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The lost joy of music piracy

pigeonsandplanes.com

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#471

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.

Depends on screen size and viewing distance.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#473

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…

The result increased the likelihood of irl performance attendance. I don't really know what my friends listen to these days.

Most of my friend nowadays (40-42 year old group) either don't listen to music at all or just put on pop radio at work and pay no attention. And almost all of them are weirdly proud of their lack of interest in music and wear it like a bizarre badge of honour. Sucks being the only one left who is interested in music.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#474

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 make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this

I rarely say this, but you're using it wrong.

There are a number of good ways to utilize Spotify for music discovery that aren't "pray to the auto-play algorithm". The best resource IMO is artist pages.

- Artist pages:

- Artist Playlists - Many artists, especially smaller ones, curate their own playlists. I've found many good, new to me artists through what other small bands I like recommend on their playlists. If I hear a track I like on it then I click through to that artist and dive into their stuff.

- Discovered on - sometimes you'll find interesting user-curated playlists in here.

- Fans also like - I suppose it's "an algorithm" as well, but it's a deterministic one, and in most genres you're going to find other real bands there of similar popularity levels.

- Live Events: Pick your area, see who's playing. I'm not sure why but at least in North America it seems to be pretty much the most comprehensive nationwide concert listing at this point (better than BandsInTown, the remnants of Songkick, etc), and has a lot of little bar-tier shows that don't make it on most other live music trackers. (Some cities with a strong local scene have some kind of good local resource but they're only for that metro area + may only be for a specific set of genres.). I find a lot of the little shows I attend through this now.

- Playlists - not the ones algo-generated by Spotify, search for something and go down to the user-curated ones. Still have to check them over a bit to see that you're not getting AI slop, but there's a lot of gems.

But ultimately, you are never going to find + fall in love with much if you are just acting in a purely passive way. If you hear a song you like, you need to....actually hit like on that song, click on the artist, and explore that artist's discography.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#475

This is a wonderful piece. I really appreciate the author for writing this – I thought I lost the ability to read longform on the internet. What.cd was so vast a resource that it means something different to everyone. I personally lament the loss of the forums the most. I would post dissertation-length comments there and others reciprocated. I would put hours of research into debating a single topic. It's where I pro…

I loved the forums as well, being an invite only music piracy site turned out to be a pretty good foundation for a community. My posts however, were definitely not very high quality.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#476
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What law is this exactly? I've done a quick web search, but couldn't find anything describing quite this. Most sources suggested the law outlaws distributing (i.e. uploading) copywritten material, not downloading. This seems like it would be similar to US law... 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 ment…

Torrenting involves uploading.

Upload limits: You can limit your global upload speed to 0 KB/s in your client settings. This effectively stops your client from sharing anything, including in-progress pieces, while the download happens. It's not "playing fair" but there is nothing in the torrent protocol which requires every user to participate in seeding.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#477

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 Canadi…

My bet is Broken Social Scene.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#478
post #136

One 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…

> One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music I don't know. iTunes at the time was notorious for deleting all of your library if it thought you didn't buy something through them

Never had that happen to me (or heard of it happening) and I used iTunes for like 15 years.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#479

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!)

what were the lyrics you recall?

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