If downloading music is piracy, tracking users is too.

[10kDA]

Stay off social media. Ditch the Smartphone for a 4G flip phone. Get a DumbTV™. Once the data harvesters got started, there was no ratcheting them back. All you can do is make it hard for them and/or refuse to participate in the activities they have developed to make it easy for themselves.

 

[circles]

Stay off social media. Ditch the Smartphone for a 4G flip phone. Get a DumbTV™. Once the data harvesters got started, there was no ratcheting them back. All you can do is make it hard for them and/or refuse to participate in the activities they have developed to make it easy for themselves.

I agree with this approach. Sadly, I do use social media to network with others interested in music and a.i.

 

[Jimi-C]

That wont happen ever, while people may go back to physical mediums, piracy wont loose it's popularity . We can't turn back time.

There's a saying , " what was Old , is New again " Bell bottoms and platform shoes are back in style now days ..... anything is possible , never say never . Where there's a will there's a way.
If the recording industry thought having a controlled medium would increase their profits , trust that they will find a creative way to convince the public that they need CDs . I have noticed that vinyl
albums are on the rise again . Maybe for nostalgic interests for now but who knows what the trend will produce.

 

[Calebz]

None of you have read a single end user license agreement or a full terms of service.

Come on, son.

Generally I would agree..

That said I've contributed to writing a couple software EULAs. So I've read at least parts of them😃

 

[FutureProf88]

There's a saying , " what was Old , is New again " Bell bottoms and platform shoes are back in style now days ..... anything is possible , never say never . Where there's a will there's a way.
If the recording industry thought having a controlled medium would increase their profits , trust that they will find a creative way to convince the public that they need CDs . I have noticed that vinyl
albums are on the rise again . Maybe for nostalgic interests for now but who knows what the trend will produce.

Vinyl outsold CD's for the first time since the 1980's last year. I'll admit to being a vinyl snob and a hipster about it. Nah man.... I know that the human ear can't tell the difference between a high definition digital audio file through a full range amp and speaker but vinyl has these weird imperfections and that makes it better. Trust me.

As far as controlled media... with the Internet that's not really possible. Once people figured out file sharing it was off to the races. The smartest thing that the industry has done in that regard is make a membership paid service like Spotify, Amazon Music, etc so much easier to use that the relatively low membership cost provides a high enough value to most people that they aren't interested in pirating music. Even things like YouTube video uploads are very efficiently either monetized for the artist of taken down if they can't be monetized for the artist. As a great for instance, my own band published some of our demos on our own channel before we went with a distribution company. As soon as we released our EP through the distribution company our videos of our own demos on our own channel got struck on copyright grounds. Our drummer joked that it was a sign of legitimacy. Someone pirating our music in their video had their video taken down because of it. It just happened to be our video that was taken down because it had our own music in it.

Obviously you also have Pandora, which you can even listen to free if you don't mind periodic ads. All of these are much better solutions if you don't want to pay for individual songs than taking a gamble on a file share.

 

[Jimi-C]

As soon as we released our EP through the distribution company our videos of our own demos on our own channel got struck on copyright grounds.

I could be wrong but I think the copy rights of YouTube for your video and the rights of the distribution company came into conflict . One way to promote controlled media for digital music is something similar to DVD region code , if the media doesn't have the code encoded in it , it will not play on any device that doesn't have the corresponding code in it's firmware. it's like a hand shake in TCP IP . You go out to play on (314 ) day 😄

 

[FutureProf88]

I could be wrong but I think the copy rights of YouTube for your video and the rights of the distribution company came into conflict . You go out to play on (314 ) day 😄

It is what it is. We take our 1/10th of a penny when someone watches the distributor's YT channel with our music and laugh all the way to watching our distribution company take the 1/10th of a penny because we haven't reached the contract minimum. We don't really care. We'd rather give them the distribution royalties and have them getting our stuff in front of people.

Edit: We do, however, maintain full ownership and control of the music itself. That's one of the reasons we went with the distributor we did. They were more expensive but we could theoretically authorize our own channel to rip them off.