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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#401

Post by starky »

parasti wrote: post #222

Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO. I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like "presave this (you can't listen to it)", "jump back in (you literally already listened to it)", "your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)". There i…

It seems like every recommendation algorithm gets into a state that is broken eventually. For the music streaming services, I find they end up in one of two states, either it shows me the exact same artists and songs over and over again even if I skip their songs constantly, or I'll play a song once out of curiosity or accident and it decided that that genre is all I am interested in listening to for the next month. Is it really that hard to map artists

I got so frustrated with Tidal recently that I finally sat down and finally setup a media player on Linux to play my locally saved music (most of which is from What.cd).

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#403

Post by 1970-01-01 »

So, it appears just enough time has passed that what.cd domain is availabe. There is nothing stopping anyone (just a few $$$) from rebuilding it very quietly. The lost joy can return if you're stupid enough to try.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#404

Post by inigyou »

ValdikSS wrote: post #256
twelvechairs wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soulseek is still going strong last time i checked

Well they shadowban the accounts which share copyrighted content for which they receive copyright claims. It's a centralized service, they just configure you account to be invisible in the search results of others. And they don't check whether the file is really reachable. I've 'chmod 000' copyrighted files so they could not be downloaded (but still could be found in search), and Soulseek administrators were not happ…

But it's free to make a new account. They know where their bread is buttered. Public file-sharing services have to make these fig-leaves about caring about copyright.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#405

Post by inigyou »

pessimizer wrote: post #335
ValdikSS wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Only Russian Rutracker is still going strong, but everything other is either stagnating or defunct. But rutracker is still going very strong, and shows up in every magnet link scraper. > 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 their home country on their residential connection. I don't think…

I think the enthusiast is beefy, not the computer. It's not P2P anymore, it's client/server with an enthusiast server and a casual user client.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#406

Post by inigyou »

GuB-42 wrote: post #350
losvedir wrote: post #215

Heh, blast from the past here from the "information wants to be free" and "you wouldn't download a car" days. Sometimes HN feels unrecognizable with how much the comments I read are pro- intellectual property. But these days, I do wonder how much 90s / early 2000s time was any better or if all of us who had experienced them are just getting older and nostalgic for our youth.

AI changed the perception of the "information wants to be free" idea. In a sense, AI companies did a lot to "free" the information, they took everything they could, including pirated data, and put them all into a model, which you can then query to get something similar to "not free" information, but clean of copyright. But now that information is actually free (or at least, freer than before) people realize that it d…

It would probably be easier to reconcile if the AI itself was free, but it isn't, the AI is completely locked down, and that just makes it pure hypocritical theft.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#407

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

"There's this whole world where people exist just to show up in the middle and take a big chunk of the money from something they had no part in creating."

This world is called "Silicon Valley"

Using a middleman, a so-called "tech" company, is not the same as trading music peer-to-peer

Historically, before the public internet, we traded music in-person or via postal mail

When I first accessed Oink I looked for the type of stuff that I liked to trade before the public internet existed: live, rare and unreleased material, e.g., outtakes. Old music

It passed the test. It was there

Today, there are bits and pieces of this stuff on YouTube but it's not the same

For this type of material, Spotify is a joke

This article should have discussed user-controlled peer-to-peer networking versus so-called "tech" company middleman

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#408

Post by kyboren »

dfxm12 wrote: post #327

I feel like when you glorify gatekeeping piracy like oink or apparently what.cd had, you've lost the plot. Piracy is largely a response to arbitrary rules in media distribution, like how, where, when or even if you can buy something. Hiding piracy behind a "textbook-length list of rules" is bad just as the system it is responding to.

No, it was a much better system.

Like all piracy, it didn't condition access on payment. And like all P2P, more users (because free) meant more content available to everybody.

The rules weren't perfect, but they imposed order and organization and prevented harmful (for P2P networks) duplication and fragmentation. Like any society, the rules helped to provide a framework to solve a coordination problem in a hopefully-global-utility-maximizing way.

The result was a vibrant community cooperatively maintaining a virtual Library of Alexandria of music where library cards were cost free.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#409

Post by inigyou »

dfxm12 wrote: post #390
losvedir wrote: post #215

Heh, blast from the past here from the "information wants to be free" and "you wouldn't download a car" days. Sometimes HN feels unrecognizable with how much the comments I read are pro- intellectual property. But these days, I do wonder how much 90s / early 2000s time was any better or if all of us who had experienced them are just getting older and nostalgic for our youth.

Can you objectively think about what was/wasn't better? Aside from download speeds, I don't think piracy is any easier or harder today than it was back then. As a negative for back then, I think the threat of legal action against regular folks downloading stuff loomed larger. I think today groups focus more on quality/file size than time to market. Overall, I think piracy is in a healthier state today.

Maybe the threat of serious legal action was stronger back then but I think the threat of light legal action is stronger now. They've streamlined the processes for getting your ISP to ban you (largely by copyright troll companies buying up all the ISPs).

In Germany, if you download a public torrent, there is a brief legal process which always ends with 100-2000€ being deducted from your bank account and given to the copyright holder. Not that it could end with that - it does end with that, every time. First your ISP sends you an email forwarded from the copyright holder demanding that you pay an amount of money or you'll be sued for a larger amount of money. You either pay immediately, or you accept getting sued, you lose the lawsuit, and you pay a larger amount of money. If you don't pay that, the court calls your bank and subtracts an even larger amount of money directly from your account. If you don't have a bank account, bailiffs show up at your house to seize property to sell. One of these things always happens. There is zero wiggle room.

The US isn't quite as strict as the notoriously strict Germany, but it has been trending in that direction.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#410

Post by inigyou »

ValdikSS wrote: post #164
tomduncalf wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t tell anyone! Haha

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).

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