the download button that shouldn't exist

i built an app that downloads music from youtube, tags it with spotify metadata, and streams it to my phone from a raspberry pi in my room.

why? i wanted to understand how music streaming actually works. how does seeking work instantlyHTTP range requests (RFC 7233). instead of sending the whole file, the server sends just the bytes you asked for. request "bytes 50000-60000" and you jump to that point in the song. this is how spotify and youtube do it too.? how do you handle concurrent downloadsbull + redis job queue. downloads run in the background, max 3 at a time. websockets push live progress to the app. no polling, no blocking.? how do you deploy this on a $50 computer and make it accessible from anywhere?

you can read about these things. or you can build them. i built it. took four days.

every time i tell someone about it, same question: "isn't that piracy?"

nah. personal use, still paying for spotify. i'm downloading from youtube music, not spotify. the audio is publicly accessible, no drm broken. spotify's api gives me metadata like album art and song titles, that's it.

it's closer to recording tv shows in the 90s than torrenting albums. the betamax caseSony Corp v. Universal City Studios (1984). the US Supreme Court ruled that recording TV broadcasts for personal use is fair use.
read more → literally established this in 1984: personal use is fair use.

tools like youtube-dlopen-source CLI tool to download videos from youtube and 1000+ other sites. youtube tried to DMCA it in 2020, the EFF fought back, github reinstated it.
github → have existed for 15 years. youtube tried to shut them down, the effElectronic Frontier Foundation. nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation. they defended youtube-dl, encryption rights, and fought mass surveillance.
eff.org → defended them, github reinstated them. millions of people use them. nobody's going to jail.

what's actually illegal: redistributing content, breaking drm, selling it. i'm doing none of that.

the part that's actually interesting to me isn't the legality. it's why people get uncomfortable. we've just accepted that music lives inside spotify or apple music, and anything outside that feels wrong. but spotify pays artists fractions of a cent per streamspotify pays roughly $0.003-$0.005 per stream. an artist needs ~250 streams to earn $1. a vinyl sale earns the artist $2-5.
source →. the "right" way to listen isn't exactly a moral high ground.

we used to own music. cds, vinyl, files on a hard drive. now we rent it. spotify can pull a song tomorrow and it's gone from your library. my files sit on my pi. nobody can take them away.

depends who you ask. spotify would say yes. the law says "personal use is probably fine." i say it's the same as ripping cds. either way, it's personal use.

the music industry has bigger problems than one guy with a raspberry pi.

if you're curious about the technical side: how the streaming pipeline works, async queues, http range requests, cloudflare tunnel deployment: here's the full breakdown.