Technology

Qobuz ... check it out

But YT audio quality is pretty shit most of the time. There’s plenty of sites that will strip the audio for you from a video and IIRC a couple browser plugins, too. I guess if you really want the song you’ll have it, but it’s not going to sound great.

Yeah.... How many times does the lesson need to be learned? The worse deal the consumer is given, the more likely they'll just pirate instead. This is in both price and usability/frustration level.

I still remember when Sirius/xm was actually popular. Ad free good quality radio where you could tune in to specialized stuff for a good price.You could generally get it for around $6/7 per mo/device. At the time I was going to buy a new stereo head just for better navigation of my flash drive with my music (I was already off of burned discs). But Sirius/xm was so cheap and it had an added bonus of some discovery and stuff that why bother? I'll just primarily use that!

The prices raised a couple of bucks and commercials for their top 10 channels but they are very quick.

Then prices raised and it was commercials for every channel and so on. I cancelled when it was $18/mo/device with commercials everywhere long enough that it wasn't as bad but close enough to being as bad as radio, except I'm paying for it. My friends told me "yeah but you just call them when your time is up and they'll always make it like $12/mo/device for the first year and sometimes if you complain after it runs out they'll do it the second year too.

But why bother when by then you had great alternatives like Pandora and then Spotify and so-on. You get the same experience as Sirius/xm but it is free. Don't want ads? It's just a few bucks a month!

Now streaming music is going down the same road that every popular service of everything always does. Worse experience and ad revenue. The price point for the pay options rise and won't atop. It won't be but maybe a decade until you can't pay for no ads. You'll pay to be able to pick exactly what you want to play and to decrease ad time I'm sure.

In the background as the deal gets worse and there is no alternative offering a good deal with a good consumer experience then piracy rises. It always does. Companies will always complain piracy hurts them and the artists but all they have to do is be more reasonable.

OK so they didn't find the other sites. Good good

So what is the best way to actually own music? I miss having a physical file I could put wherever and listen to anywhere, but haven't resorted to pirating anything since limewire

"The problem isn't price. People just don't want to pay for a bad experience."

The experience using a paid service is way better than pirating, let's be honest here. The problem for some people is price.

I'm not even able to put music on my watch unless it's a mp3, so paying to stream music is out of the question.