not cause of fake moral or commerce reasons, no no. Pirate that shit all you want.

The reason you shouldn't download music off youtube is because most youtube uploads are done by people uploading lossy encoded mp3s, which youtube then takes and also lossy encodes them, creating the dreaded "double lossy" encode which does have a noticeable effect on music quality.

On top of that a lot of downloaders also recompress the music in a lossy format.

Add onto generations of users doing this after originals get struck down and who knows how many generations of degradation you'll have.

The above photo is a spectrum analysis of a random track downloaded off of youtube and recompressed to mp3. Notice those "shelves? That's the telltale sign of a file constantly being reencoded in a lossy format.

This is what a losslessly encoded track looks like (please ignore its a different song, I realized after I snipped the initial image that my lossless copy was done at 24/192, which would not have illustrated what I was talking about). Notice the distinct lack of shelving. Higher frequencies are not cut off artificially.

I'm not saying you need to have pristine vinyl rips of every single piece of music you enjoy, but I am saying there is a noticeable degradation in quality when ripping music off youtube specifically.

hey fun tip! if you pay for Deezer's Hi-Fi plan you can use deemix to download lossless (FLAC) music off of the service. there is also a funnily named website that seems to offer this same service? except off of their account? i can only assume.