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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#321

Post by itsmartapuntocm »

bugufu8f83 wrote: post #99
eisa01 wrote: post #51

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 Even albums mentioned in the Norwegian business magazine D2 can be impossible to find in legit channels. Your only option is to buy used CDs on Discogs for 50-100 USD, or know your way around the successors of these sites These CDs weren’t even on Oink or What (or did…

>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…

If you listen to non-western music the streaming library shrinks a lot.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#322

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

At a verbal level LLMs are great: questions like "tell me about hip hop artists similar to MF doom" or "is there anything new like jefferson starship?" can be the start of great conversations. They will talk your ear off about what is going on with tracks like "Dangerous" off the Yes Union Album.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#323

Post by grvdrm »

I wasn't familiar with either Oink or What.CD - fascinating to read about them.

I spent tons of time on Napster and LimeWire roughly between late 1990s and 2005 when I graduated from college.

A few things stood out as related topics:

1. I attended UMass-Amherst - a school not unfamiliar with and perhaps even popular for jam band culture. There was, at one point, a tool distributed that allowed any particular user to search the entirety of the network of users that also used that tool. So, what quickly evolved was this huge searchable library of songs, videos, etc. covering the thousands of students that chose to put something there. I don't recall the balance of my use of other services compared to that specific network tool, but it was an amazing place to discover music and also quite fast compared to everything else.

2. I wasn't sure if this post was lamenting the loss of discovery or the loss of stable revenue streams for artists. Maybe both. I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too. When I want more variety and access to the farther reaches of the music world, I use hypem.com. It's still great, after all these years, and a quite small operation despite the presence of Apple/Spotify. Also love Soundcloud, and as someone who makes electronic music/DJs on the side - Beatport.

3. What.CD reminded me of what I now hear about re: Lobste.rs. I'm not a member, and it's unclear to me if I want that? But it has some similar characteristics - invite only, ICQ chat, active moderation. What I wonder is whether folks here (members of Lobsters) see that community as possessing the same magic/thrill/quality of What.CD?

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#324

Post by mghackerlady »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #93
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…

The first one had no wifi and less space than a nomad - 5g from memory. That’s about 85 hours at 128k. I had more than that on CDs at the time. Now technically it’s “piracy” in the U.K. to rip your own cd. I really should go back to buying CDs.

Please do! New releases aren't exactly cheap, but places like goodwill are practically giving them away. Make a list of albums you want, spend a day going to charity/pawn shops, and get what you can. If you can't find it, see what it costs on discogs, and buy it there if it's reasonable. I've gotten to the point that the only albums I have exclusively digital are those that cost an arm and a leg otherwise

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#325

Post by mghackerlady »

speed_spread wrote: post #226
postalcoder wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yet a few years before that Sony had no qualms selling walkmans, blank tape cassettes and dual-tape portable sound systems, often with double speed copy function. We would gather for afternoons and make actual copy parties. Recording quality wasn't great but we didn't care.

not to mention minidisc, which was pretty much exclusively used as a format to copy your CDs to

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#326

Post by [deleted] »

THansenite wrote: post #320

Are there any communities like this still around and thriving? I miss the old bulletin board days of the mid 2000s to mid 2010s, before Facebook and other social media took over. I'm part of a vintage car building community (LocostUSA) that still uses forums, but is a very small, niche community. What others are still active?

[deleted]

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#327

Post by dfxm12 »

I feel like when you glorify gatekeeping piracy like oink or apparently what.cd had, you've lost the plot.

Piracy is largely a response to arbitrary rules in media distribution, like how, where, when or even if you can buy something. Hiding piracy behind a "textbook-length list of rules" is bad just as the system it is responding to.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#328

Post by DaanDL »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #115
DaanDL wrote: post #90

Biggest thing I miss about all of this was the gatekeeping and curation really. There's so much garbage on Spotify, it's hard to find good music, and the recommendations I get always safely stay in what I already listened to.

The way around this is the people that listened to this also listened to that feature. That's the main way I discover new music these days. I find something new that I like and then I explore whatever it is that people listen to that also listened to that song. If you don't do that, the recommendations are basically more of the same shit. All the B-singles of an artist you like some songs of. Or worse: "you're old, h…

Yes, this is the way. Also, everything is still connected with last.fm too, so once a while I'll also take a look at my neighbours there.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#329

Post by account42 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #283
bugufu8f83 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Compression in the audio waveform sense has nothing at all to do with the medium. You can absolutely press the same compressed masters on vinyl or release the uncompressed masters digitally. It's a matter of what the customer base is looking for. Digital music is made for the mass market where "louder" means standing out and thus more success while contemporary vinyl is made for the enthusiast who can afford high-end equipment and clean listening environments.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#330

Post by mghackerlady »

eisa01 wrote: post #51

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 Even albums mentioned in the Norwegian business magazine D2 can be impossible to find in legit channels. Your only option is to buy used CDs on Discogs for 50-100 USD, or know your way around the successors of these sites These CDs weren’t even on Oink or What (or did…

This! The only album I consider perfect (Regional at Best by Twenty Øne Piløts) is only available on I think Deezer?
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