I used to spend a lot of time on news:// protocol back in the 90s, but haven’t touched it for good 20 years or so.
Could anyone point me to a good primer on how to use USENET for piracy? Looking for advice on client software, or webapps, good services worth paying the subscription that will give me access to all the right newsgroups and archives.
Last time I used news, all this stuff was free, so I’m at a bit of a loss on what’s worth paying for.
Btw, I did try looking for answers before turning to Lemmy, but ended up with just a ton of SEO garbage articles designed to serve ads, waste time and provide no real answers :(
Yeah. Spotify really got to me. It’s so convenient to have everything available. At least it used to be that way except for the one-off obscure album or a few artists who still own their copyrights and can decide to not participate. But lately a few of the songs have become greyed out and unavailable. And the unavoidable enshittification has begun.
I still remember the times when I bought CDs and owned stuff. And the time when lots of series were available on Netflix and it was worth it’s (lower) monthly price. But as of now half the movies and series I like aren’t available. Like Star Trek, all the Disney movies…
And concerning Spotify: I read they pay an artist at most a third of a cent per streamed song. That is ripping off the artists anyways. I think I could just cancel my subscription, rip off the artists myself and cut out the middle man.
You can always use bandcamp. You own what you buy drm free and the majority of your spending goes to the artist. They get $0.01 for every 12 streams of a song on Spotify. purchasing one track on bandcamp is the equivalent of 1200 streams, purchasing an album = ~7200 streams… I find the worst thing about them is that the app doesn’t have the presence spotify has (not on playstation and some of the other platforms I use). It was also recently purchased by epic games so things might change…
And concerning Spotify: I read they pay an artist at most a third of a cent per streamed song. I think they’re ripping off the artists.While Spotify doesn’t make artists much money at all, I think the focus should really be on the record labels. Labels are dinosaurs and really have no business being so prolific in today’s music industry. If I had to choose between waging war on Spotify or labels, I’d be coming for the labels first.
The biggest problem is the way the money pot is split. Whatever you listen to, your subscription will mostly go to the biggest artists (via their labels indeed who take a good share). This is wrong