Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The lost joy of music piracy

pigeonsandplanes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 637 posts

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#381

Post by dyauspitr »

mghackerlady wrote: post #316
account42 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable. The movie industry unfortunately never gave up no matter how vain the attempts are.

Still why I like DVDs. Smaller in size, easy to rip, and 480p is good enough that I don't mind the quality loss. Blu-ray is great, but if I'm buying something I'm not sure about or just want to have because it's worth having, DVD all the way

I have never heard the phrase 480p is good enough. 480p is not good enough, 720p might be good enough.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#382

Post by mghackerlady »

dyauspitr wrote: post #381
mghackerlady wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still why I like DVDs. Smaller in size, easy to rip, and 480p is good enough that I don't mind the quality loss. Blu-ray is great, but if I'm buying something I'm not sure about or just want to have because it's worth having, DVD all the way

I have never heard the phrase 480p is good enough. 480p is not good enough, 720p might be good enough.

On a small display that I usually want to watch digital movies on, it's fine. 720p is the minimum for anything I actually want to watch/enjoy watching. Like I said, a lot of stuff I have on DVD is stuff that is good to have that I'll probably never watch regularly

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#383

Post by canadiantim »

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…

How does your Canadian indie band song go? I’m intimately familiar with a looot of Canadian indie music, could help ya find it

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#384

Post by socalgal2 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #322
smugglerFlynn wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I haven't had much luck with LLMs. I can guess it works with famous artists but lots of other things work with famous artists. I asked it to find more tracks like "Hey Baby" (Deadmaus, Mellifresh) and they completely failed to even come close. I couldn't even get a similar vibe.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#385

Post by runarberg »

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…

Does Bandcamp still do their Bandcamp weekly and their regular article? Personally I never signed up for any streaming service (apart from Bandcamp; but I don‘t use their suggestion algorithm) so I can’t judge what is good or bad about it. But I feel like their regular articles and their Bandcamp weekly show was excellent at music discovery. I stopped listening and reading it a while ago, as I get plenty good music discovery on my local radio station (KEXP) as well as the national radio of where I grew up (RÚV in Iceland).

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#386

Post by fridder »

MilkLizard wrote: post #341
xaitv wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable. One of these attempts that I assume most people are familiar with but is an interesting read for those that aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

And of course Sony was involved

Sony has so often footgunned itself it is comical. Occasionally great engineering hobbled by terrible business choices

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#387

Post by socalgal2 »

I discovered lots of music back when Rhapsody was a thing (2003-2006). When a song was streaming it would show who the band was influenced by and who they influnced. Following those links would lead to more music I enjoyed.

The current stream services don't have that feature and their discovery algos are attrocious.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#388

Post by account42 »

ryandrake wrote: post #368
account42 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them Which is "piracy" - not that that makes it ethically wrong. It's actually the main kind of copying that is targeted by DRM since users of the LimeWire kind never see that.

Which is why we should never use the word "piracy." Don't let the industry dictate language (for their own benefit). Equating sharing music with a friend to robbery and murder on the high seas is a wildly out of touch exaggeration. If we let booksellers dictate language in the same way, they'd call libraries and book clubs organized crime.

Agreed, I didn't put the word in quotes on accident. I'm just quite happy to point out that copyright infringement is something that every day people do without thinking and not restricted to the realm of hardened cyber criminals aka. nerds with an internet connection.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#389

Post by bradly »

port11 wrote: post #307
wodenokoto wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the streaming sites are in a difficult position. On one hand I expect access to the worlds music, but on the other hand I also expect not to be drowned in 8bit covers and AI music. They are - to me at least - also an arbiter of music, similarly to how record stores used to be.

If only they had gobs of cash to pay people to curate content… or, I don’t know, AI that can check if something is AI. Or ask uploaders for some kind of proof, since we’re in the age of asking citizens to prove they’re adults. If only there was _something_ they could do!

I can't speak for other streaming services, but at Apple Music we did pay musical industry professionals a lot of money to do human evaluation of specific searches. We had people with specific deep knowledge of genres and niches. At least in my little corner Apple that was quite a bit of effort put into this.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#390

Post by dfxm12 »

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.

Can you objectively think about what was/wasn't better? Aside from download speeds, I don't think piracy is any easier or harder today than it was back then. As a negative for back then, I think the threat of legal action against regular folks downloading stuff loomed larger. I think today groups focus more on quality/file size than time to market.

Overall, I think piracy is in a healthier state today.

Post reply on HN