Age verification is a great success I see. I feel so much safer now with this shit in place so kids can't watch porn...

ah from shady porn sites, like spotify and wikipedia. definitely protect kids from porn there. /s

Let this be a reminder to never turn away from piracy. It needs to constantly be in the background and if any company gets like they always do, then it comes back out. But if we let the knowledge fade away then it's impossible to rebuild it.

Or you know you could punish parents for not parenting. Like if kids are watching porn and caught and if it's actually against some law then go after the parents.

It's not hard to teach parents how to implement a filtering DNS. But no, countries think they need to be the nanny.

Don't threaten, just do it. Enshittification must end.

The only reason we have mainstream paid video streaming now is because early Netflix was genuinely better than dodgy, pop-up riddled mirrors on movie4k.to. The convenience was well worth 8 bucks a month. Same for Spotify.

Fast forward 10 years and Spotify wants me to pay 15 €, scan my face and listen to forced podcast ads AND pay extra for paywalled audiobooks that used to be free? Meet my good old friend youtube-downloader, then.

I don't mind giving my date of birth to all the services I already pay for with credit card but face scanning? That's just creepy. Fuck off.

Spotify fans

“Fans”?

Back to Piracy! ✊🏴‍☠️

Really though? It isn't necessary. Use Bandcamp, you probably have half your artists covered. The rest - one of those Spotify alternatives: Tidal? Qobuz?

Personally I do selfhost btw. Jellyfin, though I heard of a better alternative specifically for music recently - and forgot the name again 😥 Something lowercase, ~~like a verb... "normalize" or some such.~~ Navidrome! Thanks @0konomiyaki@aussie.zone

Don't threaten, just do it!

I don't get why people are so stubborn to move away from corporate products.

what are "spotify fans"? Spotify paid 150k $ for Trump's inauguration party, f them. They do not deserve my money

what's even the point of age gating "explicit" music?

"oh no! "Speak To Me" by Pink Floyd has the fuck word in it! can't let my kids hear it!"

If I am paying for my account personally, with a card in my name, what more do they need?

A VPN is a must if you wanna go down this route

Soulseek (and I recommend the Nicotine+ client over the official one) is a fantastic source for all music in all formats, and particularly obscure off-label shit you won't get anywhere else. You'll even have some success finding audiobooks there, although this is very hit-and-miss. I wish audiobook pirates would use it more heavily. It's P2P, like Napster used to be. You'll have to share something or you'll get auto-ignored by most users.

RuTracker is a great non-private/non-ratio-monitoring torrent site for music (does require a free account though). I've never had a single torrent from there that wasn't seemingly seeded by a Godzilla's dick. Obviously it's in Russian, but there's really no difficulty navigating around. The only thing you might struggle with is signing up for an account, but just have your favourite translation tool open in another tab 👍

If you don't mind slow download speeds (from the likes of RapidGator), I enjoy Exystence. It's a blog that shares link to the latest albums and offers both lossy and lossless versions. Nice RSS subscription to have.

If you do find yourself using RapidGator a lot, don't waste money buying a sub directly from them, it's insanely pricey. Instead, get a reseller like Real Debrid, which costs like 10% as much and also covers you for about two-dozen other file hosters. I highly recommend putting as much distance between your credit card and the company as possible, just for safety reasons. Using PaySafeCard is fine, as Real Debrid will never see your details in that case. I don't have any specific reason to be weary of them, I just don't trust random/small/hitherto unheard of companies as a rule.

tf is spotify "fans"? more like spotify "users"

I mean, fuck Spotify and all that, but this one is really the UK government's doing.

And soon, this shit will come to every country. They're all drafting laws to mandate real age verification for adult content. The UK is just the first to implement it.

Considering how much Spotify pays artists per listens, piracy is barely any different in that regard.

I mean, the Spotify CEO invests in AI weaponry being used to murder kids in Gaza so the morally correct thing to do would be to leave Spotify over that.

I jerked it to the Hanson mmbop video back in the nineties.

Found out later the girl was a boy.

You can judge all you want, but the general thing is that horny teenagers will jerk it to almost anything.

The streaming services are run by shithead C-suites who think last quarter is the way it's always been. They forget the only reason most of us use their services is someone more visionary than them made it more convenient than piracy half a generation ago. Let's remind them there's an alternative.

Its as if law makers don't learn from history. Do they not know what happened in the 90s and early 2000s when stores wouldn't sell M rated video games or CDs with mature content labels? We found ways to get around that. We would go to stores that didn't check or care, got our older sibling or friend to buy it for us. We burned copies of our friends CDs, or downloaded stuff off line with Limewire and Napster.

Same shit when there was prohibition in the US. People drove cars across the great lakes to bring alcohol into the US. People brewed there own spirits in bathtubs with radiator coils.

If people want to anomalously watch their favorite weird kinky shit or listing to music they like, they're going to find a way. And, if the easiest way to do that is through piracy, that is what they are going to do.

DO WHAT YOU WANT CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE! YOU ARE A PIRATE!

It's a load of bullshit, for a start the ISP has my details and should be able to attest my connection is rented by someone of legal age and it should be up to me what I let my children (assuming I have any) see and not see on that connection. I already had to click the "yes just give me the porn damn it" agreement on my mobile phone which was less likely to be randomly shared unmonitored and now this overbearing crap. I'll just avoid sites and services that require this.

ngl, Spotify has become hot ass these days

Just do it.

Flac > Spotify.

Seriously, fuck Spotify and anyone else using that error-prone, intrusive, insecure bullshit.

as an independent artist I just wanna add: the best thing you can do to support artists and bands is to buy directly / on bandcamp. spotify pays shit to artists, you need millions of listeners to get any meaningful amount of cash

of course that isn’t a sustainable option if you listen to a lot of different music. so piracy is an option that I wouldn’t mind. hell, if you like my stuff and just write to me I’ll send you mp3s for free