Dude this is the dankest stuff I saw on HN for a while. Here an upvote, and thanks for the share. And thanks Jason for this awesome work.
I'm heading right away to listen to some O'school Tupac & Biggie mixtapes. Aw yeah!
Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
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Re: Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
#12Mixtapes are kind of the open-source version of rap music. Sort of free to download, remix, and distribute. Sort of... Almost every rapper who is popular right now (meaning, being played on the radio, touring...) has released their music for FREE, months, if not years, before being available for sale on iTunes, or CD. Sure, the iTunes version was mastered by someone who wasn't stoned, but it's pretty crazy that argua…
> Apple with all their force, is cracking down on sites like datpiff for releasing the tapes they have exclusive rights too.
You might be on to something. I was trying to download Chance The Rapper's new mixtape from Datpiff, and saw a message that it has been taken down due to copyright quibbles and what not. Went to HotNewHipHop and same thing ... I have to say this is the first time I've seen a message of that kind in either website.
Re: Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
#13In fifty years, Jason Scott should be fêted for this archival work he's been leading. He may not have come up with the idea of the Internet Archive, but by putting in so much work to archive and protect this history—be it mixtapes, old DOS viruses, or playable arcade games—he's making it something that the general public has a reason to care about. This archive has significantly more relevance than it did even five years ago, and that's awesome, because it will eventually represent the internet's past to its future.
It wasn't that long ago that mixtapes like this were thrown on sites like MegaUpload, in a way that didn't do much to take them outside of the moment. (It didn't help that they shut down MegaUpload, either.) By uploading the mixtapes here in a way that catalogs them and makes them easier to find, it makes it so that they're given the same level of respect as, say, something that shows up in a record store.
In another era, this would be a thankless job that wouldn't get the respect it deserves. It's getting that respect, because people are actually using the tools and archives he and other Internet Archive employees are helping to build.
Re: Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
#14Mixtapes are kind of the open-source version of rap music. Sort of free to download, remix, and distribute. Sort of... Almost every rapper who is popular right now (meaning, being played on the radio, touring...) has released their music for FREE, months, if not years, before being available for sale on iTunes, or CD. Sure, the iTunes version was mastered by someone who wasn't stoned, but it's pretty crazy that argua…
The worst part was that DatPiff has finally started putting quality control mechanism in the past two or three years or so to get separate legitimate content from artists (wheat) from the chaff and artists continued putting out their content for free.
Apple's, among other streaming services, has impacted this music negatively, and whether you are a fan of rap music or not, it does set a precedent that affects all styles, genres, and tastes of music.
I do not think all is lost - like some Underground electronic music communities, some artists will actively avoid Big Corporations....this has gone back to the days of Prince and before. There are many indie labels that still release their music on Vinyl, even.
Re: Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
#15More than once, archive.org has hosted something I though was not possible under the current copyright regime. MAME ROMs, old time radio shows, and, well, this. So for someone who's not paying attention, does anyone have an explanation of how they're allowed to do this? For example, do they have special dispensation from the Librarian of Congress?
The Internet Archive receives an exemption from the DMCA and other copyright law for the majority of the works it hosts.
Re: Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
#16Mixtapes are kind of the open-source version of rap music. Sort of free to download, remix, and distribute. Sort of... Almost every rapper who is popular right now (meaning, being played on the radio, touring...) has released their music for FREE, months, if not years, before being available for sale on iTunes, or CD. Sure, the iTunes version was mastered by someone who wasn't stoned, but it's pretty crazy that argua…
> Apple with all their force, is cracking down on sites like datpiff for releasing the tapes they have exclusive rights too. You might be on to something. I was trying to download Chance The Rapper's new mixtape from Datpiff, and saw a message that it has been taken down due to copyright quibbles and what not. Went to HotNewHipHop and same thing ... I have to say this is the first time I've seen a message of that kin…
Yep. Apple got the rights. You can get it in two weeks for free, but have to buy it to hear it today. The worst part is it's working... I caved and bought it.
It's fire by the way...
Re: Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
#17Pretty cool. Wish Pandora or something would get on the boat with this. (at least pandora can censor out swear words)
Re: Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
#18It's posts like this that make me think something that resembles IPFS just has to work out, in spite of all the big problems that are yet to be solved. Because I see this, and I think, "Wow, that's cool. I want to listen to some of these." And it just makes so much sense that my computer should be able to compute a hash of that archive and seed it for others, at least as long as it's on my machine. It makes me think…
> Isn't it a little fucked up that most (all?) of our social networks don't allow for you to share content to other people without implicitly making a statement about it?
Related to your IPFS comment, social media is also skewed towards sharing links to content which is hosted elsewhere. "Sharing a video" is really sharing a URL to a Web page containing a video, which may not be there tomorrow.
The restrictions on social media services, like Twitter's short message length, and the restrictions on media services which make it non-trivial to save copies, like YouTube hijacking the right-click menu to remove "save as", reinforce each other.
Hopefully something like IPFS can disrupt this situation, so that content starts getting shared again, rather than just URLs whose destination is controlled by a single organisation.
Re: Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
#19More than once, archive.org has hosted something I though was not possible under the current copyright regime. MAME ROMs, old time radio shows, and, well, this. So for someone who's not paying attention, does anyone have an explanation of how they're allowed to do this? For example, do they have special dispensation from the Librarian of Congress?
The Internet Archive receives an exemption from the DMCA and other copyright law for the majority of the works it hosts.
And the Archive is actively working to show the Copyright Office what needs to be preserved and therefore why they need to be exempted from DMCA
e.g. http://archive.org/about/dmca.php
Re: Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand your point, but the phenomenon you're describing is essentially just curation. Social media has simply shifted curation from established sources (newspapers, critics, etc.) to everyone. I would question whether the solution is less curation.
I don't think I was clear enough on how I imagine this working. I wouldn't have it work where you can look at the browser history of any of your friends, or as a feed. Instead, I would use any of my social-news aggregators normally, but if I end up on a page that a friend has also ended up on, It would be fun to be able to see that, and maybe I could leave tiny comments scattered around the web, visible only to my pe…
https://hypothes.is/ - Maybe relevant to your interests. Very active project. Although IIRC it is scoped to people who use the service and not to your social graph. I follow the project on github and its very active. The volume of problems that they have to solve to make something like this work for users in potentially any environment is pretty astounding.