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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#271

Post by joncooper »

Oh wow, blast from the past! I do too.

I published a sociology paper on this in college that may be of interest! (2000)

The social organization of audio piracy on the Internet (Media, Culture, and Society)

"In this article, we describe and analyze the emerging audio piracy (MP3) subculture on the Internet. As is evident to even the most naïve observer of the contemporary landscape, the explosion of Internet-based communication is radically redefining the nature of social relationships in modern societies, if not creating altogether novel forms of social interaction (Lyotard, 1991; Stone, 1996).

Yet sociologists have yet to take the Internet seriously as a site of ethnographic investigation. Where sociological observation concerning the Internet exists at all, it is through vague generalizations and unqualified assertions about what these new virtual forms of communication portend for “society” (Kellner, 1995), offering little in the way of concrete social research.

We attempt to advance the sociological study of “virtual communities” by embarking on an extremely focused study of one particular Internet subculture that is literally revolutionizing the production and consumption of popular music: audio pirates."

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/q3tcst00gjbwr5t02x38f/Social-...

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#272

Post by efficax »

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…

i pirated a ton but i also ripped all my cds and all my friends cds (and their parents cds). i took my macbook around everywhere and ripped every cd in could find

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#273

Post by MSFT_Edging »

ColdStream wrote: post #39
BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people want more than "mystery meat" levels of audio quality.

I once did a blind test on myself. A FLAC audio file and a 128Kbit Ogg vorbis file of the same track that I could switch between as I pleased but without knowing which was playing. Yeah, I cannot tell the difference. I am absolutely sure others can, but not me. I also think credit goes to far better encoders today than what we had 25 years ago.

I did this with a japanese punk band and when I finally got on a private tracker, I redownloaded them and the quality difference was night and day. I have a huge backlog of mid-grade MP3s from TPB back in the day and I'll occasionally download a second flac version of the albums just to get the dynamic range.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#274

Post by francisofascii »

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…

> selling a device to play pirated music.

Am I the only one here who legit purchased MP3s downloads for 99 cents off Amazon? (This was the era after Napster stopped working.)

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#275

Post by doginasuit »

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…

I agree, a focus on efficiency, immediacy, and quantity has lead us to a barren experience of discovery. Music streaming certainly has its virtues, it is a shame that they haven't made the discovery process better.

I wonder what it would look like to have a feature that elicited reflection, perhaps purely for its own sake but maybe also to help feed further discovery. You could have a player that didn't immediately start playing the next track but presented an interface where you could write notes or react to the song in a variety of ways. That reflection could deepen your appreciation for the song or help you put into words what you find missing. It would also be a much richer feedback for the system to understand what you are looking for and find the next song. We now have all these fancy tools and vector databases for a nuanced and meaningful search based on text content.

What I find most tiring about the status quo is that you have to skip through a bunch of tracks to find something that resonates. It seems mentally taxing and I can't help but think I may actually like a lot of these songs if I was in the right frame of mind to hear them.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#276

Post by bean469 »

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…

> Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West.

Orpheus and RED are going extremely strong right now, with very active userbases

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#277

Post by parasti »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #233
parasti wrote: post #222

Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO. I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like "presave this (you can't listen to it)", "jump back in (you literally already listened to it)", "your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)". There i…

> There is no joy of discovery of new music that you haven't heard. I have my problems with Spotify, but this is not one of them. I discover new artists, or long forgotten artists, regularly - even some weird obscure shit like Tänzelcore. But I have to agree, that the magic of discovering new music is not the same as, for example, digging records in a record store or via obscure boards and platforms (remember FF-Shri…

How? What's your secret? It's actively fighting me from discovering anything new. "Hey we'll show this artist you stopped listening to two years ago on your start screen forever. Wanna jump back in?" That's Spotify to me.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#278

Post by ValdikSS »

bean469 wrote: post #276
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…

> Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West. Orpheus and RED are going extremely strong right now, with very active userbases

That's private p2p, not public.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#279

Post by bean469 »

Diogenesian wrote: post #257
speed_spread wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> That's total bullshit. Global music revenue fell by 50% because of piracy[1].

The article you linked does not provide any source and / or a methodology for how this was calculated and attributed specifically to piracy

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#280

Post by caporaltito »

pbasista wrote: post #261
caporaltito wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The users usually not paying is a problem introduced by those platforms, in my opinion. They make the entire experience too generic for the regular users to care. It seems to me that the bands or musicians should distribute their music via their own websites. I think that then the users would care much more.

You're absolutely right
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