"YouTube users can now download all songs for free, which means there’s no need for anybody to buy music from iTunes anymore"
More like: Users can pay for a service that allows them to cache songs for offline playback in their YouTube app. It's not free and it's not like users are downloading the MP3s.
It's easy to download any youtube as mp3 - try googling for it, there are multiple services that offer that for free. Anything on Youtube is basically free as mp3.
That's not the point swombat is trying to make. You can easily rip a Youtube clip into MP3, or just download the video for later playing. I even have an app on my iPhone, McTube, that allows me to do exactly that. YouView on Mac gives you the same option. I used these apps to cache my youtube subscription overnight, as I have unlimited internet after midnight, but otherwise I am limited to 15gigs/mo.
The point is, you can't just as easily rip content from Spotify, Pendora, or any of the other streaming services.
I can always play a song and record it. YouTube doesn't even allow downloading in 1080p anymore.
Enough with this idiotic copyright bullshit. If you don't want people to copy your stuff, stop publishing it! We don't need copyright. Why is the law enforcement that I pay for with my tax money working to prevent alice from copying something bob put out in public?
Now if bob took alice's secret documents, and put them out for the world to see I can understand. However, this copyright mess is out of control. Please... Let's put an end to this nonsense.
The same thing exists for basically all the music streaming services, at least the ones that are in a browser.
Edit: And in fact, this whole thread is kind of a red herring. We already had this same conversation about DRM, and it turned out people did indeed go to paid services when it's easy to use them. It turns out many millions of people will pay to stream music, even when there are many ways to get music for free for a little more effort.
Same thing here. As far as I've heard, it's for offline listening, not download and have a file forever. The file will probably live in your youtube app and it will require breaking into it to get the music for free. I'm sure there will quickly be programs to do that, but most people won't care.
Want to add an anecdote here. Even though there are multiple options to get free songs, I still renew my Nokia Mixradio (earlier Nokia Music) every quarter. It feels good to be a legitimate user and the convenience is welcome(if only mixradio+ with 320kbps downloads starts working, things would be perfect). So, if YouTube offers a similar well priced service, I would happily pay, regardless of if there was a free way to get that mp3/4. Dirt for Safari Books.
I don't know why it makes you feel good to support the recording industry in any way. You're not a legitimate user of the artists, you're a legitimate user of the recording industry, which is a bunch of evil bastards who live off the backs of the artists without contributing all that much. It should make you feel terrible that 95 cents out of every dollar you contribute goes to support this: http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ (15 years old and still on the ball).
Every penny you contribute to these criminal assholes is hurting the artists you love. The sooner the recording industry goes bankrupt, the sooner we can move on to something better.
I strongly recommend youtube-dl. It's a small command line utility that will do the ripping for you, at adjustable (default max) quality and won't try to show you ads, send you spam mail, or put annoying stuff in the file metadata. It just works like
More like: Users can pay for a service that allows them to cache songs for offline playback in their YouTube app. It's not free and it's not like users are downloading the MP3s.