The lost joy of music piracy • Hacker News Board

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#371

Post by otabdeveloper4 » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #329

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You can absolutely press the same compressed masters on vinyl

Nah, there's physical limits of the needle-in-a-groove medium that prevent this.

> or release the uncompressed masters digitally.

Technically yes, but nobody is gonna do this and risk not "standing out".

> who can afford high-end equipment

The average vinyl record player nowadays costs less than $150. The market is absolutely flooded with low-end Chinese turntables.

When a modern person listens to vinyl records for the first time, the immediate reaction is "how the hell do I make this louder so it pops out more".

And the answer is that you can't, the medium just doesn't work like that.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#372

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #352

losvedir wrote: post #215

Heh, 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 individua…

This nuanced take is appreciated less and less as HN grows.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#373

Post by thirtygeo » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:36 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…

"(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)"

Try the HN hive mind! Can you remember a year, +/-?

I'm hoping it will turn out to be Metric or The Murder Plans or The Constantines or.... Some other great 2000s Canadian indie act I can bond with a stranger over :D

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#374

Post by kyboren » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

bean469 wrote: post #295

Diogenesian wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since the explanation for the claim is essentially pay-walled behind the book, I will just choose to ignore it

"People got used to free shit and stopped paying as much."

"Your claim is poorly supported."

"Well it came from a book. Check it out if you're interested."

"What? It's not free? Hell no I won't pay!"

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#375

Post by ktallett » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

herecomesyour_ wrote: post #168

ktallett wrote: post #36

I've tried all the streaming services, I've regularly bought physical copies of music even in recent years, but nothing has exposed me to such a wide range of music and such a range of artists as a well curated blogspot. Whether that be a wide range of excellent bootlegs or music that has not been moved from cassette to digital, it just provides me with so much more joy. Especially easy to do now iPods are back in vo…

Oh my goodness you've unlocked a memory for me. Used to frequent a blogspot which introduced me to so so much alt 70s/80s/90s music. Downloads via Megaupload etc. Completely forgot about this until your comment.

Haha! Yes exactly! I had a music taste that was primarily based around TV (such as MTV), family and friends exposure, and old cassettes and CDs I bought in charity shops (thrift stores). Blogspot allowed me to find new artists in genres I already loved such as grunge. Both my love for Green River and Alice in Chains came from a blogspot. There are still a few dedicated bloggers out there. One in particular that allows you to do deep dives into punk from many countries.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#376

Post by pluralmonad » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #358

erikschoster wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Brother, arranging 0s and 1s a particular way on storage you own is not theft in any context.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#377

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

ValdikSS wrote: post #145

omgmajk wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used a public site since Suprnova so I don't know about the health of public p2p sites at all. The private side is absolutely not stagnant, new sites pop up all the time and you can still find all the niche stuff you want to find by just nudging the enthusiasts with requests. A lot of them seed from home, with humongous servers, and there are preservation programs going on in various places.

Yes, that's true, but the core reason there are private p2p sites is because you're most likely to get a DMCA violation letter from the watchdog company via your ISP or to you directly in the West. Even if it may be not a punishable offense, that still freaks out people, and they choose not to seed from home or use public websites which are scraped by DMCA watchdogs. I don't see much point in contributing to closed s…

I think for normal people, private trackers seem inaccessible and might as well not exist. When I was a kid, I had gobs of free time and spent most of it dialing into BBS systems, learning who to contact, and navigating the scene's trust network, just to get invites to warez sites. Now that I'm an adult, I'm a lame Casual, too busy living my life to have time to sit there figuring out the secret handshake needed to get an invite to Private Tracker X.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#378

Post by dfxm12 » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

Gander5739 wrote: post #106

bugufu8f83 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Do you think the difference between film piracy and music piracy is inherent, due to the differences between film and music; or is there some alternative reality where we ended up with a one-stop shop for films, as well? For the history of music piracy, I found" How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy" was a good book to read.

There are fewer music rights holders, so it is easier to get them together in a room and agree to, for example, a piece of Spotify in exchange for licensing the music. Thus, Spotify becomes like a defacto standard with reasonably all popular music. Just one subscription for what the average listener will want.

Right now, there are too many film distributors and services, let alone TV, plus a lot of exclusives that people want to watch. These video streaming services seem to be trending towards consolidation, but I think film distributors remain diverse.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#379

Post by tonylemesmer » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:45 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…

music-map.com is a wonderful music discovery tool I still use from time to time. Not just listing similarity but also weighted similarity. Its a fun tool!

[0] https://www.music-map.com/

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#380

Post by dbspin » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

port11 wrote: post #310

dbspin wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s true I didn’t grow up with that at all. When music blog were popular I’d have been in university exclusively listening to what I already liked. Bandcamp is indeed really bad at suggesting things you’ll like… To your last point: it’s weird how Bandsintown or Last.fm didn’t figure this out. Last.fm has so much potential but just isn’t… interested? One advantage of the offline scene is that I see a lot more local a…

Agreed. Last FM is one of the great lost opportunities of web 2.0 (up there with the early location based social networks). The website still exists, and I still use it (despite painfully poor integration into iOS, requiring the third party paid client Marvis to synch). They offer unclear value subscription to access all your data, and at this point, most dedicated music geeks have probably moved to OSS / local solutions integrating musicbrainz datasets.

There is a world in which lastfm is the one of the most popular social networks, tiktok before tiktok (which started as music.ly) if you like. There's another in which it developed into a Tidal like successful boutique streaming platform. Instead it's a half forgotten not really working nonsense.

My favourite lastfm story, is that back when it was somewhat popular (at least indie popular), someone commented on my lastfm profile to say they'd been in Tokyo and been approached by the members of a hyper niche Swedish band (Strip Squad) because one of the members had heard their music being played in a park. The guy playing them had found them because of my lastfm. Lastfm at the time actively suggested connecting with other users who had similar psychographic taste.

I'm all in favour of supporting local music scenes. Just personally I don't enjoy gigs, never have really. Sound is bad, always too loud, vibes are too alcohol based (at least here in Ireland), they're pricey etc. I'd actually love it if there was more of a 'listening cafe' Japanese style venue / scene here. There's a popular bar that poses as one, but it has a terrible, wildly over loud sound system in a box room with a loud open bar next door.