Most people have extremely weird ideas of what’s considered piracy and what isn’t. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not piracy either. Torrenting an album is piracy, but listening to a bootleg on YouTube isn’t.

YouTube noticed this at some point and is now happy to let everyone know how much pirated music is available on their site. One of their main points for shilling YouTube premium is how their music catalogue is way better than Spotify. Of course the piracy site has more. That’s always how it works. Spotify actually has to license the music on their platform and is subject to copyright law. They can’t just get the Neil Young discography from soulseek one day and wait until his estate notices, facing no repercussions whatsoever aside from agreeing to a takedown request. Imagine if Pirate Bay or Napster were considered completely above-board businesses just because they took down torrents if explicitly requested by the copyright holders.

Not that I’m complaining especially when a lot of the music on youtube isn’t publicly accessible anywhere else. It’s just been extremely strange to see this go from an “open secret” to something they’re shouting from the rooftops and face no repercussions for. In the future I want everything to be like that and I’d rather keep youtube how it is than see them get the punishment that by all rights they should be getting. It’s just so strange that this is the position things have ended up in.

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  • CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    You’re missing some key facts:

    1. A lot of music on YouTube is fully licensed and uploaded by the owners or Google themselves. Like VEVO music, for instance.
    2. Google runs a content match algorithm on all uploads to detect music and movies. If you upload more than four seconds of a song, Google will detect it and transfer all monitization of that upload to the rights holder. This is why music documentaries like Trash Theory only have frustratingly short clips of the music they are talking about, and why channels like Techmoan, which documents weird music formats and playback devices, can also only share extremely short clips.

    The rights holders are getting any and all money on music uploaded to YouTube, and your entire premise is flawed.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I would also add that google very much understands the implications of streaming music.

      This is speculated to be why you can’t get Youtube Premium without Youtube Music (in most countries?). Because all the license holders would lose their minds if they weren’t getting a cut (and apparently the ad revenue from music videos isn’t enough).

    • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      6 months ago

      Well, the gigantic pile of low-end audio I ripped using yt-dlp begs to differ. Half a million tracks so far. Perfect for my OpenSwim headphones. Tiny mp3s to maximize my 4GB of storage, and shit quality to match what I’m getting from bone conductors (which are, for no compelling reason, compatible with FLAC).

      I swim a lot, and have a lot of free disk space, so I promise this makes sense.