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The lost joy of music piracy

pigeonsandplanes.com

31–40 of 637 posts

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#31
post #9

I can't believe the operators of what.cd would choose to delete everything without at least a warning, or letting people back it up. So much music and metadata just lost! Not to mention the crime of law enforcement prioritising private profit over a cultural milestone. It really is like they burned the library of Alexandria because it hadn't paid the copyright fee.

I refuse to believe there's not a database backup somewhere. Such careful curators would surely hate to destroy it!

I'd hope so, but wouldn't it have leaked by now?

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#32
I don't call it piracy. I call it a human right. Besides, yt-dlp made music "piracy" irrelevant. But, even aside from this, I noticed that I rarely add new music locally. Right now I have 764 songs I collected over almost 30 years; while I may add new music I enjoy, I mostly just listen to semi-random music on youtube these days, just as background noise. So I don't quite have a strong use case, comparing this to the napster era.

https://bash-org-archive.com/?104052

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#33

Any amount of joy you lost is a fraction of joy lost from people blatantly stealing the fruits of other people's's labor. Communities do not have to be parasites to exist. Similar amounts of joy could be created over a different interest that didn't require stealing and hurting others.

Is it stealing if when I buy digital I don't own it?

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#34
post #8
post #2

weird, I still love pirating music.

This. I do use Spotify, but this has nothing to do with my local music collection. Admittedly, mostly pirated.

I don't use Spotify, but I would consider it if I could download maybe 1 or 2 mp3 per month for offline use.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#35

Huh... I'm still waiting for Bandcamp and Soundcloud to close their streaming download hole. It has been a few years now.

does it matter as long as yt-dlp is maintained?

Some people want more than "mystery meat" levels of audio quality.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#36
I've tried all the streaming services, I've regularly bought physical copies of music even in recent years, but nothing has exposed me to such a wide range of music and such a range of artists as a well curated blogspot. Whether that be a wide range of excellent bootlegs or music that has not been moved from cassette to digital, it just provides me with so much more joy. Especially easy to do now iPods are back in vogue

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#37

Any amount of joy you lost is a fraction of joy lost from people blatantly stealing the fruits of other people's's labor. Communities do not have to be parasites to exist. Similar amounts of joy could be created over a different interest that didn't require stealing and hurting others.

The article touches on the topic and mentions Nine Inch Nails' and Radiohead's 'free' album releases.

There's also the possibility/likelihood (I can't recall the results of the research) that increasing exposure, via piracy, is actually better for the artist long term.

And then, as others have already responded, the worst offenders are, generally, the industry insiders themselves. Reports of the death of music are greatly exaggerated. Reports of the death of the music industry are widely looked forward to.

I pirated plenty as a kid with no money, it was cheap and it was easy - does anyone here remember high-speed dubbing? I also recorded a _lot_ of music off the radio. On the rare occasion I bough an album I made sure it was worth being the only thing I listen to for weeks - and the only way to know that is to have prior knowledge. I buy plenty as an adult with a music budget. I believe that's how it should be.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#38
post #10

Huh... I'm still waiting for Bandcamp and Soundcloud to close their streaming download hole. It has been a few years now.

Posting that here is one of the more promising ways of achieving that

Yeah probably. But it also depends on how much it is exploited.

If 0.1% of people do it, then it probably isn't worth while. If it 10% of the audience, that needs to be focused on.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does it matter as long as yt-dlp is maintained?

Some people want more than "mystery meat" levels of audio quality.

I once did a blind test on myself. A FLAC audio file and a 128Kbit Ogg vorbis file of the same track that I could switch between as I pleased but without knowing which was playing. Yeah, I cannot tell the difference.

I am absolutely sure others can, but not me. I also think credit goes to far better encoders today than what we had 25 years ago.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#40

Huh... I'm still waiting for Bandcamp and Soundcloud to close their streaming download hole. It has been a few years now.

If you're on Bandcamp or Soundcloud it's usually because you want to support artists directly, I doubt many people are purely interested in getting free music rips.

Pretty much. There would be some folks who are scraping large amounts of stuff but I don't think it is a giant issue.
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