"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.
Yeah the real takeaway is it’s not necessarily the kids fault that they don’t know these systems deeply as much as it is the fault of OS and app developers taking the path of least resistance and building everything around the stupidest users and their mistakes. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for the growth and development of Power Users when everything is locked down and obfuscated to protect the user from themselves.
When I was a kid there was an air of “anyone can do this” and I had friends who were only 15 were getting hired to build whole websites for $20 an hour when minimum wage was $5.15 an hour. Now there’s an air of “only professionals who are trained can do this” which doesn’t exactly make kids feel like they can just jump in feet first.
That’s overly charitable. The developers aren’t doing it just to cater to idiots; they’re doing it because taking away users’ power and turning it into a platform strictly to consume content instead of creating things for themselves gives big tech companies more opportunities to extract money from them.
This is exactly why I’d shut down any of that ridiculous “Kids just know computers these days” crap.
“No, Phyllis, just because 6-year-old-Timmy can crust up your iPad with boogers to consume endless dopamine-pumping content doesn’t mean he has any idea what is happening behind that screen. At all.”
The biggest crime is in my opinion that Android as an OS was made without allowing the user root access unless they jump through a bunch of hoops. Even if it comes at the cost of a bricked phone, kids should be allowed to experiment with their devices.
Also, from my experience basic graphic design is the newest version of this. The amount of praise I get for understanding basic color theory, as well as not to use JPGs, or Comic Sans for everything is wild.
To be fair to the basic graphic design point: When I was in high school they were busy killing art programs, and that was in the 90’s. It’s kind of hard to know that kind of stuff when it straight isn’t being taught. Honestly, very similar to the computer stuff, so much of it just isn’t taught anymore, and it’s leaving a lot of kids with degraded knowledge of the subjects they’re pursuing.
Man, I searched desperately for formal art training in school. The best they had was some “how to draw” book that at least kept me on track practicing every day. The colleges accessible to me have had “art” programs that are more the stuffy turtleneck gallery sort of stuff, and not anything practical, so I’m sad higher-ed didn’t work out either.
I’m proud none of this stopped me so far, but dang I wonder if those kids who got to take art classes and have mentoring art teachers around art peers know just how dang lucky they’ve had it…
Dang now I wanna watch “Blue Period” again…