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…
The lost joy of music piracy
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Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#532Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#533RIP
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#534Music piracy is alive and well if you know where to look. Some places has been mentioned in this thread already. Of course there is no replacing the magic of early 2000-2010's p2p sites like OiNK, What and Waffles - but well curated sites still exist.
Indeed. I'm a member of a few music trackers and they have a lot of great stuff, but What's archive was amazing. One of my proudest things I own is a What.cd beer cooler I bought from them.
i wish i wouldve bought more!
i wish i had a legit music torrent site nowadays too
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify. Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit. Sure, there exists music that is on RED that is not on Spotify. There also exists music that is on Spotify that is not on RED (some of which I even listen to!). I said "pretty much anything" and "mo…
I think you and OP are arguing different things. Netflix/Spotify are the McDonalds/Olive Garden of media. They are basic, uncomplicated, and flawed, yet they serve most people's tastes. People whose needs they don't serve well go somewhere else.
There's a huge difference in Spotify for music vs Netflix for TV and movies. Netflix's catalog is absolutely tiny. Spotify's is not.
I also continue to disagree with the idea that Spotify's catalog is only for people with basic or mainstream tastes. This is far too reductive. Like I said above, the vast majority of newly released music is released onto Spotify. For many new or small artists, streaming is the only way their music is released. There is no "somewhere else" to go.
Personally, I listen to a lot of contemporary French indie pop, including a lot of pretty obscure stuff. This stuff is most available through streaming services. To the extent it is available via pirate channels, it's because someone bothered to take the time to rip it from a streaming service. There is nothing which music piracy offers in this domain, and there is a lot that it lacks (both in availability and in all the service factors that make streaming appealing, as I've said--convenience, sharing, discoverability). A further factor I haven't brought up yet is that it just feels shitty and pointless to pirate this kind of stuff when listening to it on Spotify at least provides some benefits to the artists themselves: royalties (tiny as they may be), increased play counts, exposure via recommendation algorithms.
A large fraction of what is uploaded to music piracy sites currently is sourced from music streaming platforms. Not all of it, certainly. A large fraction of the CD- and vinyl-sourced uploads are also available on music streaming platforms too though. As I've mentioned a few times previously, Spotify has a bigger catalog than RED does (even if you ignore all the 0 play AI slop spam that's been flooding Spotify lately).
I would say that the median user of private music torrent sites now is one of two things: either they are there because they want to join other communities for things beside music (TV, movies, video games, anime, porn, whatever), or they are someone who has been pirating music for a long time, probably Gen X, listens to mainly music from 30+ years ago, and has made music piracy a part of their identity and self-perception on some level (you can see a certain sense of smug superiority about it even in this HN thread).
All of this is to say that I think that the comparison to McDonalds or Olive Garden is just way, way off base. Spotify and Netflix do not belong in the same conversation either. Is there some stuff that's not available on music streaming platforms? Sure, it exists. If people find that streaming is not meeting their needs, of course they should look elsewhere. But the picture that is being painted in this thread is simply far off from reality.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd even go as far as argue that all streaming has its origins in piracy - Spotify seeded its catalog with pirated music (allegedly), Crunchyroll started off as an anime piracy site, etc.
Sometimes it's cheaper to break the law and pay a fine, than to do everything by law.
It's incredibly disheartening to know that one of the easiest ways to success is breaking the law and hoping it doesn't catch up to you before you have enough money to be above the law. That crime does pay. That lawsuits ruined people's lives for downloading MP3s and some of the biggest companies on the planet stole everything and walk away with a slap on the wrist.
This isn't an anti-LLM comment, it's just depressing how we live in a system with 2 very different sets of rules based on how much money you have.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's Android client as well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companynam...
> com.companyname.andriodapp1 And to think that if I want to publish an app I need to submit to Google for retinal scanning and anal probing to prove my identity (which wouldn't help because my identity is banned from submitting apps, but still).
It's fun sometimes to see what that app was called before a pivot or what the internal name was since you can't change it (once published) without losing your users.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#539A successor site exists. It's called [REDACTED].
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#540Earlier 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…
I think I agree with this. A possibly interesting quirk of it is that this is a fairly intellectualized description (specifically): > - Spending more time and attention when selecting next artist > - Reflecting on what you like about the song/album, and why > - Taking time to curate your collection > - Exchanging thoughts with other people, and reflecting on their opinions Of a process that at the time could have bee…