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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#91

Post by sixtyj »

emsixteen wrote: post #72
Semaphor wrote: post #65

I loved OiNK (and had the t-shirt), but neither What.cd nor waffles ever were a proper replacement for me. What got me that feeling of discovery again, decades later, and even surpassed it, was doing release Fridays and just listening. I mostly know what (sub)-genres I like, I go through upcoming release lists for the next week, open every bandcamp link in a new tab (or for those that don’t have bandcamp, I see if I…

I really loved OiNK and all of that era. Was genuinely gutted when it all fell apart, as it was also about the community of it all. Always wanted a tee - I'm envious. When waffles and What.cd appeared it seemed to me like waffles would be the long-term successor, but definitely didn't work out that way. Neither ever felt the same, and I wasn't engaged with them like I had been on OiNK. Nowadays I'm just another strea…

I haven’t seen the headline before, so I searched it now. And it seems you can have your T-shirt :) Redbubble or other on-demand print sites have it available.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#92

Post by erikschoster »

CoolestBeans wrote: post #56

One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. It doesn't take much look at how much music an iPod could store, how much music cost, and how much people had in disposable income to spend on music to realize that music had to come from other means. The iPod and P2P file sharing were incredibly synergistic in a way that makes me giggle. The iTunes store is just…

It was also common to have a collection of CDs you owned and wanted to put on a device like this.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#93

Post by hdgvhicv »

CoolestBeans wrote: post #56

One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. It doesn't take much look at how much music an iPod could store, how much music cost, and how much people had in disposable income to spend on music to realize that music had to come from other means. The iPod and P2P file sharing were incredibly synergistic in a way that makes me giggle. The iTunes store is just…

The first one had no wifi and less space than a nomad - 5g from memory. That’s about 85 hours at 128k.

I had more than that on CDs at the time.

Now technically it’s “piracy” in the U.K. to rip your own cd.

I really should go back to buying CDs.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#94

Post by t-3 »

ColdStream wrote: post #39
BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't tell the difference with most headphones, but with monitors or a good system in a good listening environment there are some details that get lost in compression, but there's essentially 0 difference from losslezd if I rip a CD to opus or mp3 rather than from a stream.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#95

Post by rdwrrr »

Call me old fashioned but I still collect FLAC files on my server. Using plex on my mobile devices is great, even in my car things just work. The pain of manually editing metadata is long gone, the horror shudders

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#96

Post by lukan »

soundworlds wrote: post #49

Reminds me of the System of a Down - Legend of Zelda song that was popular around Limewire, etc Years later it was uncovered that it was never System of a Down, but one Joe Pleiman https://kotaku.com/no-system-of-a-down-did-not-make-a-zelda-...

Oh. That was my mind blown for today.

Well, the song was a bit out of style for System of a Down, but the voices are similar enough.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#97

Post by postalcoder »

This is a wonderful piece. I really appreciate the author for writing this – I thought I lost the ability to read longform on the internet.

What.cd was so vast a resource that it means something different to everyone. I personally lament the loss of the forums the most. I would post dissertation-length comments there and others reciprocated. I would put hours of research into debating a single topic. It's where I probably wrote my best stuff. The high barrier to entry reduced the noise and selected for people who were invested in being part of a community. The forums are also where I learned about hacker news!

I learned so much about music during those days. Algorithmic recommendations don't hold a handle to the recommendations you'd get in the forumns and in the comments sections of individual albums. Consuming music via What was equal parts learning and consumption.

It was obvious that poor music sales was a distribution problem, not a piracy problem. History played out in a way that proved this to be true. Spotify killed What.cd before the French did.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#98

Post by ktallett »

charcircuit wrote: post #79
ktallett wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You own a license when you buy it digitally. Stealing is never okay regardless of if something is technically buying or not.

You can't steal something unless there is ownership of it by the other person. There has to be loss for it to be stolen. Stealing isn't ok, but downloading music or movies without paying isn't stealing.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#99

Post by bugufu8f83 »

eisa01 wrote: post #51

It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there. There is still a need for music piracy Even albums mentioned in the Norwegian business magazine D2 can be impossible to find in legit channels. Your only option is to buy used CDs on Discogs for 50-100 USD, or know your way around the successors of these sites These CDs weren’t even on Oink or What (or did…

>It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there. There is still a need for music piracy

Ehhh..... I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites. Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days, so everything new gets released there, and by this point the catalog from the CD era is extensive. Music streaming has more music than What or Oink ever did. Streaming also has huge value add over piracy: it's really easy and convenient, it's better socially (shared playlists), and recommendations/discovery are waaaay better.

The vast majority of people do not "need" music piracy any more. If you want ten different versions of every REM album with slightly different mastering then sure, join RED. But it's a niche interest these days.

It's a huge contrast to movie piracy, which is thriving and which provides enormous advantages over any other way of watching movies at home, not just in cost and convenience but also in access and in quality.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#100

Post by Hoodedcrow »

eisa01 wrote: post #51

It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there. There is still a need for music piracy Even albums mentioned in the Norwegian business magazine D2 can be impossible to find in legit channels. Your only option is to buy used CDs on Discogs for 50-100 USD, or know your way around the successors of these sites These CDs weren’t even on Oink or What (or did…

> It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there.

And even if they did, you'd still need to pirate a copy of your collection to own it (as there's a chance not all of it is sold digitally and DRM-less).

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