"Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region."
This has been the case since before launch and is also a reason why pirates are still a thing.
Apparently Prime video has "suicide club" according to where to watch. But not in my country lol.
That's what I don't understand. The odds that more than 10 people in Mongolia are going to give two shits about say an arthouse drama about an immigrant Latino family in Yellowknife are incredibly low. No matter how well-drawn the characters, or compelling the story, obscure arthouse films are not expected to find a big paying audience. So why not make that film free to watch in any market that you don't expect to be interested in it? How much revenue do you really stand to lose?
And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies. But now, most people I know are back to pirating because it doesn’t require an eclectic taste to find that you need 6 different streaming services to meet your needs. The film industry was so close, and dropped that ball.
What do you think the biggest category is, by every measure, on YouTube?
There are lots of distribution and payment mechanics changes over the years across creative industries. So it's very hard to generalize. But strictly in terms of piracy, there are more than enough non-monetized audio uploads on YouTube to say, music piracy is alive and well.
Pirates couldn't possibly beat that if they tried. But it only exists because of an accident of history: YouTube got big on pirated content early enough and fast enough they could transition to "content id" instead of getting sued to oblivion.
I hope there's data hoarders out there that have the collection. I hope the work continues out of sight.
What when it closed:
Torrents: 2,588,359
Releases: 1,066,026
Artists: 884,432
"Perfect" FLACs: 863,944
Redacted now:
Torrents: 3,225,076
Releases: 1,675,757
Artists: 1,253,924
"Perfect" FLACs: 2,023,560
How do you know for certain that the classic 1960's song youre listening to on a streaming service is the exact same song that was played in the 1960's? There's a trust issue that comes with streaming platforms.
> stop it don't look at the gunmen
> you don't want to get the soldiers wondering
> whether you're going to run or not
> because if you run then you might get [EMPTY SPACE]
This is the explicit version available on the app. The word was "shot." The album version says the word. As of today there's no way to get the album version on YouTube Music, the way it was when I first hit "like."
I pirated the song the day it was released, so I still have the artist's original version. Ever since then, I've always wondered how we can trust that streaming platforms with a monopoly on a service, will provide unaltered versions of an artist's work.
Obligatory billy woods + kenny segal's Spongebob: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83F4JpVu61k
I've been streaming music since Yahoo music, but have started to change my ways by buying vinyl or digital through the artists own site or bandcamp. It's less about my music changing and more about supporting the artists instead of the corporations taking a big cut.
I've never heard of a (legal) streaming service that edits the songs submitted to its platform outside of YouTube (which can mute sections of videos that contain copyrighted audio)
https://www.beastiemania.com/songspotlight/show.php?s=jimmyj...
I’m sure someone could find an even older example.
For music I really care about culturally, it's absolutely physical and backed up digitally.
But 95% of my listening is definitely streaming services.
For movies, I _probably_ don't care if I get the theatrical cut, extended cut, un-rated version and so on (unless we are talking about the Abyss), so I sort of see your point.
But for me, that is why I curate my own music collection locally and run navidrome to stream.
Not nearly enough. A large swath of music I enjoy is simply not available via streaming at all. And what is there can disappear or be altered at any time.
It's worse: the movie you want to watch might only be on pay per view on google movies, even though it was on Netflix last year.
1. It's not unlimited access, it's access over the Internet. Which one doesn't have always and everywhere.
2. It's absolutely not every recording ever created; pretty sure it's not even half.
3. It's convenient, but not too convenient, because access, arrangement, playback GUI etc. is controlled, to a great extent, but the relevant service.
4. For most people in the world, this is not affordable. The median per-capita income in 2023 was ~2920 USD [1]; and you're asking for, say, 7.5 USD/month = 90 USD per year, or nearly 5% of one's income. No can do.
5. Even in richer countries - this stuff adds up! After a year at 90 USD - you don't accumulate any music you can then hear. So, you need to pay that sum for your entire life, let's say ages 15 to 95, e.g. 90 * 80 = 7,200 USD for music. Not cheap.
[1]: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/
Most subscription services adjust the service prices to what specific markets can stomach. Spotify in the US costs $11.99/month, but it's $5.86/month (23.99 PLN) in Poland.
- flip on airplane mode
- tap on Spotify
- tap one of my playlists
- tap ▶
- music starts coming out of my headphones
I guess I must be imagining the soundwaves
Knowing "not a single person who pirates music anymore" is no reflection on music(al) pirates - maybe for some reason the piraters tend to end up in different circles than the kind of people who think spotify has "nearly every record ever created".
On top of what you said in your reply above, I also (partially) blame spotify for the fact that when you ask people what music they like now, a lot of people are quite likely to say "oh, everything!".
There is no convenience in subscriptions, just some sort of pathology akin to recreational heroin, where it lulls you into a narcotic coma, death just waiting a few years down the road.
> And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies.
There was never any such time. There was a time when Netflix had a catalog of a few thousand movies. My Plex server has 6700, and I'm not even hardcore. I estimate that were I to get every new release, and work backwards through previous years to 1995 or so, I'd need storage for at least 30,000 movies just for English language titles. Television is an order of magnitude larger still, and that's if I stay away from reality tv shows. Organizing these would become a burden... if lumped all into the same library, a person might have trouble paging through all the movies that started with S just to find what they were looking for (already started to become an issue at about 5000). I'll need to start saving up for the two synology expansion bays that my nas supports.
The deal for us now is, if there's something we want to watch, we will enable that service for a month or two, then cancel it.
So only one at a time, and often none. We haven't noticed any loss of entertainment. We have a plex server with loads of great stuff on it, and satellite TV (Freeview) for general TV watching.
Do you know any single person who travels outside of 4G coverage?
Because the $5/$10 mo doesn't do much for you in a National or State Park in the US two hours away from a major city.
So, if I have a playlist in Spotify to listen to on long hikes, I will find out that I can't play it when I get to the hike (unless I use Spotify all the time, or think about this crap in advance).
Thanks, I understand that I can jump through hoops to make it work.
But an MP3 works 100% of the time, every time, without any of that crap, or thinking; I copy the file to a memory file once, and that's it. No passwords, no accounts, no internet, no logging in.
Many bands I listen to have Bandcamp/SoundCloud accounts, which offer DRM-free audio downloads. I use that when it's an option - and it pays the artists orders of magnitude more than Spotify ever will.
If I have a CD from a local show, I will rip that.
Otherwise, I am not going to make my life more inconvenient for the sake of a major artist getting $0.000002 from my Spotify subscription. I'll pirate their work.
Yes, that is the premise of this line of conversation, that you're using a music service all the time.
(Also it might be able to check in even when you're not actively using it.)
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/add-music-and-listen-...
The problem isn't lack of data service on ships. It's things stopping to work offline.
Really? That's surprising to me. A lot of people I know are basically dependent on Soulseek
https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/29776767664145-SE...
I can buy most of these games on steam with a classic bundle ~36$ now.
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/10143/SEGA_Mega_Drive_...
A great price at 1$ a game. I can also boot up an emulator and play all these games, plus more for free. I don't feel compelled to buy the bundle.
That's what happened a couple years ago – they removed Sonics 1-3 (+ Knuckles) from Steam as individual titles, then released Sonic Origins, which included all of those plus Sonic CD.
The SEGA Classics games came out 14 years ago, so they probably want to release these titles again with an updated emulator and market it as a new collection. This seems especially likely to me, since they're delisting the existing Classics Collection title on consoles.
Rarely does anyone have to ask "where can I listen to that album?", because essentially all of the music streaming services have the rights to essentially all music. "Where can I watch that film?" is still a very real problem.
But, with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services, pirating is starting to be very enticing once again. The thing I would miss the most is the recommendation algorithm, which tends to be pretty good on Netflix.
It's been the norm for many of us for decades. Even if you want to pay and stay an "honest citizen", you're not found of being worthy by most streaming/distribution platforms. For the longest time I thought geolocking will die out and we will be able to access the same stuff you have, but it's going the opposite way.
As the result, "piracy" never died out here, it's more alive than it's ever been. Take the hint. It's a true pleasure to see dozens of countries from around the world represented in the peer list of my torrent client. At least there is one area where we can work together for the good of all.
(Gabe is one of very few exceptions, and Steam is a very successful platform commercially speaking, once again proving the old quote, by gaben himself IIRC.)
Ironically, now it's possible to have the best of both worlds by paying for the subscription to get access to the catalog, then using DRM-stripping downloaders to get local copies of everything you actually care about.
Regarding video specifically, one problem I see with the streaming services is the increasing push of New content. Streaming services like Netflix or Hulu or Paramount+ are really dependent on new subscribers, which means they tend to focus on new and exclusive content to draw in new people, so they prioritize that (to a fault imho).
Many of us still want to rewatch those shows from the 90s we loved. Paramount+ specifically is "The Star Trek Streaming Service", and I know the folks over on reddit have their beef with P+ for seemingly de-prioritizing it instead of milking an extensive library like a cash cow. The past few years I've been digging into older movies - some black and white, silent, foreign, or weird avant-garde stuff. Streaming really drops the ball there, but I can understand how the business model doesn't really favor that.
It wasn’t, teenagers don’t give a shit, and torrent sites like Piratebay had trusted uploaders (green/pink skull) and comments.
Steam sucked initially but it kept increasing its value add (cloud saves / settings sync, easy voice chat before Discord, Steam Workshop for mods, etc) and simultaneously the sales got better and better.
Why pirate a game when you can wait a couple of months to buy it for 66% off, niceties included.
I'm a huge fan of this ultra-curated approach, since it lets me find a lot of things that I'd otherwise have to hunt for, and would likely miss out on.
[0] https://mubi.com
> As of September 2023, The Fall had been unavailable on streaming services or rental services, making it notoriously difficult to access with secondhand Blu-ray copies of the film being very expensive.
But apparently that isn't the case anymore! MUBI bought the rights earlier this year, and it looks like I can watch it through Amazon Video if I sign up for a MUBI trial.
EDIT: I maybe should have visited https://mubi.com/ before commenting - clips from The Fall is the very first thing they show.
Here in Europe MUBI[0] is an alternative to Criterion. I’ve tried it during lockdown but the streaming quality was seriously lacking, and their library was really small. I’m curious if they improved in those areas
[0]: https://mubi.com/en/
Until we live in a world where the conglomerates taking their huge slice of the revenue from artists and creatives are also stewards of culture, acting in the best interest of culture itself, I couldn't care less about their bottom dollar.
No connected experience (usually); you have to play in offline modes only, sometimes with more compromised. Game updates are often lagging. Others have mentioned viruses already. Steam sales are frequent so /r/patientgamer types can just wait till the game becomes affordable where-as there's a rarely discounts available & a patchwork of streaming services.
Piracy still remains a supremely important means of both accessing and archiving content after it stops being a moneymaker, or simply when it pauses being one.
Case in point - plenty of stories about games on being officially published by the content owners... with cracks, after the source code was lost (or wasn't in a shape to be rebuilt), and officially selling the pirated version was the only thing the publisher could figure out how to do[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_...
The worst movies on Netflix are just boring.
Piracy has all but ended for movies.
The issue with streaming is that there are movie streaming apps (for TVs, browsers, etc.) that basically offer the Netflix interface.
I know of people with hundreds of TB of movies and series: catalog in the five digits (so more than 10 000 movies and series).
In Europe there's also the totally rampant "IPTV" craze: where even retired boomers (not necessarily the most tech savvy audience) buy/rent an illegal little box with all of Disney+Netflix+HBO etc. plus also all the regular TV channels (of the entire world).
I don't know in which world movies and series piracy disappeared but it's certainly not in the world in which I live in (FWIW I pay Netflix).
I actually don't know if there's ever been an era with more movie piracy than nowadays!?
In other words, if the art film industry wants piracy to stop, it needs to bring all its materials together in a cheap subscription store that people can afford. Criterion[0] is one such product with outstanding content, real human curation, and a lower price than mainstream movie providers.
[0] https://www.criterionchannel.com/