I am one of those suckers (:sigh) who paid for Youtube since it bundled Youtube Music with it. However, today I used the latter’s Revanced version and it was so much customizable. Right from removing menu items to the stupid cast button Google has forced on us; it seems a billion dollar company can’t compete with these folks who make their apps so much more serviceable.
I don’t wish to go too much into the official Youtube client which too is tacked with things like Remix button and what not.
“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
Gabe Newell
I agree fully. I basically never download music anymore, because I can get all the music I can think of on Spotify for a few bucks a month. And when everything was on Steam I just got everything from there. Now that all the games companies are bringing out their own stores and launchers, that’s starting to change again.
This is a lesson that the movie & TV industry seems hell-bent on not learning.
It at it’s worst in my opinion with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. They’re all starting to get so fragmented that they’re not much better than just paying for cable anymore, and that was their whole appeal to begin with. Now you have to sub to like 3 or 4 different services to get all the content you want (sometimes more) and they all seem to be phasing out their ad free tiers. It’s like they forgot what made them so popular to begin with.
I recently started music pirating because I listen to a lot of genres and I want to shuffle them. If I use Spotify, I am limited to their shitty shuffler, but if I download my music offline, I can shuffle however I want. My favorite algorithm to shuffle my huge bunch of music is to shuffle them by genre. Now I get to listen to interesting music with full control over the algorithm used.
Also, there are frequent power cuts in my area, so an offline library always proves useful. I also visit places where internet connections are not available.
Also, my pirated game runs without trackers and forced updates. Steam version somehow insist on overlays, overnight updates, and likes to show me ads unless I google how to toggle them off.