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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#111

Post by anal_reactor »

omgmajk wrote: post #28

Music 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.

I really struggle to find new music. I feel like I've already listened way too many times to everything I have on my SD card, but I really don't know what to look for. When I was a kid I was very much into rock and everything adjacent so I do have albums of most iconic rock bands. Nowadays I'm more into electronic music. I love a good techno track and I have a folder with 2000-2010 greatest pop-techno bangers. God damn Basshunter gave me more happiness than my entire career combined. At home I often listen to more ambient music, mostly from SomaFM. There's an artist/band called Hello Meteor and the worst album is still 9/10. On the opposite side of the spectrum there's this guy Darren Tate - most of his music is literal trash, but there are a few golden nuggets with how he operates with dynamic range. Like, Prayer For God is absolutely amazing, it's so energetic. But it's really difficult for me to find electronic music that doesn't suck, most DJs make one good track by pure luck while mass-producing slop.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#112

Post by devonsolomon »

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 before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.

The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.

(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!)

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 listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.

I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#113

Post by whacked_new »

userbinator wrote: post #18

I would not be surprised if all of this content has now found its way into some music generation AI.

I'm convinced this is true, and think music piracy in the classical sense will be mostly dead in the near future, thanks to AI, which already absorbed most of the pirating and has token-tumbled all the elements so that what most people listen to is already generated from the pirated elements

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#114

Post by ninjin »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #71
CoolestBeans wrote: post #56

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…

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.

Not allegedly, I was there at the time as a user and I and others can confirm that there was plenty of scene releases on Spotify in ~2008:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202117

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#115

Post by jillesvangurp »

DaanDL wrote: post #90

Biggest thing I miss about all of this was the gatekeeping and curation really. There's so much garbage on Spotify, it's hard to find good music, and the recommendations I get always safely stay in what I already listened to.

The way around this is the people that listened to this also listened to that feature. That's the main way I discover new music these days. I find something new that I like and then I explore whatever it is that people listen to that also listened to that song. If you don't do that, the recommendations are basically more of the same shit. All the B-singles of an artist you like some songs of. Or worse: "you're old, here's some old music for you!". Or even worse, "your ip address is in Germany! You know you are a closet German! Here's some German hoompahpah music for you!".

Amazon and Youtube are equally useless when it comes to recommendations. All the machine learning talent in the world and they are utterly useless. I clicked a young ones clip on youtube a few weeks ago. Now my recommendations are 40% more f*ing young ones clips.

But randomly clicking stuff on Spotify reminds me of 25 years ago where you'd randomly download some shit and then listen to it. I also miss the art of a well produced album. I can't listen to individual songs of a good album. I have to play it beginning to end. I hate all the bonus tracks that Spotify slaps on albums. The whole point of the last track on Dark side of the Moon is the fade out to silence at the end. But that's just me.

I wish they would stop breaking my playlists by randomly breaking links to songs when they get replaced or re-imported. Seems I have to hunt down replacement tracks for 10-15% of my carefully curated playlists every year or so. Usually they are still there. But in some cases entire albums disappear. All the endless remasters, best off collections, etc. that they keep churning out result in endless breakage. How hard can it be to automatically replace those songs with the exact same recording on a different album?!

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#116

Post by taneq »

bugufu8f83 wrote: post #99
eisa01 wrote: post #51

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…

>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 Ehhh..... I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites. Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days, so everything new gets released there, and by this point the catalog from the CD era is extensive. Music…

Heck, almost everything is available for free on YouTube.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#117

Post by user_7832 »

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…

+1. A friend's pendrive full of songs was how I actually bothered to get "into" many artists that until then I didn't really care about.

Somewhat related re: discovery, it was also fun to download what was available rather than what you wanted. I got iridescent (linkin park) instead of some other track I was searching for (probably what I've done), and I learnt Dire Straits also had a song called "So far away", only after downloading it. (I was looking for the avenged sevenfold's track of the same name.)

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#118

Post by omgmajk »

ValdikSS wrote: post #104
omgmajk wrote: post #28

Music 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.

Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West. Only Russian Rutracker is still going strong, but everything other is either stagnating or defunct. I have a p2p sharing websites bookmarks which I collected about 5 years ago, 60% of them are dead now. Private (invite-only) West sharing websites are still alive though, but are supported mostly by beefy enthusiasts who seed everything via a seedbox elsewhere, not in…

I haven't used a public site since Suprnova so I don't know about the health of public p2p sites at all. The private side is absolutely not stagnant, new sites pop up all the time and you can still find all the niche stuff you want to find by just nudging the enthusiasts with requests.

A lot of them seed from home, with humongous servers, and there are preservation programs going on in various places.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#119

Post by postalcoder »

CoolestBeans wrote: post #56

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…

> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music.

On the flip side, Sony lost the consumer devices market for this very reason. Sony's single-minded pursuit of proprietary formats was a disaster class of corporate mismanagement.

It disgusts me because I used to love their products so much. Sony's competitor to the iPod was a marvel of a device called the NW-HD1. It was beautiful, had a ton of space, and great battery life. But it wasn't an MP3 player. It could only play ATRAC music. That means you had to transcode all of your MP3s to their proprietary format just to listen to them.

I remember trying to debate the virtues of my Sony NW-HD1 versus the iPod, but having to keep my computer on throughout the night just to transcode a couple albums was indefensible.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#120

Post by embedding-shape »

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 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've mostly been using my own playlists + radio to play music in Spotify and discover music. Recently though, I've started navigating and listening more by the label, and also listening through full albums instead of just picking some songs. Spotify seems to work fine for this, what exact issues are you encountering when listening by albums?

Mostly I find them via the "release radar" today, click on the album title/cover, play first track with shuffle and repeat all off, then listen until it ends. I don't think you need anything else than this :)

Back in my day we used DC++ for music sharing. DC++ was like a decentralized social network + piracy client, with the content shared by users who congregated in self-hosted servers, and it was always interesting to browse people's (sometimes very mixed) music tastes.

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