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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#521

Post by melville23 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #322
smugglerFlynn wrote: post #243

Earlier 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…

At a verbal level LLMs are great: questions like "tell me about hip hop artists similar to MF doom" or "is there anything new like jefferson starship?" can be the start of great conversations. They will talk your ear off about what is going on with tracks like "Dangerous" off the Yes Union Album.

This is a great way to do it, especially when the LLM can actually get to know you. I've been working on a project that combines a persistent music expert LLM session with social listening, and gives the LLM access to YouTube so that it can find things and play them for you immediately. I've got it tuned pretty well now and I've made it available to the public at https://tunistry.com/

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#522

Post by bean469 »

kyboren wrote: post #374
bean469 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the explanation for the claim is essentially pay-walled behind the book, I will just choose to ignore it

"People got used to free shit and stopped paying as much." "Your claim is poorly supported." "Well it came from a book. Check it out if you're interested." "What? It's not free? Hell no I won't pay!"

> "Well it came from a book. Check it out if you're interested."

> "What? It's not free? Hell no I won't pay!"

I am also sceptical that my burning questions will be answered in the book, thus I choose to not buy it. Also, the Goodreads reviews don't look too good

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#523

Post by inigyou »

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…

Isn't this largely because bandwidths got fast enough to not need P2P for music any more? You can use SLSK which is DirectConnect-style, or direct downloads, or Spotify/YouTube downloaders.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#524

Post by [deleted] »

account42 wrote: post #352
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.

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#525

Post by raydev »

Not really the point of the article but the praise for NIN participating in the culture bothers me, because in the late 90s one could visit nineinchnails.net and just straight up download decent quality MP3s (and some MP2s!!) of the entire NIN discog, until one day (I think in 1999? 2000?) they removed all the tracks. :(

Of course, my bother is rooted in my little unemployed unmoneyed 13 year old self who didn't have access to NIN CDs at the time, but did have access to my friend's internet when I visited his house.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#526

Post by cobbzilla »

gaudystead wrote: post #417
cobbzilla wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar experience and I would never trade it in a lifetime. For the “me” today, new music discovery is all about live radio. and I don’t mean pop/satellite/corporate programmed radio. I mean radio where a human still cares . I mostly use radio.garden (sometimes TuneIn) and find crazy local stations around the world. K-Pop from Seoul, Parisian hiphop, live EDM from clubs in Ibiza, weird/fun island music from the remo…

Can I offer you a SomaFM[0] in these trying times? They're entirely listener supported and the music they play is - to my knowledge - entirely human curated. I've found many tracks and artists new to me, with some artists not even having a presence (or a very small one) on Spotify. Their curation is so good that they've become a significant resource I go to when seeking out new music. It feels like a warm hug from pe…

+1 good call out. Definitely I love some SomaFM stations!

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#527

Post by properbrew »

PaulHoule wrote: post #333
dbspin wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To counter this - if you were around in the blog music era, being young had little to do with the network effect. Shitty pop music was in the ascendent culturally at the time, and the huge indie revival of the late 2000s and early 2010s happened primarily online. Hypemachine and the hundreds of mp3 blogs pushed novelty, obscurity, cross genre experiments, lost records etc. I'd finished college by this point, but dove…

Music is tough. People like music which is a lot like what they're familiar with but just a little bit different. Musicians are always suing each other because it's hard to write a song which doesn't sound dangerously like an existing song, which is why Taylor Swift is generous with writing credits. It's a big problem for LLM generated music, regardless of the training data. Myself I have gone through phases in my ad…

The card idea is absolutely great. I'm totally going to do the same. There's a number of songs in my playlist that I _really_ enjoy that I would make cards for.

Thank you for the inspiration for a weekend project!

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#528

Post by mat0 »

slackerIII wrote: post #435
tomduncalf wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audiogalaxy was awesome. I loved how you could browse every file that had ever been online, rather than just what was online now, and queue them up for when they came online again. I’d just leave it running on our dial up connection when everyone went out of the house (no dedicated line so you’d clog up the phone, the good old days haha) and then come back to some exciting downloads I’d totally forgotten that I ever…

Audiogalaxy dev here. That was my favorite part of the design. One of my other favorite parts was that prioritized matches based on how similar their domain name was to yours, so a lot of times you would end up grabbing files from someone in the same dorm or city (cable modem IPs had hostnames back then had the city in the name).

oh man I’ll never forget that site. I remember my dad and I trying to find the name of a song to download (Endless summer nights), none of us knew any english at the time, but we loved that song. So he was listening to a recording of that song, we knew the band name but we didn’t know the song name. And by some magnificent chance I was reading the tracks in the AG ui and that part of the track played and I said to my father (in spanish) “that’s the one. download this one”. “you sure?” “yes, do it!”. downloading took so long in our dial up modem, but when we could play the track it was so amazing. the audio quality, no radio voice on top. absolute bliss. thank you

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#529

Post by thom »

Perhaps I am the only person well served by the modern music industry, but I absolutely love Apple Music. The new music playlist it gives me each week has introduced me to hundreds of new artists and dozens of songs that rank up there with my teenage heart songs. I think I mostly skipped the golden age of piracy as my formative music experiences were the Evening Session and John Peel on the BBC, coupled with lax parenting and a proximity to Camden.

There are still some CDs and MP3s I take special care of because I know they’re not in Apple’s catalogue, and I’ve no doubt I’m contributing to the death of the very thing I love by participating in capitalism, but until access to all my music is unilaterally rescinded I will continue to be a very happy (paying) customer.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#530

Post by bean469 »

jake200 wrote: post #439
lamonade wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(anecdotally) proving their point that pay walling something doesn't mean people will pay for it. Buying the book would have been hypocritical.

This whole thread does have me questioning my understanding of cited sources behind paywalls. A contrived example I have in my head "My friend has more definitive proof in HIS book that , it only costs $1 trillion. Go read it yourself." For this particular thread its a bit disingenuous, but in a general case how does one go about understanding / disproving arguments made like this?

You decide whether or not the benefits from you obtaining the information outweigh the cost of obtaining the information. Or you convince Elon Musk to buy the book and leak the EPUB on twitter
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