The lost joy of music piracy

Post by leokennis » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:07 PM UTC

xzel wrote: post #217

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 ge…

Post by squishington » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

daniel-smid wrote: post #16

self_awareness wrote: post #12

It's not really about piracy in general, it's mostly about What.CD. Equivalent of what.cd today is RED. But, TBH, most of the pirated music today is on YouTube anyway.

[flagged]

Post by account42 » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

Gander5739 wrote: post #175

bugufu8f83 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:15 PM UTC

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…

Post by itsmartapuntocm » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:22 PM UTC

postalcoder wrote: post #119

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…

> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. On the flip side, Sony lost the consumer devices market for this very reason. Sony's single-minded pursuit of proprietary formats was a disaster class of corporate mismanagement. It disgusts me because I used to love their products so much. Sony's competitor to the iPod was a marvel of a device called the NW-HD1. It was beautiful, had a ton of space, and…