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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#171

Post by konart »

ValdikSS wrote: post #104
omgmajk wrote: post #28

Music piracy is alive and well if you know where to look. Some places has been mentioned in this thread already. Of course there is no replacing the magic of early 2000-2010's p2p sites like OiNK, What and Waffles - but well curated sites still exist.

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…

Anime (an everything related) torrent sites are also pretty alive.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#172

Post by ButlerianJihad »

bugufu8f83 wrote: post #161
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

First of all, vinyl is still relatively niche in absolute terms. Second of all, the popularity of vinyl, such as it is, has absolutely nothing to do with availability. It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia (as the technology itself is, of course, inferior from a technical sense of faithful reproduction) plus a desire for personal physical ownership of something.

I was a zealous collector of records when we made the switch to digital audio. And let me tell you, there was a significant artistry to the thing: a vinyl record was a standardized work of art. Every album cover was the result of careful design, photography, layout. The inner sleeve oftentimes contained more art, or if we were lucky, all the lyrics we wanted to sing along with. The record label itself, a masterpiece of design. All the smells and all the feels of merely collecting vinyl--even without playing it--are indescribable today.

When CDs came into the market, they were horribly clacky and just clad in layers of tacky plastic. The album art was shrunken, misshapen... and the objects themselves stank of polycarbonate, rather than delicious vinyl. Sure, they sounded great and they lasted a long time, and maintenance was dead simple. But so much artistry was lost. I was still collecting lots of CDs when purely digital distribution hit us, but by then, the smells and feels and experience of collecting vinyl were distant memories.

And that entire experience may be why people argue for the technical superiority of vinyl recordings, and analog tube amplifiers. Because it was all self-reinforcing, and it all fell apart once the clacky, tacky, plasticky CDs took over.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#173

Post by b345 »

keiferski wrote: post #128
charcircuit wrote: post #20

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.

It’s always really bizarre to me how pirates justify stealing creative works as some sort of culture. The record companies were/are awful, for sure, but the solution is to support musicians directly then, not come up with elaborate justifications for your theft. I imagine most of this is done by people with secure professions that don’t worry about getting paid for their work. When it comes to music and other art for…

If there was a mainstream way of supporting artists directly and having permanent ownership of music, piracy would be punching down and could possibly be a taboo practice. But as the current order stands, its punching up and fucking the suits more than artists and I really like that.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#174

Post by AlecSchueler »

embedding-shape wrote: post #120
devonsolomon wrote: post #112

The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects. My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence b…

> I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I've mostly been using my own playlists + radio to play music in Spotify and discover music. Recently though, I've started navigating and listening more by the label, and also listening through full a…

Don't forget the "label:" search in Spotify

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#175

Post by Gander5739 »

bugufu8f83 wrote: post #154
Gander5739 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the difference between film piracy and music piracy is inherent, due to the differences between film and music; or is there some alternative reality where we ended up with a one-stop shop for films, as well? For the history of music piracy, I found" How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy" was a good book to read.

That's an interesting question. I'm not sure. We sort of had that one-stop shop experience with Netflix's DVD service, where you would pay a subscription fee and in exchange you would get to watch movies from a huge catalog. But this didn't translate to the streaming era. P2P film piracy, at least for the quality-minded, has a few strong competitive advantages over film streaming. It doesn't have to deal with rights…

I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip.

The library for the music streaming platforms is much bigger than for films, of course (about 250 million for Spotify), but there's also a much lower barrier of entry. So perhaps the higher work needed to produce a film necessitates more profit, to a degree that only the fragmented streaming platforms can fulfill. After all, netflix started making originals to counter studios launching their own streaming platforms to raise profit margins, and pulling their content off netflix.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#176

Post by eisa01 »

haunter wrote: post #126
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…

Took me 1 min to find the first album in FLAC, probably the other two is available too

Only one of them had been available in FLAC, but someone made sure to make the rest available in the last two years, and someone else even put them on YouTube...

I had been on the hunt for them a couple years after purchasing The First Winter 25 years ago :)

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#177

Post by pjc50 »

erikschoster wrote: post #92
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.

We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.

Streaming (which pays labels and artists much less) only exists because it's the compromise that solves the "service problem" side of piracy.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#178

Post by ValdikSS »

konart wrote: post #171
ValdikSS wrote: post #104

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…

Anime (an everything related) torrent sites are also pretty alive.

Oh no, these don't feel very well either, in a sense that there's only a few seeders of the older uploads, if at all, and by older I mean as old as just a few years old.

I'm running my torrent preservation service, and many anime/jrock/jpop downloads start downloading only after weeks or months of waiting for a seeder.

Groups and individuals who used to be active on the scene has switched elsewhere and retracted their archives and XDCC bots.

There are Chinese torrent-to-web download services which seem to cache already downloaded stuff for a very long time if not indefinitely, sometimes you can download it from there if someone managed to use the service (they don't seed it over bittorrent though).

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#179

Post by jrowen »

devonsolomon wrote: post #112

The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects. My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence b…

I used ourTunes in the dorms, people just sharing their entire iTunes with the network. I've always been more of a solo digger, but I never liked Spotify. I have specific dance/electronic tastes so I browse and purchase music on sites like bandcamp or beatport, though actually these days it's strictly junodownload.

I do wonder though how much of what you describe, or some form of it, is still happening in dorm rooms. As we get older we just do less of that kind of stuff. I still connect with a large circle of friends through music, and discuss different artists and such, mostly at events.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#180

Post by brailsafe »

xethos wrote: post #167
devonsolomon wrote: post #112

The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects. My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence b…

> and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band Shoulda posted what you remember (and ideally male / female vocalist) as a post-script. The throwaway comment could be your way back

Agreed, plenty of Canadian's lurking here, even Dang himself.
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