17 ms·
The lost joy of music piracy
- f8e6a7d4-58d2 2mo agothe i2p network has a steady and active community around the postman tracker, it's worth checking out. contribute if you can!
- yesbut 2mo agoweird, I still love pirating music.
- dxbednarczyk 2mo agoStill very much alive! Just not as popular with the advent of $10/mo all-you-can-eat streaming services.
- ocd 2mo agoHard to argue against it when you get memory holed by playlist entry removals by a cloud service. Much easier living having everything at `.config/mpd/playlists` with git history.
- tonyhart7 2mo agoYou couldnt be serious
- ocd 2mo agoI'm very serious. It's not a simple matter to get any sort of exportable data from these cloud services, and they won't bother to notify you that media that was on your playlist or in your library has been removed. I gave Apple Music a try for about a year. and even that relatively small migration was hellish. I have an easy time managing a playlist through the many available audio player frontends writing to an .m3u which is itself usable as a file path list in scripts to copy the music from my library to an external device.
- tonyhart7 2mo agono one gonna delete your playlist, stop making shit up
- efreak 2mo agoAnd Sony would never remove movies from your account
- tonyhart7 2mo agoso we comparing license to physical now ????
- efreak 2mo agoThere's no physical media here anywhere (necessarily). This is comparing your computer (music on your PC that you purchase beforehand and do whatever you want with) to someone else's computer (cloud streaming that requires the platform to pay a license and get permission, that could one day be taken away without notice).
- tonyhart7 2mo agoYes because that just how license works you know
- inigyou 2mo agoYouTube has deleted many videos from many of my playlists.
- tonyhart7 2mo agoYes because youtube has a rule You cant uploading porn or isis video on youtube, it would be insta deleted or do you think no rule is a good thing ?????
- konart 2mo agoThis. I do use Spotify, but this has nothing to do with my local music collection. Admittedly, mostly pirated.
- silon42 2mo agoI don't use Spotify, but I would consider it if I could download maybe 1 or 2 mp3 per month for offline use.
- ColdStream 2mo agoHuh... I'm still waiting for Bandcamp and Soundcloud to close their streaming download hole. It has been a few years now.
- markasoftware 2mo agodoes it matter as long as yt-dlp is maintained?
- BoingBoomTschak 2mo agoSome people want more than "mystery meat" levels of audio quality.
- ColdStream 2mo agoI once did a blind test on myself. A FLAC audio file and a 128Kbit Ogg vorbis file of the same track that I could switch between as I pleased but without knowing which was playing. Yeah, I cannot tell the difference. I am absolutely sure others can, but not me. I also think credit goes to far better encoders today than what we had 25 years ago.
- seba_dos1 2mo agoOpus - perhaps, but claiming that 128kbps Vorbis is transparent would be rather stretching it (unless it's a mono stream); though how easily it will be detectable depends on the kind of music used to test it. However, if you added, say, Bluetooth A2DP to the mix and made it go through a lossy encoder again the difference should be pretty obvious to anyone with good ears.
- bluescrn 2mo agoHearing also degrades over time. In my 20s I was a lot more fussy about audio formats and hi-fi gear. Approaching 50, with less sensitive ears and a bit of tinnitus, I’m happy with the convenience of Bluetooth headphones and whatever format Spotify uses.
- 2mo ago
- flipped 2mo agoDid everyone forget about soulseek? It's still very much alive, been using it for years.
- fawnwind 2mo agoI still use it, easiest way to download music these days.
- bayesianbot 2mo agoAnd imo slskd is fantastic client for soulseek, I just found it few weeks back
- majkinetor 2mo agoIts 0 compared to nicotine++
- ZlibraryKO 2mo agoSoulseek is great still use it regularly.
- stavros 2mo agoI can't believe the operators of what.cd would choose to delete everything without at least a warning, or letting people back it up. So much music and metadata just lost! Not to mention the crime of law enforcement prioritising private profit over a cultural milestone. It really is like they burned the library of Alexandria because it hadn't paid the copyright fee.
- thrtythreeforty 2mo agoI refuse to believe there's not a database backup somewhere. Such careful curators would surely hate to destroy it!
- stavros 2mo agoI'd hope so, but wouldn't it have leaked by now?
- 47282847 2mo agohttps://archive.org/details/What.CD_Goodbye_Release https://archive.org/details/What.CD_Goodbye_Release
- stavros 2mo agoOh phew, I hadn't heard of this, thank you. Glad this exists, I wonder if Redacted has imported it.
- lvales 2mo agoIt hasn't, but it was used by the community to kickstart the rebuilding process. I'd wager at this point there's less than 1% of the original catalog missing. Plus, all the music that was released meanwhile. RED already surpassed the number of releases that were on WCD many years ago.
- thrtythreeforty 2mo ago
- self_awareness 2mo agoIt's not really about piracy in general, it's mostly about What.CD. Equivalent of what.cd today is RED. But, TBH, most of the pirated music today is on YouTube anyway.
- daniel-smid 2mo ago[flagged]
- squishington 2mo agoIt also had a sense of community that was never quite replicated on RED. The freeleech events were fun. I remember there was a release request for Kirk Van Houten's "Can I Borrow a Feeling?".
- globular-toast 2mo agoI can vouch for OiNK and What.cd being magical places, unlikely to ever come back. There was also Waffles which was a little more like OiNK in spirit, but What had a much bigger selection and discovery was second to none. The owner of OiNK did nothing wrong and was cleared in court, but the music industry was still able to hire thugs (the police) to raid his home in the early morning and ruin years of his life. He understandable went under the radar but I hope everything is ok now. I still think about the users of those sites to this day. The internet just isn't what it was any more.
- SamuraiLion 2mo ago[flagged]
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoEdited to add first: nice article covering an important couple of critical pieces of the Internet's history. Concerning the "Joy" element: Someone at my workplace started a Music League, with a select few music aficionados and hangers on joining, and it has been _the best_ team bonding exercise I've ever been involved with. We have covered a broad spectrum of topics that have challenged pretty much everyone at some point. Music League has a bunch of default Themes that range from boring to OK, so we've been coming up with our own suggestions, and over the course of about 12 months we've had some great ones - but it relies on the participants allowing themselves to be vulnerable when the occasion suits. This has provided joy amongst all participants in, I think, a similar way to the sharing / discovery of the golden age of music piracy. We even setup our own Slack channel un-affiliated with our workplace because a couple of people have left the company, but wanted to stay in the League. If I have time tonight, I'll list the Themes we've covered as a reply or edit of this comment. Concerning the "Music Piracy" element: I don't really pirate, unless it's some incredibly obscure thing that can only be found on slsk (are we allowed to even mention it's name?). I use a streaming service, but I also buy the really good shit from Bandcamp, since most streaming services are pretty scummy with their royalties back to artists, and I want them to keep doing what they're doing cough AdP cough. I also run my own instance of LMS[0] so my FLAC collection is always available to me wherever I am (which kinda feels like piracy, but the collection is almost all legit). MusicBrainz[1] is also doing god's work. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard took their discography off Spotify for ideological reasons, and I support their decision to follow their morality in doing so, but it does put me in a conundrum due to the phenomenal size of their catalogue. I've bought some, but definitely not all. Just gonna have to grind through it, although they seem to put new music out faster than my monthly purchase quota. [0]: https://github.com/epoupon/lms https://github.com/epoupon/lms (cheers @epoupon, I'm pretty sure you're on HN) [1]: https://musicbrainz.org/ https://musicbrainz.org/
- eltercero 2mo ago> King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard took their discography off Spotify for ideological reasons, and I support their decision to follow their morality in doing so, but it does put me in a conundrum due to the phenomenal size of their catalogue. I've bought some, but definitely not all. Just gonna have to grind through it, although they seem to put new music out faster than my monthly purchase quota. FYI, they have their entire discography in bandcamp[0] for "name your price", including $0. [0]: https://kinggizzard.bandcamp.com https://kinggizzard.bandcamp.com
- SkintMesh 2mo agoNicotine
- userbinator 2mo agoI would not be surprised if all of this content has now found its way into some music generation AI.
- detrapdoor 2mo agohttps://gizmodo.com/ai-music-app-suno-got-hacked-giving-a-glimpse-of-just-how-much-music-it-scraped-2000786013 https://gizmodo.com/ai-music-app-suno-got-hacked-giving-a-gl...
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoYeah at one point I lamented the loss of these huge and rare music libraries. Now they've been fed to the machine.
- whacked_new 2mo agoI'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
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- klipen 2mo agoIsnt REDacted the continuationnof What.cd
- hexfish 2mo agoPlease step inside the vehicle and don't make a scene.
- charcircuit 2mo agoAny 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.
- sandcat_ 2mo agoHey now, that’s a bit of a harsh way to talk about record labels. Sure most of the money you pay goes to the top performers, no matter what you actually listen to, but that doesn’t make them parasites. Executives have to eat too.
- charcircuit 2mo agoThe parasitic community I was referring to was what.cd.
- b345 2mo agoFunny because that is exactly how capitalism works.
- ktallett 2mo agoIs it stealing if when I buy digital I don't own it?
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoYou have stolen a temporary license!
- charcircuit 2mo agoYou own a license when you buy it digitally. Stealing is never okay regardless of if something is technically buying or not.
- ktallett 2mo agoYou 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.
- omgmajk 2mo agoMusic 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.
- muppetman 2mo agoIndeed. I'm a member of a few music trackers and they have a lot of great stuff, but What's archive was amazing. One of my proudest things I own is a What.cd beer cooler I bought from them.
- omgmajk 2mo agoNever bought any merch from what, but I do own a ScT t-shirt :)
- whatcd 2mo agoi only have what.cd stickers. i wish i wouldve bought more! i wish i had a legit music torrent site nowadays too
- marysol5 2mo agoHere's the other side of the issue for these platforms, they're profiteering from the criminality of the users
- illliillll 2mo agoIn a legal sense? Absolutely. In a real sense? What.CD and it’s likes didn’t even come close to being a profitable use of their operators time.
- ValdikSS 2mo agoPublic 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 their home country on their residential connection. Rutracker went the other way: they organized donation collection to buy the HDDs to the 'saviours' group, a one-time investment compared to the datacenter server cost. In RU/UA, people usually seed from home.
- alex1138 2mo agoI'm so incredibly happy police resources are being used to "protect" the rest of us from... harm...?
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoI guess that's something else a bunch of us learned about the world from moving in those circles. Important life lessons provided by being at least adjacent to music piracy.
- self_awareness 2mo agoPolice exists to enforce the policy set by legislations. Legislations define rules to protect "us" from harm, but police is for policing only. They do not protect people. They protect the law.
- alex1138 2mo agoI know. I'm just, allowed to be sad As far as I'm aware, the Pirate Bay raid essentially only happened because the US threatened Sweden with trade repercussions. Like, thanks, guys? Way to show you have superior ethics to the pirates
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoMusic piracy and copyright infringement are civil matters, the police is (...should not be?) involved.
- maxaw 2mo agoWhat a cool article. I have good memories of being 13 and my cousin telling me about limewire. Between random pornography titles there was an artist called burial, which I downloaded cause I thought it sounded edgy. How lucky was I!
- ndesaulniers 2mo agoFinal Fantasy FMVs set to edgy nu metal. Man, I _had_ a limewire shirt (somewhere); they interviewed at my college. Where is that important piece of history?
- juvvel 2mo agoThe opening of FFX basically is basically an FMV with edgy metal built in. :D
- shevy-java 2mo agoI don't call it piracy. I call it a human right. Besides, yt-dlp made music "piracy" irrelevant. But, even aside from this, I noticed that I rarely add new music locally. Right now I have 764 songs I collected over almost 30 years; while I may add new music I enjoy, I mostly just listen to semi-random music on youtube these days, just as background noise. So I don't quite have a strong use case, comparing this to the napster era. https://bash-org-archive.com/?104052 https://bash-org-archive.com/?104052
- ktallett 2mo agoI've tried all the streaming services, I've regularly bought physical copies of music even in recent years, but nothing has exposed me to such a wide range of music and such a range of artists as a well curated blogspot. Whether that be a wide range of excellent bootlegs or music that has not been moved from cassette to digital, it just provides me with so much more joy. Especially easy to do now iPods are back in vogue
- herecomesyour_ 2mo agoOh my goodness you've unlocked a memory for me. Used to frequent a blogspot which introduced me to so so much alt 70s/80s/90s music. Downloads via Megaupload etc. Completely forgot about this until your comment.
- ktallett 2mo agoHaha! Yes exactly! I had a music taste that was primarily based around TV (such as MTV), family and friends exposure, and old cassettes and CDs I bought in charity shops (thrift stores). Blogspot allowed me to find new artists in genres I already loved such as grunge. Both my love for Green River and Alice in Chains came from a blogspot. There are still a few dedicated bloggers out there. One in particular that allows you to do deep dives into punk from many countries.
- minikomi 2mo agoVery fond memories of using Audiogalaxy, and also soulseek. Soulseek especially had a community where you found someone who was into the same kind of music as you (obscure breakcore! japanese garage punk!) and could browse their collections, and chat to them also! What a wonderful way to make music friends and get good recommendations.
- brunorro 2mo agoDid I hear Soulseek? Look for slskd in github. I had a tear on my face when I could find people sharing japanese math rock :)
- jbaiter 2mo agoIt's still there!
- smcleod 2mo agoSoulseek is still going hard.
- tomduncalf 2mo agoDon’t tell anyone! Haha
- ValdikSS 2mo agoThere's Android client as well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companyname.andriodapp1&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companynam...
- inigyou 2mo ago> 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).
- 0xbadcafebee 2mo agoI wouldn't say the joy was the piracy. I remember when MySpace had this silly flash player that would stream MP3s from users' profiles. This was the main way to find indie and local bands' tracks, but every major artist had a profile too. Looking at the browser requests you could easily see the request format for downloading tracks listed on profiles. And what was worse, they all followed a standard enumerated naming convention, so you could literally download every track on MySpace by simple iteration. There was no rate limit, no cookies, nothing to stop it. The result was great: not only did you get the music you were interested in, you got a lot more you'd never heard of. And you could listen to it all on any device at any time; burn it to a CD, record to cassette tape, put it on a WinAmp playlist, whatever. For a kid with a hard time growing up, that music was an escape to a better world. The freedom to listen to what you wanted, when you wanted, how you wanted, felt like a gift deserved. You'd still go to their shows when you could, pay for albums when you could, but what kid has tons of free cash to spend? About a year later, the download method was so well known that MySpace changed to a multipart chunked streaming system and randomized the request IDs. It now required complex custom code to stream from their player alone. Access to your favorite local bands' music was now closed. The internet continued to birth to new ways to obtain music, so you could continue to get Nine Inch Nails and Infected Mushroom; but the local bands lost out on valuable word of mouth.
- soundworlds 2mo agoReminds me of the System of a Down - Legend of Zelda song that was popular around Limewire, etc Years later it was uncovered that it was never System of a Down, but one Joe Pleiman https://kotaku.com/no-system-of-a-down-did-not-make-a-zelda-song-but-thi-5885558 https://kotaku.com/no-system-of-a-down-did-not-make-a-zelda-...
- artemonster 2mo agoA lot of my peers were adamant that nirvanas song is „smeells like team spirit“ because this is how pirated mp3 on local DC (i think it was called that) p2p exchange was called
- DaanDL 2mo agoDC++ I loved that place, being able to browse people's hard drives was ingenious.
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoMan the amount of mistagged artists on Limewire and co. I got Blind Guardian as a bonus track to Dimmu Borgir - I'm not complaining, that song slapped, it was just a bit jarring to go to power metal at the end of my burned CD.
- lukan 2mo agoOh. That was my mind blown for today. Well, the song was a bit out of style for System of a Down, but the voices are similar enough.
- eisa01 2mo agoIt'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 not survive the transitions) https://www.dn.no/d2/musikk/stena-line/lars-holte/spotify/han-solgte-mer-plater-enn-a-ha-og-dde-men-eventyret-var-over-nesten-for-det-startet/2-1-691950 https://www.dn.no/d2/musikk/stena-line/lars-holte/spotify/ha...
- wodenokoto 2mo agoI think the streaming sites are in a difficult position. On one hand I expect access to the worlds music, but on the other hand I also expect not to be drowned in 8bit covers and AI music. They are - to me at least - also an arbiter of music, similarly to how record stores used to be.
- applfanboysbgon 2mo ago> 8bit covers and AI music As someone who loves lsdj... ouch.
- port11 2mo agoIf 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!
- bradly 2mo agoI 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.
- CoolestBeans 2mo agoOne 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 as much about getting the record companies on board as it is about running a legitimate music store. I don't know I guess it reminds me of a time when tech disruption was in the consumer's favor and it was frustrating exploitive companies.
- rusk 2mo ago> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music If I’m remembering right, the tagline on the Mac mini was “rip mix burn”
- SllX 2mo agoPredates 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://youtu.be/K0ZWuhcM7t4 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Apples-Rip-Mix-Burn-campaign-Copyright-C-2001-Apple-Computer-Inc_fig4_269408905 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.
- rusk 2mo ago> 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.
- SllX 2mo agoIt’s really not. Ripping a CD is just copying the tracks to your computer. It says & implies nothing about sharing them on Napster.
- sondr3 2mo agoI still have my invitation email to What.CD and cherish the stuff I found and downloaded on it. After it went away I didn't do the reasonable thing and migrate to RED/OPS immediately, though I've joined OPS in recent years. It does not feel the same, but that's probably more me being older and less optimistic than during the What.CD days. I have fond memories of reading the forum threads about jazz when I was getting into it, or looking at all the weird collections people made (I vividly remember laughing at the "albums with feet on the cover"-collection) or finding really obscure, local artists you couldn't find anywhere else or going to the public library to rent CD's to rip and upload for credits. Fun times.
- abhikul0 2mo ago> Most people didn't have the same kind of experience, they got the LimeWire version which was the equivalent of wading through a dollar store that’s just been ransacked and shit’s all over the floor. Heh, I often went a step down and recorded internet radio using RadioSure. This little utility split each track into its own file which was pretty neat and handy to a younger me. Shoutout to Ryan Seacrests' AT40 for the weekly charts on the weekends, it kept my "collection" fresh ;-) Although, it was mostly 128-256kbps mp3 but it didn't matter to me, it was fun.
- Semaphor 2mo agoI loved OiNK (and had the t-shirt), but neither What.cd nor waffles ever were a proper replacement for me. What got me that feeling of discovery again, decades later, and even surpassed it, was doing release Fridays and just listening. I mostly know what (sub)-genres I like, I go through upcoming release lists for the next week, open every bandcamp link in a new tab (or for those that don’t have bandcamp, I see if I care about the genre enough to search for a single on YouTube), and then I have maybe a hundred links, I sample everything for a few seconds and decide on yay or nay, and about 10 - 20 % go onto my excel sheet. Then on Fridays (up to Sunday, depending on how busy the release day is) I start listening to all those albums to see which of those I’ll buy (usually 1-2). It’s some effort, but my appreciation for music was never this high.
- emsixteen 2mo agoI really loved OiNK and all of that era. Was genuinely gutted when it all fell apart, as it was also about the community of it all. Always wanted a tee - I'm envious. When waffles and What.cd appeared it seemed to me like waffles would be the long-term successor, but definitely didn't work out that way. Neither ever felt the same, and I wasn't engaged with them like I had been on OiNK. Nowadays I'm just another streaming service zombie when it comes to music, aside from my old library sitting in Plexamp, like my own little musical time capsule.
- sixtyj 2mo agoI haven’t seen the headline before, so I searched it now. And it seems you can have your T-shirt :) Redbubble or other on-demand print sites have it available.
- sexy_seedbox 2mo agoI've been on OiNK, went through the waffles and w.cd era (which had the best forum community, collections, invite forums to other private trackers, Userscripts to enhance Gazelle), now on RED and OPN, it's just not the same, gets worse abd worse with each generation.
- 2mo ago
- ilvez 2mo agoClosed private trackers are bastions of hope of preserving human culture. Every iteration since oink, they have become better and better and while at one point they will close the current ones, we will persevere. Where else would we find forgotten underground music only few people remember and how specific vinyl sounds. It's the community and love for music.
- jocelyner 2mo ago[dead]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ndesaulniers 2mo agoJust setup lidarr and plex. Not happy about having to re-arrange all my loose files, but claude and beets are helping.
- dewey 2mo agoGreat read! I spent many many hours during my student times as part of the team interviewing new members for What.cd about audio encoding settings, the rules of the site and its one of the times I look back on often. Made great friends, improved my English and spent most of my day on IRC. There’s so many good stories from this time and I wish the forums would’ve been preserved.
- DaanDL 2mo agoBiggest 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.
- jillesvangurp 2mo agoThe 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?!
- fragmede 2mo agoFwiw, it's annoying, but you can go into your YouTube watch history and delete that one video from it, which should stop the recommender from suggesting those going forwards.
- rdwrrr 2mo agoCall me old fashioned but I still collect FLAC files on my server. Using plex on my mobile devices is great, even in my car things just work. The pain of manually editing metadata is long gone, the horror shudders
- juvvel 2mo ago[dead]
- postalcoder 2mo agoThis is a wonderful piece. I really appreciate the author for writing this – I thought I lost the ability to read longform on the internet. What.cd was so vast a resource that it means something different to everyone. I personally lament the loss of the forums the most. I would post dissertation-length comments there and others reciprocated. I would put hours of research into debating a single topic. It's where I probably wrote my best stuff. The high barrier to entry reduced the noise and selected for people who were invested in being part of a community. The forums are also where I learned about hacker news! I learned so much about music during those days. Algorithmic recommendations don't hold a handle to the recommendations you'd get in the forumns and in the comments sections of individual albums. Consuming music via What was equal parts learning and consumption. It was obvious that poor music sales was a distribution problem, not a piracy problem. History played out in a way that proved this to be true. Spotify killed What.cd before the French did.
- abanana 2mo ago> I thought I lost the ability to read longform on the internet Same here. It's great to read a well-written piece that keeps my interest. I'm sick of reading the overused AI cliches and all the long-form articles that spend many paragraphs on irrelevant parts of the life stories of all involved, before getting anywhere near to the point.
- merryocha 2mo agoI miss the What.CD forums as well. I learned so much there. What.CD felt like attending a conference full of people from all over, full of ideas and willing to put effort into posts. The successor sites are much smaller and less active and it feels more like visiting a bar full of regulars who all know each other. I still love those sites for the music discovery and I still collect music as a hobby but What.CD's forum was the best forum I've ever been on. I wish someone archived it so I could go back and read some of the old threads.
- bfors 2mo agoI loved the forums as well, being an invite only music piracy site turned out to be a pretty good foundation for a community. My posts however, were definitely not very high quality.
- khalic 2mo agoIt's incredible how people got convinced, by unrelenting propaganda, that private copy is a crime
- devonsolomon 2mo agoThe 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.
- user_7832 2mo ago+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.)
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
- meerita 2mo agoConvenience always wins over nostalgia.
- aa-jv 2mo agoNowadays the only thing thats truly being pirated, is peoples' attention. Everythings been commoditized, nothing serious can be compiled onboard any more, everything needs permission. Bring back the compiler, you fuckers! Its a supercomputer, in my pocket, and I need permission to do things to it.
- pbasista 2mo agoIf I was a musician and produced music nowadays, I would not induce regular copyright rights on it. Because, in my opinion, it makes no practical sense. It mostly alienates the users. I would put the uncompressed flac files of my music directly on my website for everyone to download. That does not mean that I would not be interested in getting paid. But I would approach it differently. I would charge for broadcasting it on YouTube or Spotify. Or for playing it in venues. But I would not charge a regular Joe for it. They would be free to download it, play it and redistribute it in any noncommercial way they see fit. The most important part is this. I would encourage the "buy after you like" model. Everyone is free to listen. And who likes what they hear, is welcome to buy it. In my opinion, many small bands and solo musicians would benefit from that model. And I think it would also create some goodwill among their fans. It also would not shut down the mainstream delivery channels. So if someone still wanted to listen to it over Spotify and pay for it that way, they would still be able to do so.
- caporaltito 2mo agoWell. This is what Soundcloud or Bandcamp do. The problem is that: if it's for free, 99% of people won't pay.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- pbasista 2mo agoThe users usually not paying is a problem introduced by those platforms, in my opinion. They make the entire experience too generic for the regular users to care. It seems to me that the bands or musicians should distribute their music via their own websites. I think that then the users would care much more.
- caporaltito 2mo agoYou're absolutely right
- input_sh 2mo ago
- DuncanCoffee 2mo agoI remember Emule, with its IRC client we discovered by chance, or BearShare, which had a whole social network, you could search for people based on age, country and whatever. We used to get together at a friend's house because he had decent internet, in front of a CRT monitor, chatting with people around Europe with our broken english. Music piracy also changed the course of my life, thanks to a DVD full of music I discovered my passion for metal, picked up the electric guitar, met a lot of friends, partners and had a lot of fun (I could say it was the best time of my life, but that was just because I was younger and without worries ;) I also had no money to spend on CDs, nowadays I'm often thinking about buying a blu-ray player to buy the albums and movies I love... but I don't want them to collect dust, so I'm waiting for an excuse... I do have a Sony Walkman (the new one) with a nice collection of music, but with spotify (which I want to replace with Qobuz) it's not getting used. I'm also selfhosting NaviDrome.
- BeetleB 2mo agoThe Donkey Network (Emule's network) is still going these days.
- leokennis 2mo agoI enjoyed OiNK and What.cd but ultimately their ratio requirements killed that joy. At some point the “market” was saturated. 99% of music was on the site, and every release had plenty of seeders and peers. Unless you had early access to new releases, or maybe a seedbox with insane bandwidth and storage, it was almost impossible to actually meaningfully seed. For me the only working strategy was to download What.cd releases from other torrent sites, then “downloading” the release from What.cd and then wait weeks until I had seeded enough to be able to “afford” one new download.
- inigyou 2mo agoNewer torrent sites try to solve this with rewards for long-term seeding, which also helps keep the site alive but isn't zero-sum like the ratio.
- xzel 2mo agoIt was incredibly easy to get upload credit for seeding freeleech torrents (which included 10-20 albums of staff picks once a month or so) or re-encoding releases that were missing v2 or 320 encodings and scripts would pick up the releases. You could also just watch for new releases or follow trends and you'd easily get 5-10x ratio seeds. Also, you can get a $5/m seedbox to keep your downloads alive and you'd easy get back to 1.0 ratio assuming it wasn't some truly unlistenable album. I had a ratio of like 15 or something on what by leaving my computer on. At no point was it impossible or even difficult to get upload credit on any of these websites unless you were just leeching/turning off uploads. I just pulled up a larger site and I have 15 TB up, 1.15 TB down, and I'm doing absolutely nothing besides downloading stuff and deleting the torrents once I need space.
- leokennis 2mo agoReading your reply, I think we have different definitions of “incredibly easy”.
- vegenaise 2mo agoi permaseeded everything i grabbed for 7 years or i dunno, from the beginning of the site til the end. i never uploaded a single thing. just maybe 300gb of v0 albums accumulated over time, seeding 24/7 forever. it got me hundreds of gb of buffer. zero effort. slow home connection. it was easy.
- nubinetwork 2mo agoSpending 45 minutes to download a cd, only for it to turn into a 400mb pile of garbled noise, wasn't exactly joy.
- enahs-sf 2mo agoWhat are the content discovery options on top of the modern arr stack stuff?
- mechazawa 2mo agoOne of my proudest achievements in that scene was gaining the rank of Elite Torrent Master. I had terabites of music that I was seeding. I built a script that automatically found candidates for transcoding, downloaded them, transcoded them and created a new torrent. It's still up on github and people are still using it for RED afaik. It's been ages though since I've been active in the scene. I stored all of my media on raid0 drives so when that died I kind of just gave up. I don't know who but someone leaked my semi-public books archive on the datahorders subreddit and they hit my disks so hard that they just gave up on life. I still hold a grudge all these years later.
- apples_oranges 2mo agoNow music pirates itself. (Thinking of AI generated music which doesn't get more than a few % of total listening time, but give it some time..)
- infinite_spin 2mo ago*archiving/sharing
- anygivnthursday 2mo agoOnce I had internet connection and discovered LimeWire and then torrent in my later teens hungry for music but not enough money, it was magical. Before that we had a few people with internet who printed out music catalogues of the stuff they can download and burn to CDs for others. And before CDs we were just copying tapes from each other, even photcopying (in b&w) the covers :) Eventually I also ended up with a Spotify subscription, though. Occasionally I buy albums, but cant remember when I last downloaded something for listening from a torrent site.
- farzxadu 2mo ago[dead]
- andruby 2mo agoI got into Techno by cheer coincidence. I was 13 in 1999 and browsing Napster. I had followed the 1998 World Cup the year before with France - Brasil in the final and (the older) Ronaldo stealing the show. So here I see music from what I think is DJ Ronaldo. And this is when download 1 mp3 could easily take half an hour on our dial-up connections. So we only downloading 1 or 2 songs max. Turns out it’s not the footballer but DJ Rolando with Nights of the Jaguar. Brilliant techno song. First time I heard anything like it. Hooked for life. Bought it on vinyl a few years later. Became a techno DJ and event organiser for a while.
- inigyou 2mo agoIs Nights of the Jaguar considered techno now? I associate the genre of techno with, like, very repetitive rhythms.
- have_faith 2mo agoIt's a bit "bright" for a lot of techno, but it is very repetitive. Techno is a very broad genre with lot's of fuzzy edges. I'm suddenly reminded of Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music: https://music.ishkur.com/ https://music.ishkur.com/
- andruby 2mo agoGenres are fuzzy. It opened the door for me towards Derrick May, Adam Beyer, Carl Cox, etc. If you had to put a label on it, what genre would you file it under?
- elhart05 2mo ago[flagged]
- dspillett 2mo agoQuick reminder: it appears to seen as perfectly acceptable to pirate content for the purposes of training intelligence models. If anyone questions whether you have correct license for particular content, tell them that is it fine anyway because you are just using it to train the intelligence model that runs between your ears.
- inigyou 2mo agoLike many things though, it's only acceptable if you are rich. You can do exactly the same thing OpenAI does, get served the exact same lawsuit, present the exact same defense, and lose because you're not OpenAI.
- dspillett 2mo agoAye. Saying it makes me feel marginally better though, despite knowing it wouldn't get me anywhere as a real legal defense. The fact that acknowledging the hypocrisy won't help me really, will not stop me from pointing out the hypocrisy with boorish regularity!
- damienmeur 2mo agoI think what the article is missing is that main issue with streaming platform (for music and videos) is that it reshapes completely the business models of the music/movie industry. A CD or DVD was maybe a bad product, but it allows not "TOP" artists/production to still get ROI without needing to be viewed/watched by audience of billions. The music/movie industry is now way less diverse, because smaller actors cannot live out of it, so only the big players remain and produce stuff that only a very large audience would like but not love (you cannot please everyone whenyou have a 1B audience). Smaller categories in movies and music will just disappear: look at the 2000`s movies like the Ninth gate or some cool thriller, these could not make enough money just with the theater tickets but they could exist thanks to the DVD money. Now with streaming there is not enough revenue to capitalize on second tier movies (not block busters) that would be really loved by a smaller audience. We have a less fragmented culture so by definition it just slowly looses its richness.
- cobbzilla 2mo agoit’s only less diverse at the top. go down a couple of layers and various genres of music are experiencing renaissance’s like you would not believe. pop music has always (mostly) sucked [EDIT] Bring on the downvotes. You never bothered to explore. If you take what’s given to you by those who are selling, you’re in the seller’s market. Your downvotes are pride to me.
- damienmeur 2mo agoIMO it's just very scattered across very huge players / very small players that dont really live out of their artist work (it s just like a "hobby"). If you look at this year rock werchter festival in Belgium, it's ofcourse very good artists: Gorillaz, The XX, Franz Ferdinand,... But almost only groups from the 90`s / 2000`s that could make their name when the industry was more tolerant with non-pop / blockbuster music. I m over caricaturing ofcourse, but probably that if Gorillaz was created in 2026, Damon Albarn would post his work on a forgotten soundcloud, do some bartmitzvah during the weekend to roundup the end of the months while working as a ubereats delivery driver.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- semiquaver 2mo agoSoulseek is still going strong :)
- losvedir 2mo agoHeh, 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.
- GuB-42 2mo agoAI 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 didn't come out of nowhere. People worked to produce that content, and many of them are people like you and me, not billionaires and faceless corporations, and it is affecting them and their ability to produce more content. That part didn't change, what changed was that before, piracy was a rebellious act, done by poor teenagers, something easy to sympathize with. Now, it is done by trillion (!) dollar companies on an industrial scale, not much sympathy to give here.
- inigyou 2mo agoIt 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.
- account42 2mo ago> 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 individuals.
- 2mo ago
- nirvael 2mo agoI'm confused, surely there's a contradiction between "piracy was so good, we had this panacea of completely open, free, infinite music" and "streaming is bad even though it's the same infinite music library but we charge a small subscription". I get that artists aren't paid enough, but it's better than the $0 they get from piracy.
- speed_spread 2mo agoPiracy encouraged buying music. You'd learn of this cool band through a friend and would buy their next album when it came out. People still had the same budget for music but weren't so much at the whim of what music executives wanted to push at the moment. The network effects more than made up for the "lost" revenue.
- Diogenesian 2mo agoThat's total bullshit. Global music revenue fell by 50% because of piracy[1]. What music piracy did was make it impossible for artists to sell albums without engaging in parasocial celebrity-building and shameless merch. And everyone knows this is true!!! Music pirates also like to point out that historically musicians only played live, so it's totally a-okay that jazz musicians can no longer make a living from the studio, that even John Scofield, the greatest guitarist alive, is only middle-class because he is constantly on tour in his 70s. People talk out of both sides of their mouth on piracy because their only real motivation is "I like getting stuff for free and don't like moral responsibility." There is nothing more contemptible than tech folks telling easily falsifiable lies about how digital music affects working musicians. The cynical dishonesty is so depressing. Ever since I was a kid I knew it was just people rationalizing theft. [1] https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/napster-made-monster-became-bigger-113929271.html https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/napster-made-monster...
- bean469 2mo ago> That's total bullshit. Global music revenue fell by 50% because of piracy[1]. The article you linked does not provide any source and / or a methodology for how this was calculated and attributed specifically to piracy
- drumhead 2mo agoPiracy, however much it's hated by the industry has saved so much media from being lost forever. The greatest example I can think of is Doctor Who. When the BBC erased tapings of the earlier shows, it was thought they were lost forever, but fans had been taping the audio of the shows off the television, and the cleaned up soundtracks were used by the BBC to create animated editions and maybe in the future AI replacements.
- parasti 2mo agoSpotify 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 is no joy of discovery of new music that you haven't heard. There is no connection to other humans through music. Audioscrobbler/Last.fm is miles ahead of this. Youtube is miles ahead of this. Here's how I discover music these days: I swipe Youtube shorts until its algorithm decides to show me an artist, then I look that artist up on Spotify. Thats how bad Spotify is - it's an audio server with search and a hundred layers of irrelevant features bolted on top.
- HackerThemAll 2mo agoThen switch to YouTube Music or Tidal, they're way better.
- motbus3 2mo agoI had spotify premium for ~10 years i think. I recently cancelled. I travel a lot, so now they started complaining i was not listening near my address. then they started blocking family members because i was not around. then they wanted to charge in a different coin because i was not home, but EVEN if i would their login doesnt work because it redirects me to a different country if i am abroad. they are vibe coding too hard that they add all bs they think is a good idea. it was a good push for me to cancel that.
- rkharsan64 2mo agoI haven't used it, but YouTube Music has a samples section which is supposed to show you "shorts" of new (to you) songs.
- plastic-enjoyer 2mo ago> There is no joy of discovery of new music that you haven't heard. I have my problems with Spotify, but this is not one of them. I discover new artists, or long forgotten artists, regularly - even some weird obscure shit like Tänzelcore. But I have to agree, that the magic of discovering new music is not the same as, for example, digging records in a record store or via obscure boards and platforms (remember FF-Shrine?)
- juvvel 2mo agoOh, the joy was never fully lost to me. I still listen to bands so obscure that Spotify and Youtube Music don't have them, so I have no other choice. I'm slowly reverting back to my tech use of the late 2000s and early 2010s, with the added bonus of being able to access my own music collection from anywhere. I've seriously been considering getting an MP3 player again.
- mococa 2mo agoI’ve stopped to use streaming at the moment they started to remove content, also, I have a very peculiar taste for music, which makes impossible to find it on streaming (when it is available I buy it, when not… Torrent)
- alexpotato 2mo agoThere is a story from the early days of Napster where music industry executives discovered the service. One of the executives describes it as: "We had a laptop open and we tried to play 'stump the Napster' but not matter which obscure song someone threw out, it was there!" To put it in modern terms Napster indexed: - every song - on every user's computer - and then indexed all of those songs on a central server I suspect people would pay for a service that offered this (same for movies) but a combination of licensing, IP protection etc don't allow that to happen.
- erayack 2mo agoRIP to the golden age of file sharing.
- skeater15 2mo agoIts not lost here, still going strong. Lol
- paulcole 2mo agoIf I had $20 a month when I was 17, I would’ve paid for Apple Music in a heartbeat (if it were available at the time).
- joncooper 2mo agoOh wow, blast from the past! I do too. I published a sociology paper on this in college that may be of interest! (2000) The social organization of audio piracy on the Internet (Media, Culture, and Society) "In this article, we describe and analyze the emerging audio piracy (MP3) subculture on the Internet. As is evident to even the most naïve observer of the contemporary landscape, the explosion of Internet-based communication is radically redefining the nature of social relationships in modern societies, if not creating altogether novel forms of social interaction (Lyotard, 1991; Stone, 1996). Yet sociologists have yet to take the Internet seriously as a site of ethnographic investigation. Where sociological observation concerning the Internet exists at all, it is through vague generalizations and unqualified assertions about what these new virtual forms of communication portend for “society” (Kellner, 1995), offering little in the way of concrete social research. We attempt to advance the sociological study of “virtual communities” by embarking on an extremely focused study of one particular Internet subculture that is literally revolutionizing the production and consumption of popular music: audio pirates." https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/q3tcst00gjbwr5t02x38f/Social-organization-of-audio-piracy-on-the-Internet-Cooper-and-Harrison.pdf?rlkey=gvdex2xi7tiaoepj6ebuc3nm8&e=1 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/q3tcst00gjbwr5t02x38f/Social-...
- merryocha 2mo agoThe problem with platforms like YouTube etc is that the audio is transcoded to a lossy format. Repeatedly transcoding the audio from lossy to lossy degrades the quality. Music needs to be preserved in a lossless format like FLAC which keeps all of the original audio information intact.
- RickJWagner 2mo agoIt was chilling how government and courts squashed musical piracy by making very public examples of a few violators. Here’s an example, a Minnesota woman who was fined $1.9 million dollars for 24 downloaded songs. I’d suspect lobbying from the entertainment industry was a factor. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2009/06/18/woman-ordered-to-pay-19-million-in-music-download-case https://www.mprnews.org/story/2009/06/18/woman-ordered-to-pa...
- THansenite 2mo agoAre there any communities like this still around and thriving? I miss the old bulletin board days of the mid 2000s to mid 2010s, before Facebook and other social media took over. I'm part of a vintage car building community (LocostUSA) that still uses forums, but is a very small, niche community. What others are still active?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- grvdrm 2mo agoI wasn't familiar with either Oink or What.CD - fascinating to read about them. I spent tons of time on Napster and LimeWire roughly between late 1990s and 2005 when I graduated from college. A few things stood out as related topics: 1. I attended UMass-Amherst - a school not unfamiliar with and perhaps even popular for jam band culture. There was, at one point, a tool distributed that allowed any particular user to search the entirety of the network of users that also used that tool. So, what quickly evolved was this huge searchable library of songs, videos, etc. covering the thousands of students that chose to put something there. I don't recall the balance of my use of other services compared to that specific network tool, but it was an amazing place to discover music and also quite fast compared to everything else. 2. I wasn't sure if this post was lamenting the loss of discovery or the loss of stable revenue streams for artists. Maybe both. I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too. When I want more variety and access to the farther reaches of the music world, I use hypem.com. It's still great, after all these years, and a quite small operation despite the presence of Apple/Spotify. Also love Soundcloud, and as someone who makes electronic music/DJs on the side - Beatport. 3. What.CD reminded me of what I now hear about re: Lobste.rs. I'm not a member, and it's unclear to me if I want that? But it has some similar characteristics - invite only, ICQ chat, active moderation. What I wonder is whether folks here (members of Lobsters) see that community as possessing the same magic/thrill/quality of What.CD?
- albedoa 2mo ago> I wasn't sure if this post was lamenting the loss of discovery or the loss of stable revenue streams for artists. I haven't read the article yet, but the most devastating loss was the catalog itself. It was the largest archive of music in history. Of course, discovery was enabled in part by that. > I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too. It's not even comparable. If your definition of discovery considers what you can find on Spotify, then you're talking about a completely different thing. That's not to say that Spotify and elsewhere don't have discoverability — they're just not filling the void. > as someone who makes electronic music Your stuff was probably on there :D > What I wonder is whether folks here (members of Lobsters) see that community as possessing the same magic/thrill/quality of What.CD? I'm missing the comparison here too. There are communities that possess that thrill (some of the best of which don't even offer invites), so I know what you mean by it. I just haven't seen or heard that about Lobster.
- dfxm12 2mo agoI 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.
- kyboren 2mo agoNo, 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.
- shadowtree 2mo agoTangent - I still mourn the death of WeAreHunted. What a great music discovery site that was, unmatched in its ability to give you a curated feed of new artists to check out. WeAreHunted was sold to Twitter at the time to launch as Twitter Music! What an idea, music discovery, right in your big feed. Brilliant. Twitter #Music (https://abcnews.com/Technology/twitter-music-app-launches-iphone-web-listen-bands/story?id=18984039 https://abcnews.com/Technology/twitter-music-app-launches-ip...) barely lasted a year. This was the time when Twitter also launched Vine - to also shutter it. Great ideas, killed prematurely as TikTok took them and ran away with them. TT is now my #1 music discovery service, not great, just the only one that actually works.
- throw4847285 2mo agoMy grandmother used to give me mix CDs as gifts. One time I asked her where she found all the music and she told me "Oh there's this amazing app called Limewire." She then taught me how to pirate music.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- athrow 2mo agoBeyond here is something like a utopia - no false advertisement here. Some good memories: COFFE & salinger leak, filling in one of the largest bounties of obsure german electro pop for internet glory points, good memories.
- stefantalpalaru 2mo ago[dead]
- efilife 2mo ago43.6MB for that huge gif at the top of the article. This could have been a 2MB video at most
- socalgal2 2mo agoI discovered lots of music back when Rhapsody was a thing (2003-2006). When a song was streaming it would show who the band was influenced by and who they influnced. Following those links would lead to more music I enjoyed. The current stream services don't have that feature and their discovery algos are attrocious.
- duxup 2mo agoGreat read. Those days of the internet were fun, but also a product of their times. Whatever niche worlds we make now won’t be like the past, they have to be new. In my time pirating I used to take tracks from The Sound Of Music and rename the files / metadata something like <popular metal band> - <popular song by different popular metal band>. I got a lot of downloads.
- inigyou 2mo agoA successor site exists. It's called [REDACTED].
- pimeys 2mo agoTy
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoSo, 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.
- Aeolun 2mo agoMy music piracy has been buying a casette recorder and recording anything I want from the aux port of my PC. It’s been fantastic.
- kulshan 2mo agoI still have that joy in my heart and on my server
- snitzr 2mo agoBring back Muxtape.
- 4lx87 2mo agoAnybody remember what.cd?
- coss 2mo agoI really miss What.cd's band-affinity graphs.
- ranprieur 2mo agoI still do it. Spotify is good for making playlists but I don't use it for listening. I collect mp3s, bought on Bandcamp or downloaded from Soulseek, and listen on an old Sansa Clip mp3 player.
- magicalhippo 2mo agoAh flashback of going to a large LAN party in the late 90s, having an open share on your PC, leaving for dinner and coming back to the disk filled with new and exciting tunes, including one[1] that I still listen to. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrCn5VSjSrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrCn5VSjSrE
- AntronX 2mo agoI still use torrents to find lossless CD rips of various 80s - 90s music. Makes it easy to get multiple different releases and pick best sounding version. Buying used CDs on ebay to rip would be a chore.
- digs-fm 2mo agoShameless plug: if you're into keeping track of albums you want to listen or liked and you appreciate small web communities, you might find a site I'm developing useful: https://digs.fm https://digs.fm Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
- desecratedbody 2mo ago[dead]
- doawoo 2mo agonicotine+ :)
- meindnoch 2mo agoLost? It's as alive as ever, if you're in the right circles.
- bethekidyouwant 2mo agoI have to disagree it’s much easier now: turn on your portable speaker start playing music with your friends and then you pass your phone around and they choose songs to play next and then low and behold your recommendations become mixed with your friends tastes.
- johnnyApplePRNG 2mo agoI've always found the idea of song or sound ownership ridiculous. Nobody can "own" a song that I've enjoyed and listened to in my own head. That's my own experience. And if I want to have that experience again at any point in the future, I sure as shit should not have to shell out money to some record producer (or band member, whoever has their hand out) to do so. If you want to make music, make music. If I want to listen, I'll listen. If I see them in person and I feel like paying to see them, I will.
- gitowiec 2mo agoI searched today for UK garage music blog and stupid LLMs gave me links to services with links to Bandcamp, YouTube and SoundCloud. It didn't understand the phrase "music blog" so I added mp3 and mixtape words. Still couldn't find good place like it was 2000.
- dubcrab 2mo ago[flagged]
- stronglikedan 2mo agoI miss collecting all kinds of MP3s, burning them to CDs, labelling them, sometimes even printing out the CD artwork for them, organizing them in binders, and then never listening to them. I wish I had that kind of free time as an adult! I should check the garage...
- digitaltrees 2mo agoI owned a recording studio and small label before Napster and lime wire. I know a ton of musicians that lost the joy of making music due to piracy. I am glad you had fun. But also take a little joy in the loss of that joy but some how it seems asymmetric in your benefit.
- dyauspitr 2mo agoI kind of just stopped listening to music once I got past my early 30s unless it’s incidental. I just don’t have the desire to seek it out and listen to it anymore but I still enjoy music. Is this common?
- IndySun 2mo agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L23UJfvptd8&ra=m https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L23UJfvptd8&ra=m
- raydev 2mo agoNot 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.
- thom 2mo agoPerhaps 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.
- emmp 2mo agoI was in OiNK, and later I was an Elite on what.cd. I had access to college radio station cd shipments at the time too. Filled my fair share of requests. Nothing that has come since compares to those days
- vegenaise 2mo agopretty sure red has surpassed wcd in the size of archive, # of torrents, albums, etc. fewer ppl tho, much quieter forums, which was a big draw for people i've gathered.
- whatcd 2mo agoOink.me.uk, What.CD, and waffles.fm were amazing RIP
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoRIP. What was a modern day Library of Alexandria.
- sourcecodeplz 2mo agoalways remember there is yandex... you can find anything there, like an unlocked google
- CrimsonCape 2mo agoAsking for a friend, do we have a modern distributed peer-to-peer end-to-end encrypted file sharing system?
- miladyincontrol 2mo agoI will never let Sloppify or similar define my music tastes. I still do digital music discovery the old fashion way, and enjoy several TBs of music with nary a single western publicly released album in sight.
- esotericwarfare 2mo agoNow I downnload my music with yt-dlp. yt-dlp -f worstaudio "ytsearch1: system of a down lost in hollywood"