I’ve stopped pirating more than a decade ago but streaming and “buying” content is getting worse and worse.
Even when buying physical copies, BD movies have at least one, sometimes two layers of DRM to put up with; AACS and sometimes BD+ on top of that, and even DVDs technically have DRM although that was blown wide open eons ago.
Also, although CDs are DRM-free, for now, there’s a 9/10 chance that if you get a new CD album instead of a lossy download through iTunes/Apple Music or wherever or streaming it through Spotify, that it’ll be brickwalled to hell; blame Oasis on that one for starting the Loudness Wars, meanwhile if you go to track down an old vinyl album or even a CD pre-1995 or so, it’ll likely have been mastered decently; a lot of the time an old vinyl album is mastered better than a new CD album, both because of predating the Loudness Wars by decades typically, and also because a mastering house will have had a 20Hz-20kHz window to work in with vinyl generally.
Even when buying physical copies, BD movies have at least one, sometimes two layers of DRM to put up with; AACS and sometimes BD+ on top of that, and even DVDs technically have DRM although that was blown wide open eons ago.
Also, although CDs are DRM-free, for now, there’s a 9/10 chance that if you get a new CD album instead of a lossy download through iTunes/Apple Music or wherever or streaming it through Spotify, that it’ll be brickwalled to hell; blame Oasis on that one for starting the Loudness Wars, meanwhile if you go to track down an old vinyl album or even a CD pre-1995 or so, it’ll likely have been mastered decently; a lot of the time an old vinyl album is mastered better than a new CD album, both because of predating the Loudness Wars by decades typically, and also because a mastering house will have had a 20Hz-20kHz window to work in with vinyl generally.