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Yeah, this is the thing that’s making me want to go back to having a private music library again. I pay for this shit, and they keep removing songs from my play lists.
I am thinking of doing the same thing. I will setup Navidrome to stream it.
Quoting Cyberpunk 2077: fuck corpos
What word did he keep bleeping out?
enshittification?
I try to buy all my music directly from the artist in CD form whenever possible. Whenever that’s not possible, I try to get a version that I can save locally & play offline…
Whenever I release music myself, I actively block it in Russia, because they relentlessly steal my trance / freeform releases and upload them in warez sites.
Of course geoblocking can be circumvented by a determined pirate but it helps to not be on their radar in first place as a lesser known artist.
As an example, once I released a freeform album. Freeform is a very niche, small scene. It was on Russian forums within a couple of days. Fortunately one of my fans notified me, I had a Russian friend contact the site on my behalf to explain that I’m a poor struggling artist, and they’re literally taking money out of my pocket; to my surprise they agreed to take the links down.
Did the sales increase as an effect of them taking it down?
Hard to say really. I’m fairly sure if it was available online for free, less people would have bought it.
When you’re talking only £2000 or so of sales for a small indie release, piracy makes a huge hit to sales. My more popular stuff like trance, the sales drop off a cliff the moment it’s leaked. There was a huge problem with people on promo lists leaking pre-released tracks to warez sites, not sure if the main labels (eg ones like Armada, Anjuna etc) ever got to the bottom of it, but it really hurt the sales of people who aren’t exactly making bank from their music
It can go both ways since a lot of people discover music through piracy too
I guess, I just don’t see many people getting something for free then deciding to go buy it out of the goodness of their heart… maybe I’m too pessimistic.
I try not to pirate music production software because I make some small money from my music, and I’ve personally seen companies go bust and get snapped up by Apple because everyone (me included) justified pirating their small plugins as “they’re making lots of money anyway”. But I justify pirating shit like Adobe to myself I hate paying a subscription to use software. I dunno maybe more people have this mindset than I realise and are happy to pay after ‘trying before buying’.
I’m interested to hear responses from anyone who genuinely buys the music they enjoy after pirating it. Why would they not just buy it in the first place?
They pay if they see you as a person, not just a name on the music.
stay cheeky breeky friend.
I see what you did there ;)
This is actually one of the less effective examples of geoblocking that someone could ever imagine.
Russian warez sites are only “Russian” because they’re run by local admins as pirate sites located in the Global South have tendency to have a longer lifespan and less chances to end their days by being raided than hosted in the Western world. Most part of such sites users / uploaders are from worldwide, for example, if you’ll check your active peers for any active rutracker upload, you’ll see, that only small part of them have Russian flag. So such geoblocking makes literally zero impact, as it never prevents user from any other country from uploading the tunes to such website.
Also all Russian users are already geoblocked, as they won’t buy anything from you (even if they would want to) because most of webservices that you could use to promote your album won’t be able to charge their cards due to sanctions. And if some of such users use foreign VPN + credit card combo and are able to use such services, they are not affected by your geoblocking, as they’re attached to different region.
