The lost joy of music piracy • Hacker News Board

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#331

Post by m_w_ » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:33 PM UTC

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. There is no connection to other humans through music.

Hard disagree here.

For new music, Discover Weekly is great, if you take some time to engage with it on a routine basis. Even better, if you have an artist/genre you already like, the Fans Also Like or Discovered On will link you to other artists and playlists. Super easy to go down rabbit holes of new artists and playlists.

As far as connecting with others, I do like the spotify DMs (in-app share), the friend activity tab, and particularly the share attribution. When you share a song via link (url with ?si=), you'll permanently be linked to it. For a number of my favorite songs, I see "From {friend}" at the bottom while listening. Makes me feel super connected to friends I've bonded with over music.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#332

Post by kmeisthax » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

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.

Yes, but that was also the era where Sony was fighting Congress to keep DAT legal. Even when they got their way, no label would touch the format and it was a total, abject failure.

Sony's response to this was to use their bubble-era money to start buying US record labels, purely so they could force them to support their formats. But they ultimately wound up buying the exact same mentality that they were fighting against, and the labels won that fight internally. Sure, Sony had Minidisc releases of major label music, but the format flopped anyway, because they were entirely unwilling to market it for recording in the US. Outside of the US, Minidisc was the Apple "Rip. Mix. Burn" experience half a decade prior to the iPod; but in the US that experience basically didn't exist unless you knew exactly where to look.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#333

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

dbspin wrote: post #308

port11 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, a bit of devil’s advocate but how much of that network effect was caused by being young? I’m making an assumption, true, but a lot of us that grew up with ripped CDs were teenagers or young adults back then. Sharing music was inherently part of what we did because we were young and that was an activity we shared. And as to Spotify: why do we keep complaining about these platforms but also keep patronising them?…

To counter this - if you were around in the blog music era, being young had little to do with the network effect. Shitty pop music was in the ascendent culturally at the time, and the huge indie revival of the late 2000s and early 2010s happened primarily online. Hypemachine and the hundreds of mp3 blogs pushed novelty, obscurity, cross genre experiments, lost records etc. I'd finished college by this point, but dove…

Music is tough. People like music which is a lot like what they're familiar with but just a little bit different. Musicians are always suing each other because it's hard to write a song which doesn't sound dangerously like an existing song, which is why Taylor Swift is generous with writing credits. It's a big problem for LLM generated music, regardless of the training data.

Myself I have gone through phases in my adult life where I tried hard to expand my musical interests. Like around the time my son was born I was really into obscure psychedelia, both vintage and contemporary and also prog rock and other rock B-sides from the 1970s. Then later I got into the british 1980s music I missed. Then it was Ingsoc and then the Super Furry Animals, lately Tyler the Creator. One thing that's driven it is that I make these cards

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115939341268444811

and don't want them to show my age!

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#334

Post by carlosjobim » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #269

pjc50 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable. Streaming (which pays labels and artists much less) only exists because it's the compromise that solves the "service problem" side of piracy.

Apple and Steve Jobs were always taking about ripping your CDs to have your music on the iPod in their presentations to the public.

Down voters might want to read this open letter posted by Steve Jobs: https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....

"To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC. iPod users can and do acquire their music from many sources, including CDs they own. Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM. This music can be played on iPods or any other music players that play these open formats."

And this part might be interesting in the context of the article:

"The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy."

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#335

Post by pessimizer » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC

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…

> Only Russian Rutracker is still going strong, but everything other is either stagnating or defunct.

But rutracker is still going very strong, and shows up in every magnet link scraper.

> 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 their home country on their residential connection.

I don't think this is true at all. I think most are seeded through simple residential connections. The main reasons people use seedboxes are because everybody has a laptop that travels with them and isn't powered up and networked all the time (rather than a desktop that is never turned off), or because they don't want to hear from their ISP. It's not because of "beefiness." The amount of data it takes to store or transfer an album is trivial.

I just think that a lot of people with very mainstream tastes drifted away from p2p as they realized that spotify etc. satisfied all their needs. The people left on private p2p are largely the people who trading things that aren't available on streaming, or who just don't like the streaming experience at all.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#336

Post by mghackerlady » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #199

bugufu8f83 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, vinyl is still relatively niche in absolute terms. Second of all, the popularity of vinyl, such as it is, has absolutely nothing to do with availability. It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia (as the technology itself is, of course, inferior from a technical sense of faithful reproduction) plus a desire for personal physical ownership of something.

> 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.)

Give me a break. CDs aren't compressed and sound flawless if the mixing is good. it also isn't dependent on things like the quality or age of the disc. And sure, a bad player might sound a bit worse than a high quality one, but that mostly comes down to the DAC in it, whereas with vinyl depends on the player a lot more by virtue of being a mechanical format

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#337

Post by ssl-3 » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

itsmartapuntocm wrote: post #319

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…

Arguably it hurt them with the PSP as well by trying to get everyone to buy UMDs for their movies and store music on memory sticks.

Perhaps so, but they were clueless: The PSP was so easy to mod and run pirated games and emulators with that I'm not sure if I've ever tried to run a UMD in the one I have.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#338

Post by sailfast » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:39 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #317

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…

One strategy is to look at the records on pitchfork's top 100 lists, say https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ratings/1-pitchfork-highest-r... and listen to the discography of those artists. You will find some stuff you liked there. I had another round of adventures when I plugged in a Sony 300 disc CD changer into my home theater and loaded it exclusively with DTS Music CDs https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ratings/1-pitchfo…

These deep dives are fun, but it’s a lot more fun to have a conversation with someone about this sort of deep dive, get to know their taste and trust their next rec is probably going to be good.

I miss the community around music sites more than the content. Curation and passion was top notch and fun. Nobody was angling for ad dollars or revenue. They just did it to build the community.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#339

Post by mghackerlady » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:39 PM UTC

konart wrote: post #169

taneq wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck, almost everything is available for free on YouTube.

This is very far from truth unless you only listen freshs pop music. And even then it is easy to click a song only to receive "not available in your region".

no, I've found many an album on youtube that isn't anywhere else and was uploaded by a random guy 10 years ago

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#340

Post by shadowtree » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

Tangent - I still mourn the death of WeAreHunted. What a great music discovery site that was, unmatched in its ability to give you a curated feed of new artists to check out.

WeAreHunted was sold to Twitter at the time to launch as Twitter Music! What an idea, music discovery, right in your big feed. Brilliant.

Twitter #Music (https://abcnews.com/Technology/twitter-music-app-launches-ip...) barely lasted a year.

This was the time when Twitter also launched Vine - to also shutter it.

Great ideas, killed prematurely as TikTok took them and ran away with them. TT is now my #1 music discovery service, not great, just the only one that actually works.