The War On For Your Mind (and Wallet)
YouTube sucks, but it's the best music platform
Where it's a good fit, I love to use music with my fitness clients. Music is great. It uplifts the session, creates drive, intention, mood and is a lot of fun. It’s become a very important constituent with some people I train. We might talk about that another time.
And away from that, I like to listen to music myself.
So when it come to music these days— meaning instant access to seemingly-unlimited choice, Spotify is a name you hear a lot, along with Apple Music.
I’m a bit of an old fuddy duddy though and I don’t like these closed subscription systems.
Spotify to me, based on what I’ve seen from the Window’s app and the Spotify website, seems clunky, needlessly CPU heavy, stupid, limited in scope and they inevitably want you to pay to get rid of a bunch of their dreadful useless adverts that they punish you with.
I read Spotify lets you download songs, but you can only listen to them as long as you're subscribed. Apple Music is apparently the same. Apple still have an iTunes store where I think you can buy music and keep it, but apparently by 2014 or so streaming was seen as more profitable.
I haven’t followed all this stuff as it appeared over the years, but it sounds like a frigging headache to me. At some point, when I wasn't paying attention, the corporate world went full steam (Steam get it :D ?) ahead into this industrial-scale locked-in bugman subscription model of content distribution. Much of the time no one owns anything anymore. It’s all hired. And when you stop hiring it, it vanishes. Sounds fair :D
In many ways it seems an entirely unnecessary artificial pressure to create more cash and more bugmen. Apparently we are supposed to worship money and those who collect silly amounts of it. So I just don’t care about dedicated locked-in streaming music services.
Well despite all this I do use something for music and that something is YouTube. YouTube is great for music. To me it feels like the only game in town at this point.
I’m not interested in pointless closed systems, walled gardens, locked in DRM content that vanishes and other nonsense. I haven’t got the time for it. I want life to be simpler. And it’s trivial to download YT content if you want to.
YT is how I've discovered 99% of new music (to me) over the last 5 years. And it does have some advantages: videos, including the music vids, and also interesting live performances, interviews, commentary and a ton of auxiliary content that won't be on Spotify. It doesn’t need an app to run and just runs in a browser. Note I don’t care for obsessing about sound quality, and it seems a poor selling point, whatever YouTube’s audio bitrate is sounds perfectly fine for me.
And that’s just the music side, everyone knows YouTube as the ubiquitous video platform.
Unfortunately YouTube is not so different to the others in its intent, it wants you to pay for their premium service at 13.99/month or endure their torture ads.
The best solution has been to use one of the adblock extensions, like uBlockOrigin.
Google, who own YouTube, have recently started a war with adblock extension users by updating their new more aggressive adblock detection scripts several times a day, and deploying them in groups/waves and other non-uniform distribution patterns, meaning someone in one location won't necessarily load the same YT adblock-detection script as someone else, all to make it harder to foil. But the adblockers are doing very well despite this.
How long this will go on for we don't know, but it's unfortunate. I remember a year or so back Facebook were trying to do the same. Note Facebook contains no content worth looking at anyway. FB would probably insist it has the God-given right to run a system where it can inject ads into your experience on their system. Perhaps it has the right to try, but I exercise the right to dispose of that information before it reaches me.
Apparently Twitch, in the past, has also gone on the warpath over adblockers. Twitch, I am told, is a streaming platform for watching people play video games. Sounds really healthy. The decay insists you consume more decay on top. I can’t think of anything more demented. So fuck them all.
This recent war between Google and ad-blockers got me looking more at this world of YouTube decontamination, and I discovered a few other pieces of YouTube modification software I had never heard of:
A lightweight ad-free front end to watch YT videos, and different people host these Invidious servers.
Gets rid of annoying segments where the YouTuber does their break to talk about their sponsor who "makes this podcast possible". What a crock of shit. This will get rid of that. It claims 1910 years 158 days 4.5 hours of human hours saved.
A clickbait eraser. Gets rid of the annoying clickbait thumbnails with contrived exaggerated expressions and dumb fake titles. Superb.
I support these worthy pieces of software.
For the bugmen who want to consume their stuff, let them….