The lost joy of music piracy

If I was a musician and produced music nowadays, I would not induce regular copyright rights on it. Because, in my opinion, it makes no practical sense. It mostly alienates the users.

I would put the uncompressed flac files of my music directly on my website for everyone to download.

That does not mean that I would not be interested in getting paid. But I would approach it differently. I would charge for broadcasting it on YouTube or Spotify. Or for playing it in venues.

But I would not charge a regular Joe for it. They would be free to download it, play it and redistribute it in any noncommercial way they see fit.

The most important part is this. I would encourage the "buy after you like" model. Everyone is free to listen. And who likes what they hear, is welcome to buy it.

In my opinion, many small bands and solo musicians would benefit from that model. And I think it would also create some goodwill among their fans.

It also would not shut down the mainstream delivery channels. So if someone still wanted to listen to it over Spotify and pay for it that way, they would still be able to do so.

Breaking someone's kneecaps is unquestionably a crime, copyright infringement for private consumption is not a crime, it's a civil offense (because listening to pirated MP3s doesn't make you a danger to society) so equating the two is a fallacy. I'm sure you already knew this since these arguments have been rehashed thousands of times over the past few decades.

I don't think you'd find much (if any) support on the moral angle either when it comes to people who genuinely can't afford to pay the asking price. I've never seen any authors, artists, etc. openly object to fans pirating their work in these circumstances but I've seen many of them openly encourage it. Seeing how you're equating the two, do you think they also like to have their kneecaps broken?

I remember Emule, with its IRC client we discovered by chance, or BearShare, which had a whole social network, you could search for people based on age, country and whatever. We used to get together at a friend's house because he had decent internet, in front of a CRT monitor, chatting with people around Europe with our broken english.

Music piracy also changed the course of my life, thanks to a DVD full of music I discovered my passion for metal, picked up the electric guitar, met a lot of friends, partners and had a lot of fun (I could say it was the best time of my life, but that was just because I was younger and without worries ;)

I also had no money to spend on CDs, nowadays I'm often thinking about buying a blu-ray player to buy the albums and movies I love... but I don't want them to collect dust, so I'm waiting for an excuse...

I do have a Sony Walkman (the new one) with a nice collection of music, but with spotify (which I want to replace with Qobuz) it's not getting used. I'm also selfhosting NaviDrome.

It is also simple to download from the streaming services so to me things got as simple as pasting a link in the terminal to rip to no internet places like a car

I enjoyed OiNK and What.cd but ultimately their ratio requirements killed that joy.

At some point the “market” was saturated. 99% of music was on the site, and every release had plenty of seeders and peers.

Unless you had early access to new releases, or maybe a seedbox with insane bandwidth and storage, it was almost impossible to actually meaningfully seed.

For me the only working strategy was to download What.cd releases from other torrent sites, then “downloading” the release from What.cd and then wait weeks until I had seeded enough to be able to “afford” one new download.