Spotify fans threaten to return to piracy as music streamer introduces new face-scanning age checks in the UK
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I'm returning to car boot sales to buy cubic meters of CDs.
That, and BandCamp.All my CD's got ripped (and re-ripped) to mp3 in increasing bitrates as storage increased. Bandcamp is where almost all my musicians release anyway, and I've got over a thousand albums through them, happy in the knowledge I support the artists in a fairly direct way.
Sure, I've still got an Apple Music sub (which sucks at times because licensing means a compilation gets split into several albums when whatever deal happens in the background expires). But I'll easily find new music, grab it and give it a go, and if I like it enough I'll dig them out on bandcamp. At some point I'm gonna quit that platform.
Planning to get a modern mp3 player to go offline with my music at some point. Or maybe rebuild the old iPod and put Rockbox on it and hook it up to my linux desktop.
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Here's a reliable, free VPN: https://riseup.net/en/vpn
Remember to donate to them tough - and btw. they are actually running their services for radical left activists, not filesharing... so I guess it would be cool to please not strain their servers too much.
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It's a load of bullshit, for a start the ISP has my details and should be able to attest my connection is rented by someone of legal age and it should be up to me what I let my children (assuming I have any) see and not see on that connection. I already had to click the "yes just give me the porn damn it" agreement on my mobile phone which was less likely to be randomly shared unmonitored and now this overbearing crap. I'll just avoid sites and services that require this.
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A VPN is a must if you wanna go down this route
Soulseek (and I recommend the Nicotine+ client over the official one) is a fantastic source for all music in all formats, and particularly obscure off-label shit you won't get anywhere else. You'll even have some success finding audiobooks there, although this is very hit-and-miss. I wish audiobook pirates would use it more heavily. It's P2P, like Napster used to be. You'll have to share something or you'll get auto-ignored by most users.
RuTracker is a great non-private/non-ratio-monitoring torrent site for music (does require a free account though). I've never had a single torrent from there that wasn't seemingly seeded by a Godzilla's dick. Obviously it's in Russian, but there's really no difficulty navigating around. The only thing you might struggle with is signing up for an account, but just have your favourite translation tool open in another tab
If you don't mind slow download speeds (from the likes of RapidGator), I enjoy Exystence. It's a blog that shares link to the latest albums and offers both lossy and lossless versions. Nice RSS subscription to have.
If you do find yourself using RapidGator a lot, don't waste money buying a sub directly from them, it's insanely pricey. Instead, get a reseller like Real Debrid, which costs like 10% as much and also covers you for about two-dozen other file hosters. I highly recommend putting as much distance between your credit card and the company as possible, just for safety reasons. Using PaySafeCard is fine, as Real Debrid will never see your details in that case. I don't have any specific reason to be weary of them, I just don't trust random/small/hitherto unheard of companies as a rule.
All good advice. I used to find a lot of stuff by entering "site:rutracker.org" behind my query in my favorite search engine - don't know if that still works but I never needed an account there...
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what's even the point of age gating "explicit" music?
"oh no! "Speak To Me" by Pink Floyd has the fuck word in it! can't let my kids hear it!"
My parents only let me listen to Spanish language music when I was little, so I wouldn't understand the cursing.
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I mean, fuck Spotify and all that, but this one is really the UK government's doing.
And soon, this shit will come to every country. They're all drafting laws to mandate real age verification for adult content. The UK is just the first to implement it.
I mean, fuck it. At this point we might as well put our passport numbers in the HTTP headers.
Coming to a pop up near you. If they even bother to ask any more.
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I'd say it's definitely worth it.
Our brains shouldn't have to work harder to listen to lossy music, which is what happens even if you can't reliably perceive it.
Listening to music on acid (a lot) has really shaped my views of it and how even the most minor things can have a major impact on the final experience.
I'm not an audiophile though and can enjoy music in a wide range of formats and quality; I just prefer FLAC almost anywhere.*
*some songs sound 'better,' or at least more iconic in a lower quality
I'm curious. How does acid change listening to music?
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I mean, fuck it. At this point we might as well put our passport numbers in the HTTP headers.
Coming to a pop up near you. If they even bother to ask any more.
I think there are going to be a whole lot of phishing and blackmail scams in the future, preying on the stupid computer illiterate masses putting in their personal information into fake "age verifiers" to access porn or other adult content.
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I think there are going to be a whole lot of phishing and blackmail scams in the future, preying on the stupid computer illiterate masses putting in their personal information into fake "age verifiers" to access porn or other adult content.
It's a good thing it's so easy to tell them from the "trustworthy" ones...
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I jerked it to the Hanson mmbop video back in the nineties.
Found out later the girl was a boy.
You can judge all you want, but the general thing is that horny teenagers will jerk it to almost anything.
Nice to know that I'm not the only one. It was quite a surprise when I realized that they all are boys/men.
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Ngl, right now I'm endevouring to acquire more music in digital file format rather than streaming right now. Spotify is great, especially when your looking for individual songs that you'll only listen to a handful of times, and for discovering music, but once you lose access to it you're pretty fucked.
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Ngl, right now I'm endevouring to acquire more music in digital file format rather than streaming right now. Spotify is great, especially when your looking for individual songs that you'll only listen to a handful of times, and for discovering music, but once you lose access to it you're pretty fucked.
At this point even the music discovery is being enshitified with AI bands taking up more and more space as low-cost filler.
The last 10 years of the internet are committing seppuku in front of us. Gird your musical loins, friend. We'll need jams in MP3 format in the dystopian hellscape that's rushing to meet us.
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I'm curious. How does acid change listening to music?
You get to notice things you didn't notice before. It's a lot easier for our brains to 'zoom in' and process minute details that we don't perceive normally. Since lossless and lossy music is not the exact same audio vibrating the air, our brains are not going to interpret them exactly the same. This difference doesn't matter to most and isn't always perceivable, but it's there.
One thing that stood out to me during an acid trip was how moving my phone affected the playback speed of my bluetooth speakers. Moving it further away caused the song to slow down slightly for a moment, moving it closer caused the song to speed up slightly. You can imagine that this is because of some kind of 'space invaders' effect, where my phone is sending out signals at a constant rate and adjusting the distance to the receiver causes those signals to be received faster or slower, temporarily.
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Don't threaten, just do it!
I don't get why people are so stubborn to move away from corporate products.
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Nice to know that I'm not the only one. It was quite a surprise when I realized that they all are boys/men.
There's more out there that would never admit it because of that. Which is silly when you think about it.
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I like the random recommendations from time to time
I'm a bit afraid that their algorithm is shit
to be fair at this point I'm mostly on youtube music because it allows playing youtube videos as well, which sometimes is the only way of playing some musics
YouTube music won't play in the background though, so it's a pain whilst driving and navigating traffic or routes. Some of my friends make playlists on there and share them, so I do use it sometimes.
But absolutely use the service that brings you joy, not the ones that I prefer!
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There are fans of Spotify?
I could tell Spotify was trash when I first heard about it. That Spotify decided to enshitify their already bad site makes it even worse.
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The streaming services are run by shithead C-suites who think last quarter is the way it's always been. They forget the only reason most of us use their services is someone more visionary than them made it more convenient than piracy half a generation ago. Let's remind them there's an alternative.
I have like 5 alternates I would use before Spotify.
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Don't threaten, just do it!
I don't get why people are so stubborn to move away from corporate products.
I don't use any proprietary apps. Only FOSS apps installed on my phone.
