This age-verification bullshit is a fine example of how governments represent their rulers, not their citizens.
Spotify fans threaten to return to piracy as music streamer introduces new face-scanning age checks in the UK
Submitted 8 months ago by QuantumSpecter@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
haloduder@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I dont understand this take. This is a “think of the children” bs that panders to (certain) citizens. Also a thinly veiled attempt at data collection of its citizens en masse
Reddfugee42@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Sounds like you understand the take perfectly
elvis_depresley@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
What do you think of Qobuz? From what I’ve seen, it’s got more stuff than bandcamp (at least from my library). It seems to pay the artists well too.
haloduder@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
I just use Pandora for radio and youtube for specific songs.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 8 months ago
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.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 8 months ago
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.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 8 months ago
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.
Quatlicopatlix@feddit.org 8 months ago
Its not like every industrie can somehow lobby every consumer right away when someone wants to make a new law… oh wait they do…
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 8 months ago
Actually, I don’t think this is industry mandated. I don’t think it’s in the interest of tech and content companies to create more friction to access their services. This one seems to have more to do with the governments wanting to exert more control over online affairs, and of course, over its citizens.
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 8 months ago
I’m returning to car boot sales to buy cubic meters of CDs.
That, and BandCamp.tarknassus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 8 months ago
I found it was well worth ripping to flac securely using EAC (no idea what the modern setup is).
As then I knew I had a perfect copy to make whatever MP3 I wanted in the future from.Nowadays, I convert everything to V0 for portable use, but who knows what the future may hold.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
btaf45@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I have like 5 alternates I would use before Spotify.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Well bully for you
null@lemmy.nullspace.lol 8 months ago
Bandcamp, Soulseek, Navidrome, ListenBrainz.
Has been a pretty solid Spotify-replacement stack.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Do it.
It’s easy. Just use a Youtube-to-MP3 converter.
PagPag@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is cool if you’re okay with low fidelity music.
After years of lossless and headphones to distinguish, this sounds like fingernails on a chalk board.
It’s akin to using a tape deck to aux adapter in an old car or recording a tape off of an old boombox radio lol. I’d rather listen to nothing.
haloduder@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
You can download FLACs using Nicotine+.
wabasso@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I believe you so this is a genuine question: did you ever test your kbps threshold for being able to distinguish from lossless?
I remember in the MP3 and Winamp days, I was convinced I could detect anything below 192 kbps. Obviously depends on the content, and I’m implying 44 kHz minimum.
JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Do it
Tattorack@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I mean… I’m already using Nicotine+ (Soulseek).
YellowDog@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Considering how much Spotify pays artists per listens, piracy is barely any different in that regard.
xiwi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Wrong
Piracy is 100x more ethical
dinckelman@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is the most upsetting part. If you’re a solo artist without a label, you need what’s essentially a million listens to break minimum wage. For bands, and anyone with a label, even that’s practically out of question. This shit is why everyone sells 75$ t-shirts at shows
Allemaniac@lemmy.world 8 months ago
what are “spotify fans”? Spotify paid 150k $ for Trump’s inauguration party, f them. They do not deserve my money
SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I left Spotify for many reasons including this. They’ve only proven that they do not care about artists at all. I remember before I left, many of the tracks that came up “based on my playlist” were just random AI generated crap.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Seriously, fuck Spotify and another using that error-prone, intrusive, insecure bullshit.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 8 months ago
You can say a lot of Spotify and of Apple, but the iOS app of Spotify is basically bug free and has been bug free for more than a decade now for me. The webclient has been buggy for me though.
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 8 months ago
Where is Spotify error prone? I dont use it that much, but I havent encountered a bug once.
MBech@feddit.dk 8 months ago
I use it a lot, and have been for 10 years or so. I have never had any sort of error. It has simply always worked exactly like it’s supposed to.
I don’t know anything about it being intrusive or insecure, and definately need a source on that, but it’s possible those criticisms are valid, but again, need a damn source.
JokeDeity@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Personally I could never get into the whole Spotify and Pandora thing. I want to listen to what I want to listen to and when I want to listen to it, without ridiculous restrictions and rules. YouTube has honestly been the far better choice for music for me.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 8 months ago
Pandora is sadly not available in NL and if I saw it correctly Pandora is also America which does mean that it will turn to shit somewhere in the future.
JustARaccoon@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s mostly the discovery aspect, it’s easy to find new and emerging artists through these services, and they make playing that music very convenient. YouTube does have some of it with YouTube music but I’ve not found the algorithm to be as good as Spotify or Tidal
_g_be@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I used to use and praise Spotify and their algorithm, but I was starting to find that it would insist on playing the same 20 or 50 songs regardless of the playlist I was trying to generate music suggestions from. I read a rumor somewhere that it was a way to decrease the load on their servers and rely more on the cached songs already on the device, and got sick of that enough to switch to Pandora after over 10 years of Spotify
The_v@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Having a collection of music in files that I own has been my go-to for years. Currently VLC says I have 701 hours of music in files on my phone. That’s only 29.2 days worth.
ZeffSyde@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Man, I had around 10 gigs of vintage mp3s that is created since the days of Limewire/Napster. Uploaded it all to Google Music and lost track of the external I’d had the collection stored on. Whatever, it’s all in the cloud now.
Then it wasn’t.
I really, Really, need to back up all of my Gdocs, just in case that service ceases to be.
(I wonder if ancient crunchy low bitrate mp3s will be an aesthetic, the way that dusty vinyl or worn out tapes are?)
JokeDeity@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I used to do that and I do still have a lot of music from that time on my computer, but somewhere along the line I stopped downloading music and just started listening to it on YouTube whenever I thought of something in particular.
SethTaylor@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Tidal is pretty good these days. Qobuz too
Sterling@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
We switched to Deezer about a month ago and are liking it. Flow seems to find music I like way better than Spotify’s DJ or “for you” playlists.
rmuk@feddit.uk 8 months ago
I’m having a pretty good time with Qobuz. Their curated collections are actually really good and I’ve found a lot of new stuff in there; it’s not the “here’s what the record label is shoveling this week” like on Spotify. Also, the high bitrate stuff… I hate to admit it, but it really does sound better.
Allemaniac@lemmy.world 8 months ago
do they have a lot of german music too, or are they focused on american / french music?
jnod4@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Tidal is pretty harsh on vpns and my whole network is behind something most of the time :(
Medic8teMe@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Bandcamp is owned by union busters. Only use on Bandcamp Friday for best effect.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 8 months ago
If I am paying for my account personally, with a card in my name, what more do they need?
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 8 months ago
They want to scan your face to get as many images of people of stated ages to feed into their facial recognition system. Do not for one moment think it is for anything else.
ZeffSyde@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah, they want to be able to ‘People that look like This listen to This’ so that advertisers have more options when they are locking down commercials.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 8 months ago
Well sure, the real reason is always data harvesting.
clot27@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
tf is spotify “fans”? more like spotify “users”
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 8 months ago
Fans of things that are provisioned by Spotify.
Allemaniac@lemmy.world 8 months ago
doesn’t make them fans of spotify though
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 8 months ago
LOL ‘Spotify fans’ buch of losers
gerowen@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Buy and store your own music. HDTracks and 7Digital both sell high quality DRM free downloads, or you can just swing by your local Walmart or Dollar Store and grab some CDs to rip.
Or you could go sailing, that’s always an option…
goatmeal@midwest.social 8 months ago
Libraries can have pretty good CD collections too
filcuk@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
As much as I’d like to do that, I have listened to over 7000 artists on Spotify.
I simply don’t have the time (or money) to look those up individually.
So I can either choose to have worse experience, or stick with Spotify for now.gerowen@lemmy.world 8 months ago
There is a cost to convenience ratio. Each individual has to decide based on their own ethics and preferences whether they’re willing to sacrifice their own personal experience for the right of ownership. I personally chose to cancel my Spotify subscription some time ago and start buying digital downloads and CDs again.
madcaesar@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Is there rippers for Spotify?
gerowen@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That I don’t know. I mean you could always just use something to record the sound played by your PC, but at that point A) You’re not getting as good of quality as you would from an actual download of the source material and you’d have to manually assign metadata, make sure no notifications or other sounds played, make sure your recording settings were optimum, etc. It’s easier, right now at least, to just buy what you want on CD or from a store that sells digital downloads legitimately.
TuxEnthusiast@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
I just use spot-dl to download my music…
roserose56@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Do it! I challenge you! People nowdays won’t drop an every day thing just like that.
Apocalypteroid@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I mean, the Spotify CEO invests in AI weaponry being used to murder kids in Gaza so the morally correct thing to do would be to leave Spotify over that.
c0dezer0@programming.dev 8 months ago
Source for this?
ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Not the one who mentioned it but I was curious about this as well and found this;
Electricd@lemmybefree.net 8 months ago
Do you have any other good alternative to recommend? Nice quality, not too much tracking, low/fair price, nice recommendation algorithm, has lots of musics…
Apocalypteroid@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Unfortunately most of the major players are involved in some sort of evilness as far as I am aware. Spotify/Google/Apple are all pretty unethical companies. Personally, I have made the decision to cut out the middle man and sail the seven seas while also supporting the artists I like by being a vinyl wanker and going to gigs.
As for streaming services (I am very happy to be corrected here because I am not certain) AFAIK both tidal and qobuz are good alternatives. Qobuz is based in France so your data will be safer but Tidal is a bit cheaper.
davidagain@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Soundcloud lets you play any song you want at any time, even on the free tier, and when you ask it to play a playlist, it only plays songs on the playlist.
You can have recommendations from an algorithm if you choose, but it’s encouraged rather than enforced.
There are a lot more independent artists on it, and fewer big labels, or at least it feels that way because it doesn’t seem to prioritise big labels over some person I’ve never heard of.
Spotify has an annoy-users-until-they-pay model. Soundcloud just has ads.
dynamoMaus@feddit.org 8 months ago
I am trying the following services the next few months: Tidal, deezer, qobuz and pirating
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
yt-dlp --extract-audio --audio-quality 3 --audio-format oggmegopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
You can probably get a pirate hat online for a few bucks. And there are plenty of discoverability systems not based on integration with a subscription service.
RedStrider@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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!”
swelter_spark@reddthat.com 8 months ago
My parents only let me listen to Spanish language music when I was little, so I wouldn’t understand the cursing. 😂
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
I’ve been cursing a lot lately, and I blame what I listened to in Spotify. By no means was it because I was playing my pirated Eminem music all weekend 🤣🤣
Medic8teMe@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
We live in a rural part of Canada that has been left behind by modern times. Mostly by the choice of the residents. I grew up during satanic panic. It was crazy here. My wife and I let our kids listen to anything they want. They always have. They’re 10 and 12.
Their friends often comment about swear words and “sex, drugs and rock and roll” themes of the music they listen too. As an old man I get to retail them with stories of how crazy the Christians were over heavy metal and punk rock when I was a kid, including their grandma.
Now I yell “you’re gonna go to hell!” As a joke to them every time their friends bring it up and I am around.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
“you’re gonna go to hell!”
if where all the christians go is heaven, then i’d rather go to hell
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
You’re parenting the right way. Let our kids know about our past and how it compares to theirs, live it. And joking with my kids and their friends without immediately jumping to “that’s bullying”, you can tell my kids are a bit happier than the rest because everything is a joke to them. I applaud you.
bless@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Just get me the kid bop version
tangycitrus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I have a non-uk account but at the first sight of age verification I will delete my account.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I showed it something else with cheeks and now I’m on 15 watchlists.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 8 months ago
I don’t mind giving my date of birth to all the services I already pay for with credit card but face scanning? That’s just creepy. Fuck off.
Tomato666@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
You’ve got to be 18 to be able to have a credit card.
At that point someone else has verified your details for them, a bank (who are generally considered to be accurate about most things)
darkreader2636@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Jokes on them. My m4a library reaches 1000’s easily
58008@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world 8 months ago
…return? LOL
TwinTitans@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Never stopped. Get your own mp3s kids.
haloduder@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
This is another step closer to requiring an ID to use the internet at all.