I see what you did there ;)

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?

Ah come on you know what I meant.

People say this all the time about Spotify, but it’s actually a viable outlet for revenue if you’re on a decent label who understands how to leverage playlists.

Obv that doesn’t apply for freeform… but for styles like trance, techno, DnB etc it’s not unheard of for a track to get 500k streams across a variety of playlists, which equates to $1500.

Got a sample preview of your favorite release?

I don’t think it would be wise to dox myself here after I’ve made an unpopular comment!

I agree. I think people have taken my comment as a defence of the geoblocking, was just offering an example of why someone like a small indie musician may choose to do that. I do find it frustrating when I have to VPN to a different country to watch a video.

But the reason I geoblock one country isn’t to be an arsehole, it’s because Russia has no recourse for indie musicians like myself who have their music stolen. They have no law preventing music theft which is why it’s rampant in that one territory (not saying it doesn’t ever happen elsewhere). Pretty much the entire rest of the world has some sort of avenue where I can issue something like a dmca.

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

Exactly. I had a 12 track album up for £9, or single tracks for 99p, don’t think that’s unreasonable!

Pirating from massive companies who exploit their workers and customers is different from pirating small indie artists, surely?

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.

Everytime I see this I’m amazed at the level of detail. Wish I could paint or draw even approaching this skill level!

Very talented artist.

That’s almost as far away as the moon! Therefore, the only logical explanation is ALIENS

Don’t worry I got what you were putting down. People can be very reactionary with their downvotes here, if your joke is too subtle it can fly over their heads.

It made me smirk! For my reference, how many zeros is that (I’m shit at maths but want to try and imagine such a long lever protruding into deep space)?

Did you just assume my financial status?!

(you’re probably right)

This is fascinating research. I’m middle aged now, and hope I gain the benefit of treatments like this!

Lokat!

Dark Reader. Not invulnerable to sudden blinding at night, I’d say one site in 200 seems to sneak through. But imo it beats all other dark mode addons I tried and certainly the default dark mode.

You receive: random biting of any toes that happen to peep out from under the duvet

No idea what the heck is going on, just happy to part of the hooman game!

You might find the occasional app that it ‘breaks’ (which you can then disable for) but generally everything works as intended. Apps I’ve disabled blocking for are:

• firefox
• google play store
• home
• signal
• banking / credit card

Try blocking trackers. You will be surprised at how much of a difference it makes to battery life, and horrified at how much you’re being tracked.

Yesterday I was at 50% after 24 hours, though admittedly not the heaviest use in the last 24 hrs.