Just because you subscribe to Spotify, doesn’t mean you’re entitled to every album ever made
A lot of people pirated the new Frank Ocean album. 750,000 people to be precise. A lot of people also used its apparent Apple Music…
A lot of people pirated the new Frank Ocean album. 750,000 people to be precise. A lot of people also used its apparent Apple Music exclusivity to justify their piracy. But that’s bullshit.
Blonde wasn’t an Apple Music exclusive. It was exclusive to Apple Music and iTunes. iTunes purchases are DRM-free, and your Spotify subscription doesn’t change the fact that you’re a thief if you pirated the album instead.
People who used the whole ‘I pirated it because I don’t want to subscribe to Apple Music for one album’ excuse could have very easily bought it on iTunes and transferred the DRM-free files to any phone in the world. If you use Google Music you can upload those files to the cloud. If you use Spotify you can sync them to your phone without any conversion. If you use Rdio, well, you’re shit out of luck because that service doesn’t exist anymore. But you get my point. If for some reason you have a phone that doesn’t play the widely-supported AAC format you can even convert iTunes’ DRM-free AAC files to MP3 in the iTunes interface. Apple likes it when people do this because it means the artists get paid and the user gets their music. Better still, buying an album on iTunes is just as easy as using a torrent client, and it’s much easier than using a shady AF torrent site that’s probably filled your computer with malware.
This whole excuse is exactly that — an excuse. You didn’t pirate Frank Ocean’s album because you didn’t have a choice, you did it because you feel entitled to steal another person’s expensive work.
The second big complaint going around is that Frank’s album isn’t on Spotify, which is another joke. That’s not a good enough excuse to pirate something. Even if I can’t find an album at Target, it doesn’t mean I can just steal a copy from K-Mart. Even if I subscribe to Netflix, stealing Game of Thrones isn’t suddenly okay.
I’ll admit, when Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo came out only on Tidal I did pirate it because there was no other way to even buy that album. Kanye West didn’t put his album on iTunes like Frank Ocean did. But I still didn’t waltz around saying “oh well, that’s Kanye West’s fault for distributing his music in a way that benefits him”. It was still piracy and it was still wrong.
Even worse, Spotify isn’t even that great for artists, particularly newly-independent artists. If Apple was willing to pay Ocean upfront for the album, why shouldn’t he take that money, especially if it’s still available for sale to people who don’t use Apple Music.
An artist doesn’t have to support every streaming platform in the world just because they can, and they especially don’t have to do it if another platform is offering them money to distribute DRM-free files via a storefront.
The whole argument against buying Frank Ocean’s album is pure and simple bullshit. If you want to pirate it, go ahead. But don’t tell me that it’s justified because you pay a random company 12 freaking dollars a month. People should stop feeling entitled to steal things just because they pay for a subscription service. And it’s insane that this line of thought isn’t called out for what it is: bullshit.
