YouTube Download Sites Are the Biggest Piracy Threat To Music Industry, Industry Figures Say (independent.co.uk) 149
Websites dedicated to "stream ripping" music from YouTube represent the biggest threat to the global music business, UK news outlet The Independent reported this week, citing industry figures, who added that that these shady sites are also posing business threat to "fantastic range" of legal streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. The report describes the nature of the issue: Sites that allow YouTube videos to be converted into an MP3 file and illegally downloaded to someone's phone or computer are attracting millions of visitors, with estimates suggesting that a third of 16-24-year-olds in the UK have ripped music from the Google-owned platform. Other platforms affected by the illegal ripping sites include DailyMotion, SoundCloud and Vimeo, however YouTube is by far the most pirated. The results of a crackdown that began in 2016 are beginning to be seen, thanks to a coordinated effort by organizations representing record companies in the US and the UK. Earlier this week, stream ripping website MP3Fiber was forced to shut down following legal pressure. However, dozens of sites offering similar services still remain active and are easily accessible through Google, whose search engine provides more than 100 million results for the term "YouTube MP3 converter." The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said that even referring to the aforementioned questionable websites as "stream ripping" sites is misstating copyright law. "There exists a vast and growing volume of online video that is licensed for free downloading and modification, or contains audio tracks that are not subject to copyright," the EFF told the US Office of the United States Trade Representative last year. "Moreover, many audio extractions qualify as non-infringing fair uses under copyright. Providing a service that is capable of extracting audio tracks for these lawful purposes is itself lawful, even if some users infringe."
Speakers are (Score:5, Informative)
If you can hear it, then you can rip it. Get rid of speakers that allow people to hear music and you've beaten piracy.
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FTFY.
Remember the human brain is the world's best copying device. Some even have perfect memory!
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The 3.5mm jack is a heck of a useful analog hole.
Apple has been ramping up their Apple Music online service.
Hmmm.
analog loop (Score:2)
Re: Speakers are (Score:3)
Just to present a single counterexample, Appalachian Spring premiered in 1944.
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"Noise" is a music genre.
Re:Speakers are (Score:5, Funny)
The best way to beat music piracy is to start making only crappy music. Oh wait, I think they're already working on that...
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I feel they have been working on that solution for quite some time, decades. Turned really crap during the nineties in fact. Likely google the source because they have really old videos and people are tuning into anything, well, pre nineteen nineties and they would be the largest source for that. Crappy new versions of old music are not working either because crap music artists using autotune etc. and the only reason they get the job is because they are cheap and they are willing to 'cough' 'cough' suck coc
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The funny thing is that Youtube music compression is often pretty terrible, no one should want to actually listen to that on a regular basis.
Conveniently (for the rippers at least) modern music is deliberately engineered to sound like a 32kbps MP3. After going through the Youtube compression, it still sounds like a 32kbps MP3, so nothing of much value was lost.
Nope (Score:1)
Given how the Music publishers and 3rd party parasitic maggots all together rob at least 70% of an artist's profits for themselves; and how Incompetech is one of a myriad of perfect examples that you can get money streaming into your hands even when you have a completely open license for anyone to use his music for free, so long as you have talent which speaks for itself and which people automatically credit everywhere the music appears; and how YouTube has precisely made it possible for many talented artis
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, yes, that what the headline said.
Youtube is a threat to the music industry, not to the musicians.
Tell me how (Score:5, Insightful)
this is any different from the Supreme Court ruling in 1984 about using VHS tapes to record TV. This is just the 2018 version of that.
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Smart people know that file sharing is not a threat to the music industry.
Idiots who can't see past the end of their noses call it "piracy" and seek to ruin the Internet in an utterly futile attempt to stop it.
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While I don't think that YouTube download sites are in anyway a threat to the music industry, there are some differences. VHS tapes degraded over time, and the record quality wasn't even comparable to the original broadcast. I don't really see why anybody would even use a YouTube downloader. So much easier to just find an actual CD rip or some other existing audio file. YouTube audio tops out at 192 kbps, so, while it's adequate, it's hardly the best place to be getting your music.
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50 years ago most of my peers borrowed records (12" vinyl) and copied them to cassette tapes. The music industry complained but did not go bust. Youtube ripping is just today's copying to cassette. I agree that it is breaking copyright but it won't kill them, indeed it may be that Piracy Can Help Music Sales of Many Artists, Research Shows [torrentfreak.com].
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As YouTube is a "Free" service, I think it's more akin to recording off the radio, but yes, that is just me being nit-picky and not adding anything of value to the conversation :)
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It's just the usual greed from the music industry. They love the idea of streaming but not the fact that they missed the boat and all their own platforms are failing and dying off. They could have been the new radio... But were too busy soiling their pants over stream ripping and trying to release broken DRM-infested crap.
Piracy is their go-to excuse for their own incompetence. "Oh, we would have made so much more money if only people weren't downloading from YouTube so they can listen in the car! Surely th
No need for UBI (Score:1)
Everybody should be paid until their work fully depreciates. For example, someone gets paid $10/hr to paint a wall. They should continue to receive $10 every hour until the wall needs to be painted again. But the amount can lower over time according to the state of the wall.
That's how it works for "artists" and they are doing well. It should be the same rules for everybody.
Re: No need for UBI (Score:1)
Anyone can paint a wall. Artists produce something unique. You can scoff and comment about music sounding the same, etc, but thatâ(TM)s just your age showing.
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Anyone can paint a wall. Artists produce something unique. You can scoff and comment about music sounding the same, etc, but thatâ(TM)s just your age showing.
Apart from the majority of pop songs being written by two or three people and then just sold to various pretty faces to 'sing'. Please don't insult actual creative talent by calling them artists.
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The War On Drugs ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... oh, sorry.
The War On Piracy ...
Know what?
Both models work the same, as in not.
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Both models work the same, as in not.
Also, both models are promoted by self interested moralizing asshats who only want to put people in jail for profit.
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Yep. Cost avoidance by not enforcing their shit themselves:
Texas ISP Slams Music Industry For Trying To Turn It Into a 'Copyright Cop' [slashdot.org]
"Having given up on actually pursuing direct infringers due to bad publicity, and having decided not to target the software and websites that make online file-sharing possible, the recording industry has shifted its focus to fashioning new forms of copyright liability that would require ISPs to act as the copyright police."
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Bullshit.
Simple answers to complex problems suck tater toes.
The entertainment ecosystem is composed of at least these demographics:
- Entertainers
- IP owners
- Distributors
- Consumers
- Custodians
They are a mixture of every fucking kind of human on the goddam planet.
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They do the job they're supposed to. The war on drugs has filled the prisons with poor people, often of particular demographics and often non-violent (who wants their prisons full of violent types? It costs money) types.
The war on piracy is moving to being able to take down web sites and such without any judicial oversight, instead on the word of the copyright industry. This is a way to take down speech that the powers that be don't like as it is going to be part of NAFTA, it can be blamed on needing a trea
LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
The music industry and the sampled rebroadcast crap they call music for the most part are the biggest danger to the music industry today.
Downloading from Youtube is legal, you shitheads. (Score:2, Informative)
Hometaping didn't kill music. [wikipedia.org] In fact, it preceded the most profitable era the music industry has ever enjoyed. Take your fucking propaganda and shove it where the sun don't shine.
Live Music, Go See Some (Score:2)
Wait, what sites? (Score:2)
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Radio recording threat (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Radio recording threat (Score:3)
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I thought that one particular plane crash decades ago was the day the music died...
Now I'm singing my my this here Anakin Guy...
Damn you, Weird Al!!!
Are the Biggest Piracy Threat To Music Industry (Score:5, Funny)
Are the Biggest Piracy Threat To Music Industry
You've used that phrase so many times that it's lost all meaning.
Besides, I've consulted with our crack team of honey badgers and we are in unanimous consensus that the music industry is the biggest threat to the music industry.
It's a scientific fact.
No need to convert to MP3 (Score:1)
The DASH audio opus @160k (format code 251) I download from YT with youtube-dl plays just fine on my Android phone if I rename the file to .ogg. Thanks, Alphabet!
The music industry seems mostly concerned with control (read: metrics and, ultimately, dollars). Funnily enough, the loss of control (Napster.....Youtube, and before that, tapes!) has probably helped them more than it has hurt. Perhaps the best step would be to have a streaming site with an undocumented (but very wink-wink, nudge-nudge) download fe
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What is this 2008? Apple Music gives you more songs than you could possibly listen to in a lifetime for $10 a month, with new music magically appearing in your phone every Thursday night when the clock strikes 12. Who wants to waste their time on some fucking torrent site or following dead links on some other download site?
This attitude right here is the problem. Just shut up, pay your subs and listen to this crap.
So stupid it hurts... (Score:3)
This is a further reminder that there has ALWAYS be "free" content for as long as broadcasting has been around. That's longer than there has been paid physical media. If you can watch it for free on YouTube then IT DOESN'T MATTER that you can "record" it. You ALREADY have a payment avoidance mechanism.
It's just like radio. It's just like MTV.
Comment (Score:1)
Completely Legal (Score:1)
Still around (Score:4, Insightful)
Napster came out 16 years ago, the music industry is still here and still making money. You can only cry wolf so many times before people start ignoring you.
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Napster came out 16 years ago
I see your 16 and raise you: The cassette recorder came out 56 years ago and the music industry is still here and still making money despite our assurances that they would go bankrupt overnight.
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Also long as musicians are still making less than record label conglomerates then all is right with the world. Or so my masters tell me.
Music as a Service... (Score:1)
It's interesting to see how this has become an issue considering that sites such as Amazon, and Spotify allow you to legally stream music on a per-month fee basis dirt cheap rather than having to buy music, or even download it.
They sound like a broken record (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone else understands that new technology comes with advantages and disadvantages. But the new technology is preferred because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Only the music and movie industries don't seem to get this, and focus only on the disadvantages while ignoring the advantages. Their piracy claims have been wrong every single time. Cassette tapes led to increased music sales, since it freed music from a record needle sitting in a groove, meaning you could now listen to music in your car or while jogging. Radio/cassette recorders allowed people to listen to music two different ways with a single device, so led to people listening to more music since the playback devices now cost less them less. VCRs spawned the movie sale industry, allowing movie studios to make more money than they ever could through theater releases alone. Sales to video rental stores eventually eclipsed videotape sales as the biggest revenue source for movie studios. MP3s became the ubiquitous method to store and distribute music in the 21st century. Internet-based music and movie sales and rentals have now eclipsed disc-based sales and rentals. And YouTube remains the easiest way to quickly check out new releases and new genres of music, and view movie trailers on demand without having to hope to catch it during a commercial break on TV
In every single case, their prophecies of doom by piracy have not only been proven wrong, but the new technology has led to increased sales of music and movies. Yet these two industries cannot seem to break their habit of demanding the new technology be shut down before it "destroys" them. Life isn't perfect. You're never going to get rid of piracy. As long as the benefits of a service like YouTube outweigh the piracy drawbacks, it's a net win. Just like retail stores don't shut down just because they lose some inventory to shoplifting. The benefits of increased sales from allowing customers to see, feel, and browse the merchandise in person outweighs the drawback of loss due to shoplifting.
Re:They sound like a broken record (Score:5, Insightful)
Great list! I would also add:
* Humming music was the biggest piracy threat because artists weren't getting their "fair share"
* Used CD sales was the biggest piracy threat because according to clueless, greedy asshats [latimes.com] artists aren't paid royalties on these transactions,
* Guitar Hero [wired.com] was the biggest piracy threat since it allowed gamers to play music over and over again onlyh having to pay once,
* iTunes was the biggest piracy threat since it allowed music and movies to be distributed without needing physical media.
This is different from .mp3 since Apple's .aac used to be DRM protected but did these wankers complain about that when Apple removed DRM from their music?
Furthermore, why did it take a computer company to sell music???
The only thing the music industry knows how to is whine, constantly. It's not fucking rocket science. People just want:
* Access to music, regardless of device, and
* The ability to pay for it.
Piracy shows you have a distribution opportunity not a price problem.
Re: They sound like a broken record (Score:1)
Agreed. A couple of footnotes:
In terms of music industry understanding its markets, credit to the bootleggers (in it for the money) and sharers (in it for love of the music and believing good music should be heard) who, combined, led the music industry to belatedly release more music that would otherwise have sat in the vaults.
"Home taping is killing music" is a genuine wikipedia article. Truth is, brickwalling is more likely to be killing music.
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I think we're sort of missing the point of the article though. It's not an article about how the music industry is doomed, it's a study on what's currently the most popular way to pirate music.
Each of those methods was the most widely used method at one point. Cassette dubbing, MP3 sharing, and now ripping the audio track of a YouTube video. And each remained the most popular method until something better came along. MP3s offered perfect digital duplication, and now you can do the same thing by ripping YouT
YT quality is crap - not the real problem (Score:2)
If you download a song from Youtube, and it sounds good enough to be listenable (vs. the quality of a purchased music file), then the problem isn't piracy.
The problem is that your music naturally sounds like reproducible, sterile, "Millenial Whoop" and familiarity/brainwashing driven, forgettable and disposable sound bytes - not memorable music.
To the music industry: Stop spending millions of dollars on marketing campaigns and psychological tricks to make people consume your brand of music. Instead, go chea
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The problem is that your music naturally sounds like reproducible, sterile, "Millenial Whoop" and familiarity/brainwashing driven, forgettable and disposable sound bytes - not memorable music.
Old codgers have been saying that about every genreation of music, including the one you think is good.
If you start waving your cane when you say it it's much more convincing.
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Comment removed (Score:3)
The URL is in the html source... (Score:2)
Stop it! (Score:1)
"Alexa, stop playing songs from YouTube copies!"
"Siri, don't listen to my MP3s. They'll charge me for a performance!"
illegaly? not in EU (Score:3)
Remember that retarded blank CD tax? Guess what - it came with legal language allowing personal copy.
PERFECTLY LEGAL in my country (and probably half the developed world).
Before cassette (Score:1)
I remember being 12 years old... (Score:2, Interesting)
...and being afraid to use things like LimeWire, BitTorrent, etc., so I just used a 3.5mm male-to-male audio cable, running from line-out to line-in and used Audacity to record the audio while I played the music on Grooveshark, YouTube, et. al. It was rudimentary and was kind of funny now that I look back at it but it worked.
Even still, my 12 yo paranoid self thought I was going to be caught somehow (I theorized that the RIAA would detect that I was running Audacity while recording something off the Interne
threats to the industry (Score:1)
Because the average user .... (Score:2)
The music industry is just trying to plug the big leaks. They'll never stop those with the tech savvy.
Sites? (Score:2)
Music sucks today (Score:1)
More like a threat to audio quality (Score:2)
Reencoding youtube's 128Kbit/s AAC to MP3 gains you quite an awful audio quality in the end because you enjoy AAC encoding artifacts multiplied by MP3 encoding artifacts.
I don't know a single decent youtube ripping website which allows you to download youtube's AAC/Opus audio directly.
When do youtube execs get Kim Dotcom treatment? (Score:2)
I am not a great fan of Kim Dotcom.
But he had a point when he treated that. Dotcom was spied on, raided, had all of his property confiscated. Dotcom had millions of dollars taken from him.
All because he was distributing copyright material.
Why do google/youtube execs enjoy a different standard?
Youtube-dl (Score:2)
Just download the Youtube-dl utility, it downloads video & audio directly from Youtube, it even has a simple GUI. Works great on Playlists as well and has an automatic download resume. The occasional error crops up but a simple re-download solves that.
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dnload-sites (Score:1)