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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#251

Post by erayack »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #243
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 never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks. I don't think algorithms are…

Yeah, this is the part I miss too. Not really the downloading, more the weird little rituals around finding stuff and talking about it. What do you think a modern version of that would look like without just becoming another feed?

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#252

Post by Folcon »

cobbzilla wrote: post #242
flir wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> radio.garden (and many others) got neutered in the UK courts by Sony Do tell more, I’m very curious— am I unaffected in the US? I haven’t noticed a big change in the past several years. What happened?

It seems that radio stations outside the UK cannot be listened to, can you listen to any stations outside your country?

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#253

Post by soco »

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.

Oh but also the good old IRC channels on Undernet or whatever? Not quite warez to get you banned, just gray area with no official support but allowed to stay. Community chat, music recommendations, admin bots and random trivia - #mp3_...

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#254

Post by amelius »

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 miss the sharing of mixtapes (or even mix-CDs, later when burning them was possible).

Right now if I want to share music with someone, I first have to check which streaming service they are on ...

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#255

Post by erayack »

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…

Live radio has that someone is actually there feeling that playlists never really have

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#256

Post by ValdikSS »

twelvechairs wrote: post #223
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…

Soulseek is still going strong last time i checked

Well they shadowban the accounts which share copyrighted content for which they receive copyright claims.

It's a centralized service, they just configure you account to be invisible in the search results of others.

And they don't check whether the file is really reachable. I've 'chmod 000' copyrighted files so they could not be downloaded (but still could be found in search), and Soulseek administrators were not happy with that ether.

I've been shadowbanned 4 times or so. They never unban, need new account.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#257

Post by Diogenesian »

speed_spread wrote: post #236
nirvael wrote: post #218

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.

Piracy encouraged buying music. You'd learn of this cool band through a friend and would buy their next album when it came out. People still had the same budget for music but weren't so much at the whim of what music executives wanted to push at the moment. The network effects more than made up for the "lost" revenue.

That's total bullshit. Global music revenue fell by 50% because of piracy[1]. What music piracy did was make it impossible for artists to sell albums without engaging in parasocial celebrity-building and shameless merch.

And everyone knows this is true!!! Music pirates also like to point out that historically musicians only played live, so it's totally a-okay that jazz musicians can no longer make a living from the studio, that even John Scofield, the greatest guitarist alive, is only middle-class because he is constantly on tour in his 70s.

People talk out of both sides of their mouth on piracy because their only real motivation is "I like getting stuff for free and don't like moral responsibility." There is nothing more contemptible than tech folks telling easily falsifiable lies about how digital music affects working musicians. The cynical dishonesty is so depressing. Ever since I was a kid I knew it was just people rationalizing theft.

[1] https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/napster-made-monster...

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#258

Post by Affric »

amelius wrote: post #254
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 miss the sharing of mixtapes (or even mix-CDs, later when burning them was possible). Right now if I want to share music with someone, I first have to check which streaming service they are on ...

I still have the last cd I was ever given. Incredible mix.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#259

Post by cobbzilla »

Folcon wrote: post #252
cobbzilla wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> radio.garden (and many others) got neutered in the UK courts by Sony Do tell more, I’m very curious— am I unaffected in the US? I haven’t noticed a big change in the past several years. What happened?

It seems that radio stations outside the UK cannot be listened to, can you listen to any stations outside your country?

yes definitely, don’t even need a VPN. I can stream/listen from anywhere in the world on radio.garden

I’m sorry the UK cripples your streaming. That really sucks.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#260

Post by dspillett »

inigyou wrote: post #189
dspillett wrote: post #187

Quick reminder: it appears to seen as perfectly acceptable to pirate content for the purposes of training intelligence models. If anyone questions whether you have correct license for particular content, tell them that is it fine anyway because you are just using it to train the intelligence model that runs between your ears.

Like many things though, it's only acceptable if you are rich. You can do exactly the same thing OpenAI does, get served the exact same lawsuit, present the exact same defense, and lose because you're not OpenAI.

Aye. Saying it makes me feel marginally better though, despite knowing it wouldn't get me anywhere as a real legal defense. The fact that acknowledging the hypocrisy won't help me really, will not stop me from pointing out the hypocrisy with boorish regularity!
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