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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#211

Post by ghaff »

jrowen wrote: post #179
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.…

There's probably some truth in that although, if you didn't have to collect a large volume of music whether purchased or copied in some form, I'm not sure the incentives are there to get started in any serious way. It is also true that, for me at least, I purchase very little music these days and basically don't pirate at all.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#212

Post by inigyou »

andruby wrote: post #165

I got into Techno by cheer coincidence. I was 13 in 1999 and browsing Napster. I had followed the 1998 World Cup the year before with France - Brasil in the final and (the older) Ronaldo stealing the show. So here I see music from what I think is DJ Ronaldo. And this is when download 1 mp3 could easily take half an hour on our dial-up connections. So we only downloading 1 or 2 songs max. Turns out it’s not the footba…

Is Nights of the Jaguar considered techno now? I associate the genre of techno with, like, very repetitive rhythms.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#213

Post by bugufu8f83 »

a-french-anon wrote: post #170
bugufu8f83 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify. Some examples: Melvins' Lysol is (famously) only available on Apple Music and for good measure I just looked right now at Spotify's page for Midor…

>If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify.

Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.

Sure, there exists music that is on RED that is not on Spotify. There also exists music that is on Spotify that is not on RED (some of which I even listen to!).

I said "pretty much anything" and "most people". I stand by this. Most people do not experience major holes in the Spotify catalog and are perfectly well satisfied by the breadth of the catalog. If you aren't, that's cool, but you're in a minority.

If this weren't the case, music piracy would be more popular. It's not. RED has more music now than What.CD did, but the community is smaller. It's telling that it doesn't even get a mention in the OP. A lot of people who join aren't even particularly interested in music piracy but just want to use it as a stepping stone to other communities.

I'm not saying that music piracy sucks or whatever. I'm just saying that most people don't feel much need for it and are well-served by Spotify--which, again, has some huge advantages over piracy that I gave previously. I think it is useful to be realistic about this because it's easy reading an article or thread like this to feel a kind of FOMO and I think it's valuable to push back against that.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#214

Post by flir »

cobbzilla wrote: post #156
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…

Similar experience and I would never trade it in a lifetime. For the “me” today, new music discovery is all about live radio. and I don’t mean pop/satellite/corporate programmed radio. I mean radio where a human still cares . I mostly use radio.garden (sometimes TuneIn) and find crazy local stations around the world. K-Pop from Seoul, Parisian hiphop, live EDM from clubs in Ibiza, weird/fun island music from the remo…

radio.garden (and many others) got neutered in the UK courts by Sony. Offensive, short-sighted, Balkanizing decision.

I haven't bought a Sony product since the rootkit debacle. My only regret is that there's not a "boycott++" mode for the damage they did with that decision.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#215

Post by losvedir »

Heh, blast from the past here from the "information wants to be free" and "you wouldn't download a car" days. Sometimes HN feels unrecognizable with how much the comments I read are pro- intellectual property.

But these days, I do wonder how much 90s / early 2000s time was any better or if all of us who had experienced them are just getting older and nostalgic for our youth.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#216

Post by abc123abc123 »

konart wrote: post #169
taneq wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck, almost everything is available for free on YouTube.

This is very far from truth unless you only listen freshs pop music. And even then it is easy to click a song only to receive "not available in your region".

What? I find plenty of jazz and classical music on youtube. yt-dlp -x is your friend.

I find it amusing that youtube can be the source of my "pirated" music and get away with it. But the piratebay guys got their lives smashed to pieces.

But that I guess, is our civilization today. One set of rules for politicians and corporations, and one set for the slaves.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#217

Post by xzel »

leokennis wrote: post #139

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 r…

It was incredibly easy to get upload credit for seeding freeleech torrents (which included 10-20 albums of staff picks once a month or so) or re-encoding releases that were missing v2 or 320 encodings and scripts would pick up the releases. You could also just watch for new releases or follow trends and you'd easily get 5-10x ratio seeds. Also, you can get a $5/m seedbox to keep your downloads alive and you'd easy get back to 1.0 ratio assuming it wasn't some truly unlistenable album. I had a ratio of like 15 or something on what by leaving my computer on. At no point was it impossible or even difficult to get upload credit on any of these websites unless you were just leeching/turning off uploads. I just pulled up a larger site and I have 15 TB up, 1.15 TB down, and I'm doing absolutely nothing besides downloading stuff and deleting the torrents once I need space.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#218

Post by nirvael »

I'm confused, surely there's a contradiction between "piracy was so good, we had this panacea of completely open, free, infinite music" and "streaming is bad even though it's the same infinite music library but we charge a small subscription". I get that artists aren't paid enough, but it's better than the $0 they get from piracy.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#219

Post by drumhead »

Piracy, however much it's hated by the industry has saved so much media from being lost forever. The greatest example I can think of is Doctor Who. When the BBC erased tapings of the earlier shows, it was thought they were lost forever, but fans had been taping the audio of the shows off the television, and the cleaned up soundtracks were used by the BBC to create animated editions and maybe in the future AI replacements.
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