when music isn't easily available by legal means, we must turn to ye olde ways of internet piracy and youtube uploads. back in my day, we downloaded mp3s off of youtube and made flipaclip animations of edgy warriors ocs who were broken and had a black bar over their eyes; and it was always to ncs music. sometimes, artists are sick of the current state of legal music acquisition, and take their work off of platforms like (mainly) spotify. i know i hate spotify! but when that happens, so many are affected. i'm not though, i choose the way of p2p and digital purchasing directly from artists (or physical media.) those who don't have their music locally saved go the way of youtube, and while it's ol' reliable, the ads have made vanilla youtube insufferable. a lot of people rawdog the 'tube with no adblock or don't use a modded apk on their phones (or can't, if they have an iphone.) they say capitalism breeds innovation!
the recent uprising of tearing yourself away from streaming services puts power back into the people, seeing so many turn to off-brand mp3s is like watching a baby take its first steps when you've been on this grind since you were given access to the internet. it's great, and these baby steps will eventually lead to the people curating their own large libraries of music. people's baby steps of taking back power from greedy elites and learning step by step that they do in fact have the ability to rely on themselves and not be spoonfed by the elite trying to groom them into being useless. i feel like this could be a first step for so many.
anyways what i REALLY wanted to write about was people who lock their files on the 'seek. you suck, i hate you, and i will not pay 20 pounds a month to access lossy files. at the least give me lossless, dammit. even if you're using the money given to you from that to buy more music i still disagree with locking other people's work behind a paywall like that, unauthorized bootlegging if you will. "b-b-but leechers!!! people who don't share back!!!" Who gives a shit!!! music is art, and everyone deserves equal access to art. that's why, and especially for anything i make that's paid, i ENCOURAGE piracy! i encourage piracy of my own work because what's most important to me is that 1. you either downloaded and enjoyed it or 2. you downloaded it, did not like it, and didn't end up wasting money or having to go through the hassle of refunds because of some fuckass electronic music.