Beyond here is something like a utopia - no false advertisement here.
Some good memories: COFFE & salinger leak, filling in one of the largest bounties of obsure german electro pop for internet glory points, good memories.
The lost joy of music piracy
351–360 of 637 posts
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#352Heh, blast from the past here from the "information wants to be free" and "you wouldn't download a car" days. Sometimes HN feels unrecognizable with how much the comments I read are pro- intellectual property. But these days, I do wonder how much 90s / early 2000s time was any better or if all of us who had experienced them are just getting older and nostalgic for our youth.
> Sometimes HN feels unrecognizable with how much the comments I read are pro- intellectual property.
How so? Many people just rightfully care mainly about the cultural exploitation aspect and the impact on society. Under that lens you can be anti-copyright when it is used by corporations to exploit individuals and pro-copyright or at least pro-equal enforcement when it is ignored by corporations to exploit individuals.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#353The 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…
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?…
The problem with subscription music is that the streaming platforms have no incentive to get you to discover new music - you're already paying either way.
Before Apple Music, when it was just the iTunes Store, Apple introduced iTunes Genius and it was scary good at recommending music; it worked so well I shudder to think what I spent in total buying $1 songs off of it.
But apple's music "play similar songs" just seems to take the same artists and pump their other album filler songs.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#354The 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’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band.
In the last couple of months, I've found that Gemini has actually become really good at finding those missing songs and obscure albums. It might take a few minutes of going back and forth and false leads, but I've found very obscure songs from the 80s and 90s that I've been searching for for decades without success. It helps if you give it everything you remember about the song, style, maybe who it sounded like or other bands that may have been around at the time.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#355I 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…
> I wasn't sure if this post was lamenting the loss of discovery or the loss of stable revenue streams for artists.
I haven't read the article yet, but the most devastating loss was the catalog itself. It was the largest archive of music in history. Of course, discovery was enabled in part by that.
> I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too.
It's not even comparable. If your definition of discovery considers what you can find on Spotify, then you're talking about a completely different thing. That's not to say that Spotify and elsewhere don't have discoverability — they're just not filling the void.
> as someone who makes electronic music
Your stuff was probably on there :D
> What I wonder is whether folks here (members of Lobsters) see that community as possessing the same magic/thrill/quality of What.CD?
I'm missing the comparison here too. There are communities that possess that thrill (some of the best of which don't even offer invites), so I know what you mean by it. I just haven't seen or heard that about Lobster.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#356The 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…
Reading this is weird because those network effects and friend group sharing experiences are exactly how my music lover friends use Spotify.
They share playlists instead of the files. They make friends of friends through playlist recommendations.
I was at a get together a few years ago where someone met a friend of mine and exclaimed, “Oh you’re _____ of the _____ playlist series! Those are amazing!” and then they talked about music and concerts for the next hour.
I don’t think piracy was as key to your experience and joy of music. It was the way you acquired the music, but your enjoyment and the social networks came from the novelty of it all and likely your age at the time. It was all new and fun and you still enjoyed it all.
Your story quickly shifted from being about piracy to complaining about music these days:
> and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.
I think you’ve just fallen out of love with music in general. Piracy had nothing to do with it other than being the means to an end at the time of your honeymoon phase.
I remember substantially similar stories from older generations trying to explain how online piracy had ruined music discovery because the real fun was from their younger days of trading bootleg tapes, mix tapes from friends, and going to concerts. The cycle continues.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#357[dead]
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#358One 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…
It was also common to have a collection of CDs you owned and wanted to put on a device like this.
I mean, sure, but at some point with 3 or 4 thousand cds crated up, it became a lot easier to steal than go crate digging in my own basement. And then when what.cd happened and you could literally grab a torrent of perfectly curated files of an artist’s whole catalog, the laziness really spiked.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#359The 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…
My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships Hey! You can bring this back in 2026! In a fit of random inspiration (possibly inspired by a glass of wine or two) I began a new practice. If I'm hanging out with somebody who's passionate about music, I pull up Spotify (or Apple Music, whatever) and create a blank playlist. I hand them my phone and ask them to add some tracks for me. Here's the trick that makes it w…
I love this idea!
Yeeeeears ago, I was in the middle of some late-night hacking session, hanging with friends on IRC, and I had shared my screen via VNC so they could watch/help. (ISTR I had found the UART port on some piece of embedded hardware and we were muddling our way through U-boot incantations or something.)
At some point, I tabbed over to Winamp to change the music, which everyone saw, and one of the crew was like "oh hey you have artist X on your playlist, do you like artist Y?", and I admitted that I had not heard of artist Y. Seconds later there was a DCC file transfer.
Artist Y fit the mood perfectly. This was great.
This evolved into spawning Winamp on a second box that could be separately VNC'd into, where anyone could upload and play music they thought was appropriate for the session, without interrupting the main console. And someone installed a Shoutcast server on it too, so everyone could listen.
After a little while this was our little Friday-night routine, regardless of whatever other hacking was happening. The collaborative deejay stage -- we popped a Notepad on the Winamp box to track who was playing and who was up next, though ephemeral chat remained on IRC -- defined a brief era of my internet experience.
Many years later, I ran across a Spotify plugin called Jqbx that did basically the same thing. It was short-lived, but there seem to be several work-alikes. Sadly the community disbanded, but now it's got me thinking...