Why Do You Pirate Music?

YouTube and Spotify don’t have flac or alac filetypes.
- Similar here, but I don’t do google and I hate Spotify lawl. I do download for my collection, but I’ve also subscribed to Apple Music because I don’t wanna fuck around with putting music on my phone, I mostly use my phone for podcasts.
  But I just for some headphones that use spatial sound and holy shit is that fantastic. I have like five nice pairs of open-back fancy headphones and now I’m using my probudz all the time because it makes your music sound 4.5D and you can look around if you want and it sounds like you’re at a concert
  
  I’m in the market for fancy headphones. What do you recommend? I mostly listen to flac tracks ripped from CDs and also would use headphones for watching movies from Jellyfin. All done at home.
- IIRC, Spotify added FLAC recently
  
  I see a lot of news of it "coming soon" and leaks, but not an official release. Do you have more info?
  
  This is the only thing I could find on it. Seems it’s still in testing.
  Hopefully soon though!

Basically boils down to quality. The default options for pirated music are FLAC 44.1-96 kHz 16-24 bit, or MP3 320kbps.
Both are better than YouTube quality.
- Yep, don't need to get a headache from crappy 128bps mp3s.
  Also because fuck this rent-music mentality.

Because fuck Lars Ulrich.
- Hell, I wish my downloads took money directly from him. He sucks.
  
  I wasn't even a metallica fan but i started downloading tracks in the days of yore just to delete them out of spite
  
  What's the issue with him? Honest question, just want to know what's up
- I to this day still make it a point to download anything from them and I refuse to listen to it. If one of their songs comes on anything I'm streaming, I skip.

Because some music is not available on streaming platforms. Occasionally artists and labels decide to split their ways, and suddenly their older albums are gone. Over the years I started losing notable chunks of music I like from my playlists.
- Not only that but the original mixes of albums often don't get put on streaming platforms because of licensing bullshit or whatever.
  And especially for rock and metal the newer remasters of popular albums tend to be pretty bad and overly compressed or have weird post EQ added.

If i can't buy it in bandcamp friday i'm pirating it.
- Same thing here lol
- Same thing here :)

FLAC files - better sound quality
- The right Deezer Downloaders have Flac tho
- I've also had issues with Lidarr not downloading anything - For example, I tried downloading music from the artist NF - which I don't think is a particularly niche artist - but Lidarr didn't download anything. What indexers do you use to download music?
  
  I think you basically need a private tracker for lidarr. The arr suite is mostly targeted toward collecting media of a particular quality and will sit on its hands if what it finds doesn't meet that standard
  Music is also not well represented in the public indexers, so it's not surprising it doesn't always find what you're looking for
  
  Personally I don’t download music. I rip my CDs but I do know that some streaming services don’t offer as high quality as CDs hence my comment.

quality
organization of files
proper metadata
extras like photos/other images, lyrics, links, etc
community (on various torrent sites, mainly)
not being reliant on a company and centralized servers
someone paid for the album.. band made more from that one sale than how many streams of it? Lol 😐
commands are crowding my CLI history. Lol
It depends what it is and maybe I'm not savvy enough but, I find it easier to use bittorrent still.
Some things are easier to find on YT or X streaming service so, I'd say multiple methods these days are necessary depending on what one is into.
To that end, I think we need to just reach out to bands and point them to a primer on uploading their music. Additionally, more people need to go to shows and start creating high quality torrents of smaller, more independant bands. As well as people creating torrents or torrent packs for the stuff that gets ripped from the other sources.

Because back when the only way to listen to new music was to buy it, then find out a load of it was absolute tripe, then not be able to take it back.
So fuck 'em. I download first, then if I like it I buy it. There's quite a few CDs on my shelf that I first pirated. And no CDs that are full of lame filler shite.

You can use tools like spotdl and yt-dlp to download songs from YouTube music and Spotify
To get quality like this https://youtu.be/cX4KA-AFS9M ? Nah thanks.
- That video is A ART
  When I started driving and my friends or partners would be like “can I play a song I love on your nice sound system” and they pulled up YouTube (this woulda been like late 00s to mid 2010s) it LEGITIMATELY SOUNDED LIKE THAT TO ME.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/cX4KA-AFS9M
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Quality. YouTube audio leaves something to be desired.. Spotify though... I never heard of that tool so thanks.
- FYI SpotDL also downloads from YouTube, it just reads Spotify playlists.

but to answer your question, I've heard audiophiles complain about the highest possible quality you can get from a YouTube rip. so, I'm assuming that some of the torrents out there are higher quality than what you can get from youtube
- Pretty much this. I like to DJ, mostly a hobbyist over paying gigs these days, and have plenty of tunes ripped from the tube. Now I have the fun task of trying to replace everything with higher quality versions. Shitty rips are fine enough for a house party on a humble audio system, but proper venues with subs and high fidelity audio setup make it obvious you ripped from YouTube.
  In a perfect world I would love to buy what I use. Problem is I would need an insane budget to grab what I want. I listen to a lot of a music.

I dowload my flacs via soulseekqt. sadly torrent is not cool for music anymore..

if the music is older, and not from the US, it's often not on spotify. Versions matter too - even for some mainstream bands their B sides/acoustic/live versions just aren't on spotify or youtube. Album metadata for spotify is garbage too - it just isn't an adequate replacement for a record collection.
I do use a spotify subscription, but for me it's a tool for playlist generation and music discovery.
Also audio quality, as others have mentioned.

I still burn CDs... my ancient vehicle has a multi-disc changer and doesn't require my phone to be on, so I like having the best quality I can get before I do the burning.
- I've been looking for one of those!
  Anyway, for $10-20 you can get any ol' used car stereo from a junk yard that'll work and have a 3.5mm aux port. You can even find some with USB and grab a dirt cheap 32GB nub/stick from Microcenter or wherever.
  After the initial setup, it'll be easier and cheaper in the long run than buying CDs. Less wasteful, too. Plus, nobody's gonna see a CD booklet and think they might be valuable and break into your car. Assuming you keep them in there.
  I've even seen USB stick mini booklets if you wanna load a bunch up with FLACs if your car system can tell the difference while cruisin'...

I mostly pirate for others to leech. Always my slsk is getting upwards of 40 users and 30MB/s upload. It is harder and harder to get packs, or music in general from private and not trackers. Redacted does not have everything, I love the idea of big repository of music and share upwards of 50TB on slsk. Lots of Dj's, new producers and podcast use this stuff :) I pay for youtube premium, but never rip it, I almost always buy music I like trough Bandcamp if it is available.

Same reason as usual : the music I like isn't conveniently available elsewhere I've looked to purchase, or available at unreasonable prices that won't benefit the artist, and I refuse to stream shit. So the high seas it is!

Downloading from YouTube or Spotify is still piracy. And those sources offer mostly shit quality far removed from the artist's intent.
Believe it of not, there are things that aren't on Spotify, YouTube, TIDAL, Apple Music, Bandcamp, or any streaming service. Sometimes when a streaming service does have a song or album, it's either not the best quality or only a radio censored version available, even if Spotify claims it's the explicit version. And that explicit tag feels like a slander because the original intent should be default and the radio edits should be the one's with the CENSORED tag.
There is great music out there you can't purchase or stream a digital release of.
There are old and often played CDs in my collection that can't be ripped properly (by me) for one reason or another.
There are some really high quality vinyl recordings out there, done by people with better hardware and more skill than I. Again, many of these vinyl releases are not available in any other format and are no longer available for purchase anywhere.
The real primary reason I got into it, in the long ago times of Napster, was that I liked to make mixtapes/discs. When radio was no longer playing songs I wanted on those tapes, the wilds of Internet was the answer.
I still regularly support the artists I like as directly as I can: buying albums and merch directly from them at shows or their own websites. And I spend more of that money on more artists and especially less popular artists specifically because of the habits listed above.

Game or anime songs are often not available in their full versions on YouTube or Spotify. Also better sound quality.

Piracy for privacy!

I'm tired of scrolling through my playlists and seeing "this track is unavailable".

I don't have internet on the go and they're killing CDs.

On the rare occasion it's not on Spotify? Because it's not on Spotify and I wanna hear it.

if you're an audiophile you can get flacs and stuff (but tbh I'd rather store my music in opus, flac just seems like a waste of space)

I guess lidar also sorts music for you, like radarr and sonarr does with Movirs/Series.

Show me a music store I can purchase music from on my phone through an app, and I'll purchase it.

I used to pay for Deezer used and a variety of downloaders to download FLACs from them, but then they seemed to break that at some point and a ton of metadata was borked. Also, some artists who were on a bunch of different labels only ever had stuff from just one label on there, which meant a trip to the torrent sites/Soulseek anyway.
I just gave up and went back to Soulseek and RuTracker for my music after a while.

$10 a month for the rest of my life seems expensive.

I use Lidarr to watch for new releases and try to get some bootleg albums, while main way of getting things is trough some websites or just pulling stuff from qobuz directly.
All the music is FLAC with a small percentage in mp3 320. also, man sometimes wants to get that 300GB discography pack with 6 different releases of the same album 😁

I never bought CDs to begin with because when I was little my dad pirated music and I followed his way. Then when YouTube was getting popular in the 2000s people uploaded music there and I never saw a reason to buy it.

Lidarr also supports Usenet

I personally don't see a reason to torrent music when a simple download of a flac or something from yt if I can't find it anywhere else is usually fine. But I will say I'm more likely to pirate music from large artists/companies because I don't support large record companies and their shitty practices.
Similar thing goes for things like Vocaloid, UTAU/OPENUTAU, Synthesizer V, DeepVocal, etcetera, songs because the majority of the time the songs I'm listening to don't have an official download (or a link to a removed file) or way to get it through supporting the person who made them.

As I kid I would record songs off the radio, and I would copy songs off other cassettes I liked. I did the same when cd's became a thing and then when internet went to cable/dsl from dial up, that's when I started downloading shit like it was my job.

Pretty much only pirate when something isn't on QoBuz.

However, I don't get why you would ever use Lidarr. Why would you ever download music using torrents? You can use tools like spotdl and yt-dlp to download songs from YouTube music and Spotify, it's faster and more reliable; I have had some issues finding torrents of music from less-known artists.
I make use of deezeloader, deemix and/or streamrip, which is what I use because unlock Spotify deezet, qobuz and tidal (supported by streamrjp) have true lossless flac audio available.
Lidar can be extended to work with them instead of torrents.

My card issuer shouldn't get to help itself to the profiling data, and the service shouldn't get to lose my info in the data breach.

I really don't. I do have some of my favorites stored on my Plex server, but lately I've just been using a cracked version of the YouTube music app that lets you do all of the premium things without premium

Ytdlp. It gives a lot of flexibility to download from yt and soundcloud where i build my playlist before adding them on my phone.

I like the idea of using spotdl and yt-dlp but my eyes gloss over as soon as I see that there is no GUI. Lidarr kinda sucks but it gets me pretty close to what I need. Wish I was more comfy without a GUI but don't really have the time to get the hang of it. So it goes.
- There are several frontends available if you search...
- Check out Freetube. Also Newpipe on Android.

Completely agree! There are solutions for letting Lidarr download from Deezer and Tidal, but afaik no other music streaming services for some reason.

Youtube and spotify do not offer lossless codecs. I prefer using tools like qbdlx and deemix but not all music can be found on said services. That is where torrents come in.

I'd go one step further and say pirating music is too big of a hassle in general. Apple Music and Tidal do loseless compression, have huge catalogues and are so dirt cheap I don't understand why you'd make your life so hard on purpose. Once effectively unlimited mobile data became a thing music piracy lost most of its purpose.