441–450 of 637 posts
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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.
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…
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…
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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.
Maybe the threat of serious legal action was stronger back then but I think the threat of light legal action is stronger now. They've streamlined the processes for getting your ISP to ban you (largely by copyright troll companies buying up all the ISPs). In Germany, if you download a public torrent, there is a brief legal process which always ends with 100-2000€ being deducted from your bank account and given to the…
Maybe I should have mentioned the threat of criminal charges, or defined piracy as downloading (but it seems like you understood it this way too as you mentioned "downloading a public torrent"). Rights holders do make sure there are news stories every so often about lawsuits around some act related to piracy, but of course regular people can be bullied in the courts, whether they are truly liable or not.
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…
That's precisely the reason I'm building Digs[1]. If you like listening to whole albums and discovering things via friends, you might like it!
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I think algorithmic music discovery is overrated. Back in the day I used to use Audioscrobler which was an audio plugin for Winamp which was basically a recommender system for music. I discovered some interesting music through that but nowhere near the amount of music I later discovered through hypem which was a music blog aggregator.
Does anyone in 2026 rate algorithmic discovery for music? Or is it widely perceived to be the engagement-reinforcement mechanism that it is?
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…
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?…
I've tried going back a few times, but it just isn't worth the money.
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Hard to argue against it when you get memory holed by playlist entry removals by a cloud service. Much easier living having everything at `.config/mpd/playlists` with git history.
You couldnt be serious
I have an easy time managing a playlist through the many available audio player frontends writing to an .m3u which is itself usable as a file path list in scripts to copy the music from my library to an external device.
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You can't steal something unless there is ownership of it by the other person. There has to be loss for it to be stolen. Stealing isn't ok, but downloading music or movies without paying isn't stealing.
>There has to be loss for it to be stolen. Counter example: Pirating a song is considered stealing as you are taking something for free without paying for it. You are using a definition that is different from the average person.
If I go to the store, pick up a carton of milk with my right hand, and magically get a second carton of milk in my left hand, then walk out the store with the carton of milk in my left hand, leaving the original carton in the store, then I have not stolen anything. If that is stealing, then I can only conclude that stealing is (a)moral, and we need a different word for what I would consider to be stealing.
Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862