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The lost joy of music piracy
451–460 of 637 posts
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#452It'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…
> streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there True, but it's way less common to want to listen to a specific piece of music than it is to want to watch a specific film or TV series. There's also way way way more music out there than there is film or TV, so it's again less of a problem. If I want to listen to music I just say "hey google play some music" and it gets some random music based on my…
Less common mayhaps, but some of my more blissful moments are when I sit down in the couch, load up one of my favourite albums, close my eyes and go on a musical journey!
What I listen to is definitely not interchangeable. And contrary to TV series, there is no limit to how much I can enjoy it!
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What law is this exactly? I've done a quick web search, but couldn't find anything describing quite this. Most sources suggested the law outlaws distributing (i.e. uploading) copywritten material, not downloading. This seems like it would be similar to US law... Maybe I should have mentioned the threat of criminal charges , or defined piracy as downloading (but it seems like you understood it this way too as you ment…
When downloading a torrent you usually also start seeding (distributing).
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, a bit of devil’s advocate but how much of that network effect was caused by being young? I’m making an assumption, true, but a lot of us that grew up with ripped CDs were teenagers or young adults back then. Sharing music was inherently part of what we did because we were young and that was an activity we shared. And as to Spotify: why do we keep complaining about these platforms but also keep patronising them?…
The problem with subscription music is that the streaming platforms have no incentive to get you to discover new music - you're already paying either way. Before Apple Music, when it was just the iTunes Store, Apple introduced iTunes Genius and it was scary good at recommending music; it worked so well I shudder to think what I spent in total buying $1 songs off of it. But apple's music "play similar songs" just seem…
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Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#455Spotify 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.…
I still find that, even after all these years, Pandora's recommendation engine still seems to be the best. I can tune into stations that I created, jeez, 15+ years ago, and it might play one or two tracks that I know, but it quickly diverges into new tracks that are still within the "flavor" of the station, but I've never heard of.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What law is this exactly? I've done a quick web search, but couldn't find anything describing quite this. Most sources suggested the law outlaws distributing (i.e. uploading) copywritten material, not downloading. This seems like it would be similar to US law... Maybe I should have mentioned the threat of criminal charges , or defined piracy as downloading (but it seems like you understood it this way too as you ment…
Torrenting involves uploading.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#457One 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…
> the NW-HD1
Ah, something tells me it wasn't the technical capabilities that held this very pronounceable and fashionable product back.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#458Heh, 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.
> Sometimes HN feels unrecognizable with how much the comments I read are pro- intellectual property. How so? Many people just rightfully care mainly about the cultural exploitation aspect and the impact on society. Under that lens you can be anti-copyright when it is used by corporations to exploit individuals and pro-copyright or at least pro-equal enforcement when it is ignored by corporations to exploit individua…
To be clear, I was never actually really one of the pro-piracy types. Honestly, I think very few people are really all that high-falutin' principled anyway. It really is hard when it's free to reproduce; you having something isn't preventing someone else from having it as well.
The one clear straight line I can draw is: people are pro- or anti-IP when it benefits them.
If you're a broke student, you were anti-IP (and convincing yourself you were really just sticking it to the record companies, not the musicians). If you were an indie musician who benefited from name recognition you could afford to be anti-IP to get your name out there. If you were a well-known musician back then, you were relatively pro-IP, to get your royalties.
These days, if you're a struggling artist you're pro-IP and screw the AI companies for crawling your work. If you're a small business plumber scrambling to make ends meet and AI helps you make business cards and flyers, you're anti-IP. (At least as far as AI and its training goes - if someone tries to use your brand, you're back to pro-IP.)
Anyway, since there's no physical basis, IP is a weird legal restriction solely there to benefit certain groups, and whether you support it (or should support it) or not depends on context and which groups you're in at the moment.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
One strategy is to look at the records on pitchfork's top 100 lists, say https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ratings/1-pitchfork-highest-r... and listen to the discography of those artists. You will find some stuff you liked there. I had another round of adventures when I plugged in a Sony 300 disc CD changer into my home theater and loaded it exclusively with DTS Music CDs https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ratings/1-pitchfo…
Exactly this. There were even curated collections on Oink/what.cd of these lists which is where I obtained a large portion of my collection. Those days were the end of the era for me. I still had access to an FTP-ish site that was an offshoot of Something Awful Forums but that decayed probably 10-12 years ago. I still have a turntable/cd-changer in my living room which is used monthly at least, but it is mostly a soc…
The death of what.cd was also the end of an era for me. I know "replacements" have popped up but the real value of what wasn't in the piracy, it was in the community. It was the best on the internet and nothing has taken its place since.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
Predates the Mac mini (tagline: The most affordable Mac ever.) by a good few years—predates the iPod even—but it was an Apple ad campaign: https://youtu.be/K0ZWuhcM7t4 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Apples-Rip-Mix-Burn-camp... You can’t really call it a pro-piracy message though. Ripping implies you have the original CD already.
> You can’t really call it a pro-piracy message though. Of course not. That would probably infringe on advertising standards. But it is the clear implication.
It’s really not. Ripping a CD is just copying the tracks to your computer. It says & implies nothing about sharing them on Napster.