Even 720p videos can include up to 192kbps AAC audio, but who knows how many times it gets transcoded between upload and delivery in various sizes and formats.
I was just thinking "nobody tell them about youtube-dl"! I wouldn't be surprised if half of these YouTube-to-MP3 sites are using it in the background - why wouldn't they? Should be pretty easy to containerize the program. I actually wonder sometimes how they are able to provide these conversions given progressions in ad-blockers.
There is absolutely no way to stop pirating. Long before the internet was fast enough (or even existing) people were recording songs with phones, copying tapes, ripping records, etc. Anything a human can hear can be recorded. Anything that a human can see can be recorded. It's a losing battle.
There is evidence to suggest it helps improve sales overall [1] [2]. Like most laws, this will probably have the biggest impact on poorer people who can't afford to buy every single at the price point they charge.
If they'd just make the content available on Spotify, which all of my pirate friendly but otherwise non-technical friends use, they'd have their conversion. Piracy continues to solve the discovery and "listen to just this one song I like" problem that the industry ignores, and until the paid options are as useful as the pirate versions, the battle will continue.
(Also, I'm ignoring some philosophical things: I like to own things and not stream them for bandwidth reasons, and tech folks tend to not like DRM, but the general public doesn't seem to care much about those things.)
My guess would be that the music industry would rather point people at the download sites, that can be stopped with a court-order than point people at youtube-dl, which would require more effort to suppress.
I would also argue the music industry cares more about control than about raw sales. This is because, they aim for: A. a fixed tax of "what you're willing to pay for entertainment" from everyone in a given country, B. an ability to manage trends and use that trend management to bring residuals (movies, toys, fashion-shoot, whatever for their established artists). C. a strong bargaining position versus their artists - the more they can say "we made you, we can break you and replace you", the more leverage they have in negotiations.
Of course there is, but the regime have to be much more repressive than 1950s Soviet Union to achieve that.
> Mostly made through the 1950s and 1960s, ribs were a black market method of smuggling in and distributing prohibited music by foreign and emigre musicians banned from broadcast in the Soviet Union. Real medical X-rays, purchased or picked up from the trash from hospitals and clinics were used to create the recordings.
Or their outdated business modal is the biggest threat to their industry.
Honestly, my thought on anything like this is 'just go bankrupt and be done with it'. Your business model clearly doesn't work anymore, you may as well just accept it and shut down.
Then again, that's my opinion on basically every business complaining to the government about how the internet is taking away their profits/how competitors/startups whatever are taking their market/can't stay solvent because of bad decisions (see banks). Capitalism is capitalism, the market is right, and if you can't deal with it, you go under. Simple as that.
That is precisely why antitrust issues begin long before a company gets a monopoly. Once a company becomes large enough where paying for friendly laws becomes easier than innovating, markets are going to stop working. If an organization is too big to fail, it's too big to be allowed to live.
Explain how it's an outdated business model? Content creator (musician, film studio) makes content. They must make money to recoup the costs of making said content so they can (at least) make more of the same content.
Are you saying all musicians should just go back to only doing live shows and concerts and give up recording music altogether?
This kind of comment just blatantly ignores the fact that there are very real issues at play, especially when big names in music are taking their music down from places like Spotify because they're just hardly getting any reward for it.
For the big labels, most of the money is not going into the costs of making the content itself - most of it is going into marketing, executives, etc. The musicians themselves get a small portion of it.
The model faces some threat due to the shift of musicians moving to do their own marketing themselves without a label, and releasing the music themselves onto services like Bandcamp, or even directly to services such as Amazon, iTunes, etc. The internet has provided a powerful medium to fight against the entrenched interests of the big labels that don't feel like they need to do more for their artists.
The business model relies upon the scarcity of copies and that the copyright owner is the only person able to make copies. That was reasonable many years ago, but today copies can be made and published by anybody with a computer in milliseconds. The business model was overtaken by technology a long time ago, but instead of shifting to a different model, they rely upon the law enforcing a kind of Ludditism where we all pretend that this amazing copying and publishing technology doesn't exist for anybody but the copyright holders.
There are alternative business models – you mention live shows and concerts, but there's also things like the street performer protocol. But as long as the law artificially props up the old-fashioned way of doing things, there's no impetus to try other things. They aren't intrinsically entitled to this specific business model and it makes less and less sense to keep up this weird fiction for this reason.
Both for songs and for regular videos, even vlogs. You don't have the copyright to the recording, the creator of the video (or the owner for the sync/mechanical rights for a piece of music) has.
Really? I was under the impression that there's no legal distinction between "the website sending you a file and you caching it in memory" and "the website sending you a file and you storing it on your hard drive". (Redistributing the file, or breaking DRM, are different matters.)
The have a terms of service, and ripping in this way is against it.
"It IS illegal to convert copyrighted music videos into downloads. That said, nobody has been sued for this (yet).
Again, it is completely legal to watch any video you want on YouTube. Streaming from a legitimate site is permitted under copyright law. And if it doesn’t involve creating a video mp3 or download, you’re in the clear.
But, it IS illegal to create a personal download conversion of a copyrighted work under US copyright law. That includes an mp3, mp4, or any other download file type from your videos convert process."
>Given the video is available publicly, copying the video is what happens every time you watch it from your computer.
What's copying technically and what's from a legal perspective is not necessarily the same thing (and one version can be allowed while another is not).
>I'd argue it's covered by fair use but I'm not a lawyer.
As per Google's YouTube terms of service: "you agree not to access Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Player, or such other means YouTube may explicitly designate for this purpose".
There are also more nuances to it. E.g. lots of songs and movies on YouTube are uploaded illegally, and the ability to download personal copies doesn't extend to illegal material produced due a copyright violation. That for example is the case in German law. (So e.g. an official VEVO music video would be ok).
>This is essentially taping TV or radio, which is legal, right?
Taping TV or radio in some countries is allowed as part of a time-shifting permission (to be able to watch/hear at a later date when it's not longer broadcast). But technically this applies to broadcast media, not to online video which you can watch at a later time online anyway.
Note also that "fair use" is not applicable outside the US, specific laws apply to different countries, and in Europe things are usually towards more the creators/publisher's side.
Not true, at least not everywhere, for instance in France, there is a right to make a copy of a copyrighted work for one's own private use. Or rather, this is not a right but an exception to the right of the copyright holder who cannot restrict that specific usage. A tax is paid on each blank media sold and distribited to copyright holders in compensation.
There are similar laws in Germany, Belgium, Spain, and maybe other countries.
If the product is DRM-ridden garbage music platforms, vendor lock-in and being forced to buy specific devices, then no, I don't want the product. I want clean MP3 or FLAC downloads, such that I own the product I bought and nobody can take it away from me. That is why I've spent hundreds of dollars (or more? I've lost count) on Bandcamp.com and will continue to do so.
Innovation takes many forms, sometimes in selling a product, sometimes in securing a product's exclusivity - such as DRM.
Look only as far as YouTube to see what content creators do when the money well dries up - a lot have turned to selling products/advertising themselves with direct deals (dollar shave club, Nord VPN, etc). Another method is through "merch", something Disney for example has been doing for years.
Besides, many Countries simply don't respect media copyright full-stop, it wouldn't harm creators to learn to hustle for other (potentially wider) markets.
What is the music industry's product though? The musician? Or just the marketing? Certainly not the music, they show no respect for the music.
To be clear, I think you are right, people want the product. Just I think the music industry product is actually facilitating groupthink about popularity. Even then they have a 99 in 100 failure rate.
It used to be about distribution. Seems pretty clear (from anecdata) that artists these days selling independently or even on platforms like bandcamp (which is awesome) make more on a couple hundred sales than artists with record companies make on a couple thousand.
And i think you are right that innovation won't help them. Or at least, this is actually the way they innovate.. Through bullying and legislation. And to that end, I hope they go to hell.
How about buying what they have the sole rights to sell, instead of downloading without compensating them? Or just getting something else, which is available freely?
That the artist might not get most of the money, is not an argument, since the artist already signed agreeing to that.
No problem then, because those who get their songs off of YouTube are not their customers (or, in any case, are not their customers for those particular songs).
you can have my youtube download site any time, what is very important to me is the ability to open web media with VLC and use the nifty tools available, such as recording transcoding and restreaming [yadayadayada]...
... i think youtube itself is the biggest online threat to all internet media...
Anything can be cracked. The only way to not get your content copied is to not give it to the user in the first place. If the user can see/hear the content then he can also copy it.
Streaming music services does not have that obscure songs one might like, some remixes, not every country has universal internet coverage and not everyone likes to waste dataplans on music etc. etc.
"Websites dedicated to “stream ripping” music from YouTube represent the biggest threat to the global music business, industry figures have warned...
... estimates suggesting that a third of 16-24-year-olds in the UK have ripped music from the Google-owned platform."
I find the "1 in 3 young people have done it" highly suspect, especially if that estimate comes from "industry figures". Even if that were true, "1 in 3 have done it" doesn't say anything about the frequency at which they do it.
I think this is mostly alarmist, and my personal opinion is that music piracy is in decline in the face of easy and cheap legal alternatives.
Which of course is added complexity and a source of incompatibility between playback devices and screens. Can't count the number of times in the early years of HDMI that I couldn't play a DVD because my projector didn't support it.
On the other hand, the pirated copy still worked great.
So you don't think it possible for an inaudible DRM scheme to be embedded into the music? Perhaps a signal to any digital recorders? I wouldn't put it past Apple to forbid one Apple product from recording anything broadcast by another.
This is already a thing in another medium: money. Digital printers, and some software packages, are trained to identify embedded signals to disrupt attempt to scan/print paper currency.
There are cases where "inaudible" watermarks in paid audio downloads are actually audible[0], meaning that buying the FLAC download gives a worse experience than a properly ripped CD.
We talk about the technical futility of copy protection. Or the erosion of fair use rights. But I have little sympathy for the parasitic websites that have built a business model out of violating Youtube's TOS. When Mozilla recently axed 23 extensions that were leaking browser history, 7 of them were for downloading videos or blocking ads on Youtube. This cottage industry is full of actors much less principled than the copyright cartel.
Now, if Google was smart they'd find a way to sell downloads. But good luck getting the media licensers to agree to it.
I don't know about that, there's plenty of innocuous extensions that either started off with hidden bad intentions or sold their userbase and went rogue.
It might interest some of you to know that youtube-dl has an awesome archive feature which will allow you to scrape a playlist periodically and only download new additions to that playlist.
So when I stumble across a track I like, I just add it to my “favourites” playlist, and my PC at home will automatically download it, convert it to MP3, trim any silence from the beginning and end of the track, attempt to tag it (although that fails more often than not), and it’ll be there waiting for me the next time I feel like sorting through my music download folder.
74 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadYou can have my Transmission and SkyTorrents over my dead body!
For videos I can see the value though, anything below 720 is quite obvious.
There is absolutely no way to stop pirating. Long before the internet was fast enough (or even existing) people were recording songs with phones, copying tapes, ripping records, etc. Anything a human can hear can be recorded. Anything that a human can see can be recorded. It's a losing battle.
There is evidence to suggest it helps improve sales overall [1] [2]. Like most laws, this will probably have the biggest impact on poorer people who can't afford to buy every single at the price point they charge.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...
[2] https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...
(Also, I'm ignoring some philosophical things: I like to own things and not stream them for bandwidth reasons, and tech folks tend to not like DRM, but the general public doesn't seem to care much about those things.)
I would also argue the music industry cares more about control than about raw sales. This is because, they aim for: A. a fixed tax of "what you're willing to pay for entertainment" from everyone in a given country, B. an ability to manage trends and use that trend management to bring residuals (movies, toys, fashion-shoot, whatever for their established artists). C. a strong bargaining position versus their artists - the more they can say "we made you, we can break you and replace you", the more leverage they have in negotiations.
Of course there is, but the regime have to be much more repressive than 1950s Soviet Union to achieve that.
> Mostly made through the 1950s and 1960s, ribs were a black market method of smuggling in and distributing prohibited music by foreign and emigre musicians banned from broadcast in the Soviet Union. Real medical X-rays, purchased or picked up from the trash from hospitals and clinics were used to create the recordings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribs_%28recordings%29
There weren't piracy in North Korea until 1990s AFAIK.
Honestly, my thought on anything like this is 'just go bankrupt and be done with it'. Your business model clearly doesn't work anymore, you may as well just accept it and shut down.
Then again, that's my opinion on basically every business complaining to the government about how the internet is taking away their profits/how competitors/startups whatever are taking their market/can't stay solvent because of bad decisions (see banks). Capitalism is capitalism, the market is right, and if you can't deal with it, you go under. Simple as that.
Are you saying all musicians should just go back to only doing live shows and concerts and give up recording music altogether?
This kind of comment just blatantly ignores the fact that there are very real issues at play, especially when big names in music are taking their music down from places like Spotify because they're just hardly getting any reward for it.
The model faces some threat due to the shift of musicians moving to do their own marketing themselves without a label, and releasing the music themselves onto services like Bandcamp, or even directly to services such as Amazon, iTunes, etc. The internet has provided a powerful medium to fight against the entrenched interests of the big labels that don't feel like they need to do more for their artists.
There are alternative business models – you mention live shows and concerts, but there's also things like the street performer protocol. But as long as the law artificially props up the old-fashioned way of doing things, there's no impetus to try other things. They aren't intrinsically entitled to this specific business model and it makes less and less sense to keep up this weird fiction for this reason.
Both for songs and for regular videos, even vlogs. You don't have the copyright to the recording, the creator of the video (or the owner for the sync/mechanical rights for a piece of music) has.
"It IS illegal to convert copyrighted music videos into downloads. That said, nobody has been sued for this (yet).
Again, it is completely legal to watch any video you want on YouTube. Streaming from a legitimate site is permitted under copyright law. And if it doesn’t involve creating a video mp3 or download, you’re in the clear.
But, it IS illegal to create a personal download conversion of a copyrighted work under US copyright law. That includes an mp3, mp4, or any other download file type from your videos convert process."
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/10/youtube-to-mp3-s...
It is certainly violating YouTube terms of service.
Given the video is available publicly, copying the video is what happens every time you watch it from your computer.
The conversion point doesn't apply as YouTube videos are mp4 and you can just play a mp4 as audio.
I'd argue it's covered by fair use but I'm not a lawyer.
What's copying technically and what's from a legal perspective is not necessarily the same thing (and one version can be allowed while another is not).
>I'd argue it's covered by fair use but I'm not a lawyer.
Fair use is a US thing.
There are also more nuances to it. E.g. lots of songs and movies on YouTube are uploaded illegally, and the ability to download personal copies doesn't extend to illegal material produced due a copyright violation. That for example is the case in German law. (So e.g. an official VEVO music video would be ok).
>This is essentially taping TV or radio, which is legal, right?
Taping TV or radio in some countries is allowed as part of a time-shifting permission (to be able to watch/hear at a later date when it's not longer broadcast). But technically this applies to broadcast media, not to online video which you can watch at a later time online anyway.
Note also that "fair use" is not applicable outside the US, specific laws apply to different countries, and in Europe things are usually towards more the creators/publisher's side.
There are similar laws in Germany, Belgium, Spain, and maybe other countries.
Look only as far as YouTube to see what content creators do when the money well dries up - a lot have turned to selling products/advertising themselves with direct deals (dollar shave club, Nord VPN, etc). Another method is through "merch", something Disney for example has been doing for years.
Besides, many Countries simply don't respect media copyright full-stop, it wouldn't harm creators to learn to hustle for other (potentially wider) markets.
To be clear, I think you are right, people want the product. Just I think the music industry product is actually facilitating groupthink about popularity. Even then they have a 99 in 100 failure rate.
It used to be about distribution. Seems pretty clear (from anecdata) that artists these days selling independently or even on platforms like bandcamp (which is awesome) make more on a couple hundred sales than artists with record companies make on a couple thousand.
And i think you are right that innovation won't help them. Or at least, this is actually the way they innovate.. Through bullying and legislation. And to that end, I hope they go to hell.
That the artist might not get most of the money, is not an argument, since the artist already signed agreeing to that.
Companies exist to serve their customers. The companies that forget this tend to decline.
No problem then, because those who get their songs off of YouTube are not their customers (or, in any case, are not their customers for those particular songs).
>Listening to music is the "biggest piracy threat" to music industry
... i think youtube itself is the biggest online threat to all internet media...
When and if that happens, I hope PeerTube and other video hosts can take off in the fediverse.
Anything can be cracked. The only way to not get your content copied is to not give it to the user in the first place. If the user can see/hear the content then he can also copy it.
My impression is that listening to locally stored mp3 files is becoming less and less common in favor of streaming music services.
... estimates suggesting that a third of 16-24-year-olds in the UK have ripped music from the Google-owned platform."
I find the "1 in 3 young people have done it" highly suspect, especially if that estimate comes from "industry figures". Even if that were true, "1 in 3 have done it" doesn't say anything about the frequency at which they do it.
I think this is mostly alarmist, and my personal opinion is that music piracy is in decline in the face of easy and cheap legal alternatives.
Bloody hell!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
Stop protecting bytes from being copied!
On the other hand, the pirated copy still worked great.
This is already a thing in another medium: money. Digital printers, and some software packages, are trained to identify embedded signals to disrupt attempt to scan/print paper currency.
This exists commercially: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
I don't know if it's truly "inaudible", maybe some experts can detect it? But probably 99% of people can't.
[0]: https://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermar...
Now, if Google was smart they'd find a way to sell downloads. But good luck getting the media licensers to agree to it.
We already have content from the music companies to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, which is exactly what Netflix does.
In fact we had streaming services for music long before Netflix was a thing (e.g. Real's), so theirs is hardly "forward thinking".
So when I stumble across a track I like, I just add it to my “favourites” playlist, and my PC at home will automatically download it, convert it to MP3, trim any silence from the beginning and end of the track, attempt to tag it (although that fails more often than not), and it’ll be there waiting for me the next time I feel like sorting through my music download folder.
downloaded.txt will be used to store a list of video IDs. Any ID listed will not be re-downloaded