Huge YouTube-Ripping Service Bans US and EU Users on Mp3 Juice
The largest YouTube-to-MP3 ripping website in the world, Mp3 Juice, receives an estimated 128 million visitors per month. It’s interesting to note that the platform is currently notifying millions of users that the service has shut down entirely with a shutdown notice. This is not true.
Millions of people currently prefer to download music for personal use, which has created a thriving market for so-called YouTube to MP3 ripping services. Mp3 Juice is arguably the most well-known platform in this market, however recent events have cast doubt on the site’s viability.
The shut-down message is seen by millions of users.
The United States is the country from which Mp3 Juice receives the most visitors, according to data from SimilarWeb. In fact, 12 million of its 128 million members do this on a monthly basis. Yet as of the time of writing, the most (if not all) of those visitors have been informed that the Mp3 Juice service has been terminated as of August 1.
One may be excused for believing that the program had ended because so many Mp3 Juice users are receiving this message. The writing truly does seem to be on the wall when you factor in the fact that UK visitors are also seeing the same notice. The announcement is less comprehensive and definitive than it initially seems, though, when you look at it more closely.
Mp3 Juice hasn’t gone away; however, it seems to be geo-blocked.
Geo-blocking is frequently related to legal streaming services that have acquired content but lack the necessary permission to display it in a specific area. In general, stream-ripping services aren’t bothered by that, but in this instance, Mp3 Juice does seem to be making a distinction depending on location.
Countries including Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, and Denmark did not notice the shutdown warning in our extensive tests. Italy, Ireland, Germany, and the Netherlands all fit this description. Users from Mexico, the second-most popular country for using Mp3 Juice, as well as those from Spain, India, and Japan, are all free to use the website.
Indeed, based on our testing, Mp3 Juice only prevents access from users in the United States and the United Britain. Visitors from Australia do see a “site blocked” warning, but only because Hollywood already secured an ISP blocking injunction.
This begs the question of why the administrators of the website appear to have targeted US and UK users.
Geo-Blocking May Indicate Legal Problems
Recently, Mp3 Juice has seen an upsurge in traffic from the United States, thus it would be counterproductive to prohibit those users. But, there are definite examples from the ripping industry that demonstrate how geo-blocking might be connected to legal action.
The RIAA filed a lawsuit, which led to the closure of YouTube-MP3, the most popular YouTube ripping website in the world, in 2017. After coming to a deal with the BPI the year before, the service decided to ban visitors from the UK.
Within a few weeks after YouTube-MP3 was shut down, other YouTube ripping services followed suit by restricting UK traffic in an effort to avoid being sued. Such services may undergo forced blocking if they decide to continue operating in the UK, like Flvto and 2Conv recently did.
The RIAA and BPI are typically used as common denominators.
The BPI has been contacted by TorrentFreak for comment because it frequently links geo-blocking or enforced blocking to legal action taken by the organisation. A response from the BPI may shed some light on why Mp3 Juice is blocking the UK. The most logical explanation for Mp3 Juice’s decision to restrict US visitors is the RIAA’s campaign against stream-ripping websites in general.
The RIAA has issued DMCA notices to have more than 9,300 Mp3 Juice URLs delisted from Google’s search results, according to Google’s Transparency Report. This summer, it seemed as though this endeavour had come to an end, but the RIAA is still working on Mp3 Juice.
More than a year prior to that, the RIAA acquired DMCA subpoenas from a court in the United States in an effort to learn the names and contact information of the owners of Mp3 Juice, which at the time received roughly 64 million monthly visitors worldwide.
It’s unclear if that endeavour was successful, but the RIAA issued new DMCA subpoenas to Cloudflare and Namecheap in October 2020 in an effort to learn more about Mp3 Juice’s operators.
Mp3 Juice Was a Primary Target of RIAA’s Anti-Circumvention Notices
2019 had a very low number of DMCA complaints using the anti-circumvention clauses of the DMCA, although the RIAA has recently started employing this strategy against Mp3 Juice and similar websites.
That turned into a game of whack-a-mole because the targeted platforms were constantly changing their URLs, which did not have the desired outcome. In fact, Mp3 Juice increased its traffic significantly despite being one of the key objectives.
Consequences of preventing US/UK visitors
The current move to prohibit traffic from the US and UK may theoretically result in a loss of 15+ million visitors each month for Mp3 Juice, assuming that the decision stays in place. But, since the site hasn’t actually gone offline, anyone who has the tools to get around a geo-block (for instance, by using VPNs or proxies) can still access the website.
It’s not yet apparent if this will be sufficient to avoid legal action or fulfil the requirements of a prospective settlement deal. The BPI and RIAA have not yet released any statements that could shed light on the situation, but we will update this item as soon as we do.