Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Ah, my mistake!
The lost joy of music piracy
281–290 of 637 posts
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#282The 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 made a mix CD for my wife for her birthday last year. It was my interpretation of Cereal Killer's "Greatest Zukes Album", featuring "great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit" that was mentioned in the 1995 movie Hackers. So to qualify for inclusion, the artist had to either have died of drug or alcohol overdose before September 1995 (when Hackers came out) or be a band one of whose principal members died in such a fashion. It was great fun to make and my wife still listens to it.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia Incorrect. The reasons why vinyl specifically is still relevant (as opposed to any other "retro" audio format) are technical. Vinyl avoids compression issues by design. (Compression both in the computer science sense and in the audio engineering sense.)
This is complete bullshit, sorry. Digital is more capable of faithfully reproducing sound than vinyl is. Vinyl does not have technical advantages when it comes to faithful sound reproduction. I mean, it literally degrades over time, for chrissake! I don't know what kind of "compression issues" you're talking about but I strongly suspect you'd be well served by learning about the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.
> Digital is more capable of faithfully reproducing sound than vinyl is.
That's exactly the problem that makes digital unsuitable.
Theoretically digital can reproduce sound faithfully, but if the medium allows sound engineers to compress the hell out of music, then they will abuse the opportunity.
Vinyl is a very limited format and you can't really do any sort of "creative" audio optimization bullshit with it.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a shitload of valuable vinyl records that don't have any art at all or even any cover. Paper and cardboard doesn't last as long as the record itself. No, the reasons for this are entirely technical.
de gustibus non est disputandum Look, I am telling you about my own lived experience with collecting vinyl. You can speak for yourself, but I carefully stored all my items in archival sleeves, and the jacket, art, and inner sleeve were often just as important as the disc and the music encoded on it. There was a real thrill and reward that came from collecting LP albums in particular, and that meant 12" discs, and I a…
I'm just saying there is a market for vinyl records with no art or sleeves, but no market for sleeves and art with no record.
Clearly the art isn't the driver of this market niche.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#285The 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…
> bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.
I've been thinking lately about the effect I'm having on the world.
Most people who read or watch something never subscribe. Most people who subscribe never comment.
Your work can be changing the lives of dozens of people but you still feel like you're shouting into a void.
Of the people whose work has changed my life I have reached out to approximately none of them.
And I often do try to make an effort to reach out! But for the most part I, too appreciate things invisibly.
--
P.S. You can just email people, regardless of how legendary they are, and a surprising number of them actually do reply!
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#286I 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.
Genres are fuzzy. It opened the door for me towards Derrick May, Adam Beyer, Carl Cox, etc.
If you had to put a label on it, what genre would you file it under?
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#287The 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 think algorithmic music discovery is overrated. Back in the day I used to use Audioscrobler which was an audio plugin for Winamp which was basically a recommender system for music. I discovered some interesting music through that but nowhere near the amount of music I later discovered through hypem which was a music blog aggregator.
Winamp is where I fell in love with last.fm. It wasn't as fun as going to a lan party and raiding the file server of all of the music to explore it or later, Napster checking out what music the person you were downloading a song from had that seemed interesting but it was super good at finding new similar music and side fun fact that my wife and some lady in Russia are the only close matches to me in music taste on there still. pretty wild. CBS ruined last.fm
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people want more than "mystery meat" levels of audio quality.
But bandcamp is only 128 kbit MP3 for free streaming, now that’s not a mystery, but probably also not worse than whatever YT offers.
If it is 128kbps MP3 then it’s slightly worse than YouTube which generally has 128kbps AAC and OPUS versions of everything.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The article is mostly an interview with a journalist who wrote a book about Napster. The claim comes from his book. That's the source. I have not read the book. If you have concerns about the methodology you should read it yourself.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#290The 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…
> bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa. I've been thinking lately about the effect I'm having on the world. Most people who read or watch something never subscribe. Most people who subscribe never comment. Your work can be changing the lives of dozens of people but you still feel like you're shouting into a void. Of the peop…
A year or so ago I emailed a composer just to tell him how much I enjoyed his arrangements of a great OST. He sent a very kind, thorough response and mentioned that feeling of “shouting into the void.@ He said once he releases a record he doesn’t really tour so he never gets to speak to people or see the emotional response, so the occasional message means a lot.