.
when physical ownership was possible, you could tend to have games that you can use for perpetuity. nowadays, you can lose access to what you buy for arbitrary reasons (see ubisoft example - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40020961).
it then all boils down to similar grounds as mentioned for other media. all the dark patterns, forcing online connection for singleplayer experiences, and intrusive drm really downplays the labour of love argument for me. if it is all for passion for most game devs, they should not seek monetary expectations from their audience, who dedicate thousands of hours to play their works.
it should be well-understood that streaming is not ownership, and it has been an unsustainable business model. but so is owning anything digitally by paying up front. at least the arrangement is more apparent for the former. i personally work on things that can and is pirated, and having been on both sides, i would not demonize one.
AAA Games are too expensive. Pricing for a retail product is not solely based on the cost to produce it, you have to price in what the market will bear and I think the games industry just isn't doing that. £60 or £70 for a base game (that often has microtransactions in it, or is often kinda incomplete with major plot still to be delivered via DLC, usually with £80 or £90 'premium' editions) is a lot of money for what are already stretched budgets. Most gamers I know wait for sales with significant discounts (50% or more) before they even consider buying AAA titles.
If you can't make a game affordable, then maybe the big AAA industry is making the wrong games, oversaturating the marketplace, or quality is suffering. Starfield's a good example - years of work to produce a game that is resoundingly 'meh'. You can't expect customers to shell out £60+ for 'meh', no matter how many people or resources were used to create it.
There's a lot of smaller 'indie' developers that do not have hundreds of staff that are making games that the market engages with and seems to love. Anecdotally I know my friend group generally prefers these titles to AAA. They frequently fill a significant percentage of the Steam Top Selling lists and these lists are sorted by revenue, not by number of sales. Their prices are more affordable (£10, £15, £20 or £30 are common price points) compared to AAA titles that are trying to cling to that £60 price point.
Are you not describing XBox Game Pass?
A tangant, but has anyone noticed a number of albums on Spotify have been replaced with "deluxe" versions recently? I feel like every time I go to listen to an old favourite albums of mine, new tracks have been inserted which completely break the flow.
They're expensive as hell but the ritual of putting something to play or changing discs when entertaining friends is refreshing in this streaming era.
> The only way the record companies could have kept selling records is with vinyl. But they killed that to get more profits decades ago.
Maybe I don't understand something about your point, but why skip over CDs and direct sales of single tracks, as popularized by iTunes? Purely looking at potential profit from sales, I don't see a difference between vinyl and CDs, at least prior to the recent resurgence when vinyl got a premium due to the perceived exclusivity and quality.
> Good luck convincing people music is worth sitting down for like people do with books, movies and games.
Sitting down and listening to music is still greatly appreciated across all ages, at least from what I can tell. That seems somewhat reductive.
> Yeah, let me sit down and listen to Cardi B for the next 40 minutes, said no one.
That seems very reductive.
> The youth just press play on a playlist and whatever comes out doesn't matter, it's all basically the same anyway.
That seems extremely reductive.
I do not know what you were listening to in your youth, but I'd be surprised if there weren't tracks, artists or even whole genres that people of your current age might have looked upon unfavorably in the past.
The way I see it, there are three choices:
1. Sell a physical good and let the free market do its thing,
2. Sell a service and let the free market do its thing,
3. Attempt to create a non-free market using various combinations of technical and legal means (e.g. DRM, copyright etc.)
Vinyl records were an example of (1). They couldn't practically be duplicated. But CDs could and the free market very quickly realised this. So CDs were the beginning of their journey down route (3) which they eventually lost. They have now settled on method (2) just like movies, games and everything else.
> That seems very reductive.
It seems, but it isn't. Music is produced for the YouTube/Spotify "formats" these days. Putting together an album that would be listened on a turntable or a cassette player, is a very different task than releasing a Spotify single.
As an analogy, modern artists are more like weekly columnists on a magazine. Past artists were more like book writers. Both categories write, but their output is very much affected by the format they use. And a columnist is very likely to be bad as a book writer, and vice-versa for the book writer.
I'm not a huge music fan. I like the stuff I grew up with, and very, very rarely something recorded in the last 10 years. I don't study music, rarely actually listen to the lyrics, don't care about the quality too much. It's always background to what I'm actually focusing on. And the less it distracts, the better.
I used to have a few Gb of music, but deleted it all [0] because Spotify fills this niche now.
I pirate books if they have DRM, video all the time. But not music, because (as TFA says) Spotify has basically solved that.
[0] I'm sure I have it all on a backup somewhere. Just in case Spotify enshittifies further.
And now instead of reading bits from your local storage you are increasing your carbon impact by streaming from somewhere else...with pretty much 0 actual value.
The thing with shirts and sweats at least in the US is that most bands pay a premium to have them made. I’ve seen unit cost as high as 25 for shirts and 40 for sweats. Tack on shipping and theres not a lot of margin. Also bands have to price match with headliners. The venue fees are usually 10% on soft goods. Which is why posters are so lucrative. They kind of skirt by in the corner. Unless its a true indy band, meaning they press the music themselves with no label support, at best an artist can hope to make a dollar of maybe two off an album sale often times way less. Posters on the other hand, unit cost for a screen printed one are around $2. So for twenty bucks 18 is going directly to the artist. Get that thing signed or not and you’ve got an asset that will probably appreciate and not take up too much space in the process.
Of course if one is in a position to and one really wants to support an artist you should license their music or get your company too.
Practically, it's very rare for games to disappear from a Steam library once purchased. It happens for stolen/fraudulently purchased keys (eg keys bought with stolen credit cards), but for a whole game it's very rare.
It has happened, but generally for games that relied on online servers for functionality and the servers have been taken down.
And if you want to go there then consider the environmental impact of physical media. There's entire landfills full of vinyl records, cassettes and CDs. Streaming is the best environmental option out of all of them.
Fair enough.
> And if you want to go there then consider the environmental impact of physical media.
You can buy music without purchasing a physical media. In that case you download once. I have a number of records I purchased from Bleep and 7digital.
As about distribution platforms neither investors, publishers or game developers have any leverage against Valve, Microsoft or Sony. They just do whatever they want. So you're totally right here. These kind of monopolists can only be regulated by large political bodies like US or EU.
I can't speak for everyone, but I think this may be because with microtransactions you pay for additions to some product already known to be good (you tested it and you like it enough to buy some more), while with single-player games you typically have to pay upfront in hope it will be good. So risk-aversion sets in.
Is the argument that Steam is worse than Spotify because a subset of games have got built in self destruct, while Spotify only requires ongoing rent to access that 99¢ song?
I think the self destruct is bad, and requiring 3rd party logins for single player games should not be allowed.
Genuine question tho, I just recently started playing again with portal and find most game to be boring, even the acclaimed one like cyberpunk and rdr2, but I don't see how Mario bros and likes could be remotely better.
Imo gaming peaked between 2000 and 2010.
Fair point, but those are clearly not the ones being pointed out as greedy by most people.
...except for maybe scrappy mobile companies that churn shitty microtransaction games looking for whales, but those are greedy indeed, and I doubt they have the sympathy of you or OP.
Microtransactions in PC games are there for the same reason - because you can't just go and sell your game for $25 if all of the competitors with similar production quality in last 5 years released for $15. Gamers simply wouldnt buy it and nobody care that with inflation $15 back then and $15 now are very different money.
Yet you can put microtransactions in the same $15 game and the same people will pay for them. And you'll reach desired $$$ of profit per copy sold. If everyone refused to pay for microtransactions and would spend more money on buying games without them instead there wouldn't be any microtransactions by now.
Not really. Most of these games are preying on weaknesses. These people are not voting with their wallets. They're being duped into giving away their mental health, and their wallet is taken away when they're not looking because of they're high in dopamine induced by images and sounds.
While technically true, it omits a pretty damn significant detail behind the appeal.
The platform itself will remove everything from you unless you keep paying Taylor Swift every month, and the artists you actually listen to probably don't get anything, unless you only listen to top ten charting songs.
