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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#511

Post by edm0nd »

Diogenesian wrote: post #257
speed_spread wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy encouraged buying music. You'd learn of this cool band through a friend and would buy their next album when it came out. People still had the same budget for music but weren't so much at the whim of what music executives wanted to push at the moment. The network effects more than made up for the "lost" revenue.

That's total bullshit. Global music revenue fell by 50% because of piracy[1]. What music piracy did was make it impossible for artists to sell albums without engaging in parasocial celebrity-building and shameless merch. And everyone knows this is true!!! Music pirates also like to point out that historically musicians only played live, so it's totally a-okay that jazz musicians can no longer make a living from the s…

that seems more like a musician with poor skills and mismanagement VS piracy had anything to do with their lacking career. Piracy is awesome!

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#512

Post by devonsolomon »

xethos wrote: post #167
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…

> and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band Shoulda posted what you remember (and ideally male / female vocalist) as a post-script. The throwaway comment could be your way back

I selfishly wanted to but: 1. It’s a little besides the point 2. I didn’t want to embarrass myself with how badly I remember it.

Anyway, here’s my shot: Male singer + (from other comment) It was pretty alt-grungy (something like TV on The Radio or Blockparty at the time). Lyric I remember is from a song starting with something along the lines of: throw away your newspaper/ no more bad news today.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#513

Post by pluralmonad »

ux266478 wrote: post #412
pluralmonad wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you operate under the misguided assumption that the law cannot be wrong. I care less for legalese than morals. Its plainly not theft, regardless of the hand wringing of bureaucrats and gatekeepers.

What? The context of the conversation was about piracy which is a distinct legal fiction, it's inherently grounded in the law's opinion, so yes necessarily the law cannot be wrong in this context, that's incoherent. An idiosyncratic disagreement with the law isn't saying anything relevant to the discussion.

In that context it is still not theft. The term is copyright infringement, a distinct fiction and categorically not theft.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#514

Post by devonsolomon »

thirtygeo wrote: post #373
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 Canadi…

I probably should have just included it in the post, because now I’m replying the same thing hoping someone finds it…

I don’t think it’s BSS unless there are EPs from before what’s on Spotify. It was more punk rock than BSS, I think.

From the other comment TLDR… Male singer; Something like Blockparty/ TV on The Radio, song lyric was (maybe) something about throwing away your newspaper / no bad news today

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#516

Post by ValdikSS »

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.

That's covered by What.cd's Gazelle "spider web of similar artists"

https://litter.catbox.moe/od8vcq.png

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#517

Post by red-iron-pine »

piker wrote: post #206
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

spotify has brought me some gems. more hits then misses, generally.

definitely engagement bait and they lean hard on popular (both pop, and just well loved / common) music.

no idea if the "payolla" system is still in effect like with radio but it feels like it sometimes.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#518

Post by red-iron-pine »

gaudystead wrote: post #417
cobbzilla wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar experience and I would never trade it in a lifetime. For the “me” today, new music discovery is all about live radio. and I don’t mean pop/satellite/corporate programmed radio. I mean radio where a human still cares . I mostly use radio.garden (sometimes TuneIn) and find crazy local stations around the world. K-Pop from Seoul, Parisian hiphop, live EDM from clubs in Ibiza, weird/fun island music from the remo…

Can I offer you a SomaFM[0] in these trying times? They're entirely listener supported and the music they play is - to my knowledge - entirely human curated. I've found many tracks and artists new to me, with some artists not even having a presence (or a very small one) on Spotify. Their curation is so good that they've become a significant resource I go to when seeking out new music. It feels like a warm hug from pe…

love me some SomaFM. even paid for their deliberately overpriced tshirt and stickers to support them + occasional donations.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#519

Post by eric6071 »

bfors wrote: post #475
postalcoder wrote: post #97

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.

We're all hackers here, somebody should build one!

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#520

Post by [deleted] »

account42 wrote: post #299
pjc50 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable. Streaming (which pays labels and artists much less) only exists because it's the compromise that solves the "service problem" side of piracy.

> 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.

[deleted]
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