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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#591

Post by matheusmoreira »

keiferski wrote: post #128
charcircuit wrote: post #20

Any amount of joy you lost is a fraction of joy lost from people blatantly stealing the fruits of other people's's labor. Communities do not have to be parasites to exist. Similar amounts of joy could be created over a different interest that didn't require stealing and hurting others.

It’s always really bizarre to me how pirates justify stealing creative works as some sort of culture. The record companies were/are awful, for sure, but the solution is to support musicians directly then, not come up with elaborate justifications for your theft. I imagine most of this is done by people with secure professions that don’t worry about getting paid for their work. When it comes to music and other art for…

[dead]

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#592

Post by matheusmoreira »

charcircuit wrote: post #430
ktallett wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't steal something unless there is ownership of it by the other person. There has to be loss for it to be stolen. Stealing isn't ok, but downloading music or movies without paying isn't stealing.

>There has to be loss for it to be stolen. Counter example: Pirating a song is considered stealing as you are taking something for free without paying for it. You are using a definition that is different from the average person.

> Pirating a song is considered stealing

Nope.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#593

Post by afzalive »

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…

Instead of solving difficult, unsolvable problems, the goal of the tech industry has become to replace these sub-cultures with a subscription or social media. In doing so, first they offer convenience for cheap, once they've replaced the sub-culture, they ramp up their prices to profit.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#594

Post by dbspin »

kylestratis wrote: post #491
runarberg wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Bandcamp still do their Bandcamp weekly and their regular article? Personally I never signed up for any streaming service (apart from Bandcamp; but I don‘t use their suggestion algorithm) so I can’t judge what is good or bad about it. But I feel like their regular articles and their Bandcamp weekly show was excellent at music discovery. I stopped listening and reading it a while ago, as I get plenty good music d…

They actually do a lot for discovery. Bandcamp weekly, notifications when labels you've bought from release something from another artist, playlists, and they have genre-focused blogs as well. People just like saying something doesn't exist when they just didn't bother to look at their emails.

So I've been a bandcamp user since close to the dawn of the service. The issues I commented on above don't relate to their curation emails but the poverty of the interface itself. Bandcamp has been widely and roundly, not to mention accurately criticised for it's technical / UX failures for a long time. It also has no social features whatsoever. Unfortunately a curated email isn't a replacement for proper recommendations based on similar users listening (as lastfm used to to, see above anecdote), content based recommendations, or genuine social recommendations. Not to mention the fact that half the writing staff were fired several years ago, and the quality of their curation fell off a cliff after that point.

The app and site are awful, and even finding stuff you've bought to play or download can be a nightmare if you own a lot of material. To site a specific example - I bought a back catalogue of sound effects records for work reasons. They have many dozens of individual releases - which makes navigating my other purchased records much more difficult.

Bandcamp also only allow you to 'uncover' the download links for tracks or albums one at a time, presumably to save bandwidth costs. I could go on and on.

It's a hypothetically great service that's absolutely crippled by not having been improved for a decade.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#595

Post by rconti »

Semaphor wrote: post #496
rconti wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "doing release Fridays"?

The paragraph following that explains what I mean. It’s technically not always all on Friday, as Japan doesn’t join in, and smaller labels or non-labels sometimes also pick others days, but the bulk of releases happens every Friday. For tomorrow I have 9 albums on my list, plus an extra one that releases on Sunday.

Wow, sorry, and thanks. Not sure what went wrong in my brain there :)

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#596

Post by runarberg »

dbspin wrote: post #594
kylestratis wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually do a lot for discovery. Bandcamp weekly, notifications when labels you've bought from release something from another artist, playlists, and they have genre-focused blogs as well. People just like saying something doesn't exist when they just didn't bother to look at their emails.

So I've been a bandcamp user since close to the dawn of the service. The issues I commented on above don't relate to their curation emails but the poverty of the interface itself. Bandcamp has been widely and roundly, not to mention accurately criticised for it's technical / UX failures for a long time. It also has no social features whatsoever. Unfortunately a curated email isn't a replacement for proper recommendat…

I think me and you use Bandcamp in totally different ways, and this is why you see a problem where I don‘t. I am not judging btw (unlike your parent) just pointing out the differences.

My primary (and now only) use case of Bandcamp is as a marketplace between me and the artist/label. I use it as a super convenient record store. And like a good record store, bandcamp also has the equivalent of music magazine which you can read in the store, and helpful staff willing to point you to new releases. and just like in a record store, the staff won‘t play what they recommended for you, you have to take the sample CD to the listening station, put on the headphones, and hit play your self. I see their streaming feature as basically a super convenient listening station at the record store. I usually stream an album before I decide whether or not to buy it.

After purchasing I never listen to it again in app, but rather download the files and upload to my MP3 player, or wait for the physical media to arrive and listen to it in my living room’s stereo system.

Bandcamp also has the equivalent of a radio station’s music oriented talk show with their podcasts, this is more then your average record store. E.g. I think Easy Street in Seattle nor Lucky Records in Reykjavík have a regular podcast, although I can see it could be amazing if they did.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#597

Post by AntronX »

marysol5 wrote: post #575
AntronX wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took about 30 minutes to get 3.5 MB mp3 song over dial up. I would let downloads run overnight and could get a dozen songs by next day. I would do my bulk mp3 downloading in the morning before class at schools library to immediately transfer over USB to my 4 GB Archos Jukebox hard drive mp3 player. That was around 2001 - 2003 either before schools blocked p2p or I must have been using public file downloading sites…

"I did not have sexual relations with that women" FUCK SAKE

You OK?

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#598

Post by port11 »

bradly wrote: post #389
port11 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only they had gobs of cash to pay people to curate content… or, I don’t know, AI that can check if something is AI. Or ask uploaders for some kind of proof, since we’re in the age of asking citizens to prove they’re adults. If only there was _something_ they could do!

I can't speak for other streaming services, but at Apple Music we did pay musical industry professionals a lot of money to do human evaluation of specific searches. We had people with specific deep knowledge of genres and niches. At least in my little corner Apple that was quite a bit of effort put into this.

Kudos to you then, that’s commendable. Maybe it’s a branding choice on Apple’s side to have this curation?

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#599

Post by port11 »

AntronX wrote: post #434
port11 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, GP is rose-tinting piracy and Apple’s stance a bit… When I was a teenager we had _dial-up_. My first 2 iPods were strictly playing ripped CDs, which I, friends, or family had bought. Buying the iPod itself was probably cheaper than 2 months worth of internet traffic back then.

It took about 30 minutes to get 3.5 MB mp3 song over dial up. I would let downloads run overnight and could get a dozen songs by next day. I would do my bulk mp3 downloading in the morning before class at schools library to immediately transfer over USB to my 4 GB Archos Jukebox hard drive mp3 player. That was around 2001 - 2003 either before schools blocked p2p or I must have been using public file downloading sites…

Hmm, with unmetered traffic? I played DarkGalaxy one month at home and we got a ~95€ bill, my dad wasn’t amused. Literally just DG’s website once a day.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#600

Post by port11 »

hylaride wrote: post #353
port11 wrote: post #304

Earlier 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…

My counterpoint is that if you’re always listening to the same stuff, your collection feels stale and you’re less likely to listen to more music.

Maybe that’s actually advantageous to the streaming services, but one big reason I cancelled them was that I wasn’t getting anything new.

(Instead, Radar FM in Portugal is where I started tuning into to learn about new stuff.)

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