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The lost joy of music piracy

pigeonsandplanes.com

141–150 of 637 posts

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#141

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…

Well. This is what Soundcloud or Bandcamp do. The problem is that: if it's for free, 99% of people won't pay.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#142

Edited to add first: nice article covering an important couple of critical pieces of the Internet's history. 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 p…

> 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.

FYI, they have their entire discography in bandcamp[0] for "name your price", including $0.

[0]: https://kinggizzard.bandcamp.com

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#143
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…

> pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites

If that were true, then vinyl sales wouldn't be growing.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#144

Very fond memories of using Audiogalaxy, and also soulseek. Soulseek especially had a community where you found someone who was into the same kind of music as you (obscure breakcore! japanese garage punk!) and could browse their collections, and chat to them also! What a wonderful way to make music friends and get good recommendations.

Did I hear Soulseek? Look for slskd in github. I had a tear on my face when I could find people sharing japanese math rock :)

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West. Only Russian Rutracker is still going strong, but everything other is either stagnating or defunct. I have a p2p sharing websites bookmarks which I collected about 5 years ago, 60% of them are dead now. Private (invite-only) West sharing websites are still alive though, but are supported mostly by beefy enthusiasts who seed everything via a seedbox elsewhere, not in…

I haven't used a public site since Suprnova so I don't know about the health of public p2p sites at all. The private side is absolutely not stagnant, new sites pop up all the time and you can still find all the niche stuff you want to find by just nudging the enthusiasts with requests. A lot of them seed from home, with humongous servers, and there are preservation programs going on in various places.

Yes, that's true, but the core reason there are private p2p sites is because you're most likely to get a DMCA violation letter from the watchdog company via your ISP or to you directly in the West.

Even if it may be not a punishable offense, that still freaks out people, and they choose not to seed from home or use public websites which are scraped by DMCA watchdogs.

I don't see much point in contributing to closed silos (even if I'm present on the majority of invite-only music trackers and occasionally contribute there) because I have ThePirateBay and RuTracker account: it's the same, but it's open for everyone and google-able.

Some private trackers disallow accessing them via VPN, which I find super strange. They want to access the website with your residential connection, but they allow seeding via VPN (which many do, because see above).

Other private tracker which I used to be on had a timeout on account life time. If you don't log in once in a while (6 months AFAIR), your account will be suspended, even if you're seeding all the content in the torrent client all this time.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#146

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.

Copyright infringement is not stealing.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#147
One of my proudest achievements in that scene was gaining the rank of Elite Torrent Master. I had terabites of music that I was seeding. I built a script that automatically found candidates for transcoding, downloaded them, transcoded them and created a new torrent. It's still up on github and people are still using it for RED afaik. It's been ages though since I've been active in the scene. I stored all of my media on raid0 drives so when that died I kind of just gave up. I don't know who but someone leaked my semi-public books archive on the datahorders subreddit and they hit my disks so hard that they just gave up on life. I still hold a grudge all these years later.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#148
post #54

Very fond memories of using Audiogalaxy, and also soulseek. Soulseek especially had a community where you found someone who was into the same kind of music as you (obscure breakcore! japanese garage punk!) and could browse their collections, and chat to them also! What a wonderful way to make music friends and get good recommendations.

Soulseek is still going hard.

Don’t tell anyone! Haha
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