[Wowfunhappy]

If bootlegs and unreleased tracks were officially released, they would become official and released tracks.

If there's a specific unreleased track you want, fine, pirate that. I don't think there's anything wrong with pirating content that's not available for sale (as long as you buy it if/when it does become available for sale). However, the existence of some unreleased tracks do not give you license to pirate tracks which are released.

Outside of specific, exceptional circumstances, I have zero sympathy for anyone pirating music in 2018. Music is finally being distributed in the DRM Free, affordable, and unencumbered formats consumers have been asking for.

[icebraining]

The problem is that if your tastes are not very conventional, the "exceptions" are half the cases, and you start to wonder why you bother.

A good example is Morphine's The Night. We're not talking about a bootleg record, it's a proper studio album owned by UMG. Yet it's not available on Spotify, Google Music or Amazon Music. It's on iTunes, but that requires installing a native app, which doesn't run on any of my devices, including the most popular OS in the world (Android). Alternatively I can buy a CD, which will cost me something like $50 with shipping, and rip it myself - and that's only because I still happen to own a desktop with a CD drive.

[CDSlice]

Just a FYI if you buy music from iTunes you get DRM free files that you play pretty much anywhere. It's how I get all my music on my Android phone.

[icebraining]

Yeah, but I don't have anywhere to run iTunes :/

[ahakki]

c’mon, ur on haxxor news and u cant run a windows vm? there’s a free image on microsoft’s homepage, and I bet you’ll manage to get itunes working and transfer the music within the free trial period.

[icebraining]

Sure, but don't you see the absurdity? I have to download and install VirtualBox, download a full Windows VM image, download and install iTunes on it, create an account, create a virtual credit card, register it on the account, purchase the album, and then copy the files out of the VM.

All so that the artists get about $1 from my $10.

Or I can download a torrent and give those $10 to Vapors of Morphine on their Bandcamp page, which is much easier for me and will net them about $8 instead.

So fuck the leeches, I'll keep pirating.

[buckminster]

Amazon has it for cheap.

https://www.amazon.com/Night-Morphine/dp/B000046PUL

[icebraining]

It's not cheap once you account for the typical 100-200% in cross-Atlantic shipping charges.

[wolco]

It's important to keep the piracy channel alive. Right now you may feel you have choices and options but there are a handful of players who can sell you everything. 2020 may not be as great.

[Wowfunhappy]

If the media we purchase today is DRM Free, it will be easy to distribute when and if the legal channels disappear.

Having easy-accessible piracy channels now works against that goal by incentivizing content providers to invest in more stringent DRM schemes. DRM can rarely prevent piracy completely, of course, but it can make piracy more difficult and less accessible.

[wolco]

DRM never stopped piracy and DRM affected paying customers and drove them toward piracy makincg it more accissible (more people sharing bigger hive). The effect is not the cause in this case.