The lost joy of music piracy

The owner of OiNK did nothing wrong and was cleared in court, but the music industry was still able to hire thugs (the police) to raid his home in the early morning and ruin years of his life. He understandable went under the radar but I hope everything is ok now.

I still think about the users of those sites to this day. The internet just isn't what it was any more.

Concerning the "Joy" element:

Someone at my workplace started a Music League, with a select few music aficionados and hangers on joining, and it has been _the best_ team bonding exercise I've ever been involved with. We have covered a broad spectrum of topics that have challenged pretty much everyone at some point. Music League has a bunch of default Themes that range from boring to OK, so we've been coming up with our own suggestions, and over the course of about 12 months we've had some great ones - but it relies on the participants allowing themselves to be vulnerable when the occasion suits.

This has provided joy amongst all participants in, I think, a similar way to the sharing / discovery of the golden age of music piracy. We even setup our own Slack channel un-affiliated with our workplace because a couple of people have left the company, but wanted to stay in the League.

If I have time tonight, I'll list the Themes we've covered as a reply or edit of this comment.

Concerning the "Music Piracy" element:

I don't really pirate, unless it's some incredibly obscure thing that can only be found on slsk (are we allowed to even mention it's name?).

I use a streaming service, but I also buy the really good shit from Bandcamp, since most streaming services are pretty scummy with their royalties back to artists, and I want them to keep doing what they're doing cough AdP cough.

I also run my own instance of LMS[0] so my FLAC collection is always available to me wherever I am (which kinda feels like piracy, but the collection is almost all legit).

MusicBrainz[1] is also doing god's work.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard took their discography off Spotify for ideological reasons, and I support their decision to follow their morality in doing so, but it does put me in a conundrum due to the phenomenal size of their catalogue. I've bought some, but definitely not all. Just gonna have to grind through it, although they seem to put new music out faster than my monthly purchase quota.

[0]: https://github.com/epoupon/lms (cheers @epoupon, I'm pretty sure you're on HN)

[1]: https://musicbrainz.org/