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 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.
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? They deleted my account when I moved countries, so I deleted their app. We’re done. Years ago. Now I get music from the library when my kid goes there to pick up books. There’s Bandcamp, Qobuz, what have you. Look at local festivals with weird bands (how I discovered Constantinople and Huun-Huur-Tu). iPod hacks have never been easier! Let’s shake it up a bit :)
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 right back into music and broadened my tastes considerably.
Discoverability and usability in general is godawful on bandcamp. Always has been, and shows no signs of improving. Never heard of Qobuz. What made the mp3 blog era so unique was exactly the network effect referenced above. The curators had audiences, they were aggregated from larger platforms and both deeply specific and hyper erudite. There was a whole culture around this online, and waves of excitement around certain artists, which would spill into 'in the know' circles offline.
Googling who's playing at local festivals or using some random app isn't and can't remotely be the same thing. I could see a music based social network taking off in the future. Currently there's nothing with the buy in, and the existing platforms are way too financially invested in pushing major labels, AI etc to become real recommendation and sharing engines.
It’s true I didn’t grow up with that at all. When music blog were popular I’d have been in university exclusively listening to what I already liked.
Bandcamp is indeed really bad at suggesting things you’ll like…
To your last point: it’s weird how Bandsintown or Last.fm didn’t figure this out. Last.fm has so much potential but just isn’t… interested?
One advantage of the offline scene is that I see a lot more local artists, all knowing each other and playing together. There seems to be some camaraderie/support for each other going on.
> 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 to blame (bear with me).
It's that the word "discovery" internet platforms have started using for this kind of experience is very misleading.
What real discovery means:
- Spending more time and attention when selecting next artist
- Reflecting on what you like about the song/album, and why
- Taking time to curate your collection
- Exchanging thoughts with other people, and reflecting on their opinions
Platforms are selling you efficiency, in reality the've compressed above steps to minutes or even seconds.
This is not unique to music platforms by the way. Instagram spoon feeds you reels so you never actually reflect on anything - you don't have time for reflection, because content is coming. Instagram will say they've solved "content discovery" for you, which is good, right?
LLMs spoon feed you tons of data, leaving no room for reflection.
It is logical if you think about it: these platforms do solve accessibility, but they don't solve discovery, deep reflection or retrospection of the user. Why bother marketing things they _don't_ solve? So they oversell accessibility solution like they've solved everything else, while in reality their product teams spend literal zero time addressing the important things.
Unless you consciously prompt yourself to reflect and think (which takes x10 more time than just browsing content) you are missing out.
I've spent good 20 minutes reflecting while writing this comment. Could have been written by LLM based on a short prompt, right? But I write on HN not because I want for everyone to see my thoughts published out there - I write precisely because I want to _reflect on my own thoughts_.
I need help reflecting, not writing or discovering.
I agree, a focus on efficiency, immediacy, and quantity has lead us to a barren experience of discovery. Music streaming certainly has its virtues, it is a shame that they haven't made the discovery process better.
I wonder what it would look like to have a feature that elicited reflection, perhaps purely for its own sake but maybe also to help feed further discovery. You could have a player that didn't immediately start playing the next track but presented an interface where you could write notes or react to the song in a variety of ways. That reflection could deepen your appreciation for the song or help you put into words what you find missing. It would also be a much richer feedback for the system to understand what you are looking for and find the next song. We now have all these fancy tools and vector databases for a nuanced and meaningful search based on text content.
What I find most tiring about the status quo is that you have to skip through a bunch of tracks to find something that resonates. It seems mentally taxing and I can't help but think I may actually like a lot of these songs if I was in the right frame of mind to hear them.
My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships
Hey! You can bring this back in 2026! In a fit of random inspiration (possibly inspired by a glass of wine or two) I began a new practice.
If I'm hanging out with somebody who's passionate about music, I pull up Spotify (or Apple Music, whatever) and create a blank playlist. I hand them my phone and ask them to add some tracks for me.
Here's the trick that makes it work... I give them strict instructions not to pick something they think I'LL like. I just want some tracks or albums that THEY are passionate about.
I've had a lot of fun doing this! People are also generally touched that you want to know what kind of music they feel strongly about. It's a fun way to build connections.
Back in the day I used to use Audioscrobler which was an audio plugin for Winamp which was basically a recommender system for music. I discovered some interesting music through that but nowhere near the amount of music I later discovered through hypem which was a music blog aggregator.
Winamp is where I fell in love with last.fm. It wasn't as fun as going to a lan party and raiding the file server of all of the music to explore it or later, Napster checking out what music the person you were downloading a song from had that seemed interesting but it was super good at finding new similar music and side fun fact that my wife and some lady in Russia are the only close matches to me in music taste on there still. pretty wild. CBS ruined last.fm
It really depends, but in general I quite like it. I still sit through my Spotify weekly every week, moving the songs that I like into playlists. I regularly find new artists I like, thankfully I don't see much ai slop yet - the bands I find have tour dates and proper web presence. I've been to see some. But I wonder if it's a function of my niches or what?
I don't tend to let songs autoplay outside of playlists unless I'm commuting, and it usually just picks artists and songs I already know anyways.
Occasionally if I want to find more like an artists I go onto the song radio on Spotify but just read the song titles and artist names, it's not worth setting aside a couple hours for the possibility of two gems.
If I had one complaint or thing I wish I could change about my listening habits it's that I wish I spent more time listening to albums in order. I think something is lost by skipping straight to the best tracks - the dessert as it were, you've got to take the time so it's all the sweeter when it comes.
A year or so ago I emailed a composer just to tell him how much I enjoyed his arrangements of a great OST. He sent a very kind, thorough response and mentioned that feeling of “shouting into the void.@ He said once he releases a record he doesn’t really tour so he never gets to speak to people or see the emotional response, so the occasional message means a lot.
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 remote pacific, random college radio. It’s all out there, live, amazing!
when I hear something I like, I “shazam” it, then add it to my library later. and I’m always smiling when shazam can’t find any match.
radio.garden (and many others) got neutered in the UK courts by Sony. Offensive, short-sighted, Balkanizing decision.
I haven't bought a Sony product since the rootkit debacle. My only regret is that there's not a "boycott++" mode for the damage they did with that decision.
radio.garden feels like spinning an AM radio dial late at night (which is how I discovered John Peel as a youngling). It's a lovely thing, verging on art, and should be treasured.
> 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.
I've been intentionally doing this with my music streaming service. If I hear a song I like or someone in one of many friend groups recommends something, I'll add it to my liked songs, and eventually get around to listening to it. Sometimes I'll find a gem and go into their discography further. I can't agree with never getting this feeling back; there's also a resurgence in popularity for physical media and offline music players, so it might be quite common again soon.
+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.)
I miss that network discovery as well, as well as the quasi-random element to it. Nowadays I get my kicks by searching for, say, Albanian rock (I don‘t speak Albanian), whatever was trending in Indonesia (I am not from there), who is the national poet/singer of France (I am not French), what was playing on Peruvian radios in 1985 when I born, etc.
Edit: it‘s also a great way to meet other countries/cultures, not only other great music. For example, this is how I got acquainted with the beautiful Wolof language from Senegal and even with traditional regional music in Brazil (where I am actually from) I would have never been exposed to otherwise.
I made a mix CD for my wife for her birthday last year. It was my interpretation of Cereal Killer's "Greatest Zukes Album", featuring "great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit" that was mentioned in the 1995 movie Hackers. So to qualify for inclusion, the artist had to either have died of drug or alcohol overdose before September 1995 (when Hackers came out) or be a band one of whose principal members died in such a fashion. It was great fun to make and my wife still listens to it.
> 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've mostly been using my own playlists + radio to play music in Spotify and discover music. Recently though, I've started navigating and listening more by the label, and also listening through full albums instead of just picking some songs. Spotify seems to work fine for this, what exact issues are you encountering when listening by albums?
Mostly I find them via the "release radar" today, click on the album title/cover, play first track with shuffle and repeat all off, then listen until it ends. I don't think you need anything else than this :)
Back in my day we used DC++ for music sharing. DC++ was like a decentralized social network + piracy client, with the content shared by users who congregated in self-hosted servers, and it was always interesting to browse people's (sometimes very mixed) music tastes.
I used ourTunes in the dorms, people just sharing their entire iTunes with the network. I've always been more of a solo digger, but I never liked Spotify. I have specific dance/electronic tastes so I browse and purchase music on sites like bandcamp or beatport, though actually these days it's strictly junodownload.
I do wonder though how much of what you describe, or some form of it, is still happening in dorm rooms. As we get older we just do less of that kind of stuff. I still connect with a large circle of friends through music, and discuss different artists and such, mostly at events.
There's probably some truth in that although, if you didn't have to collect a large volume of music whether purchased or copied in some form, I'm not sure the incentives are there to get started in any serious way. It is also true that, for me at least, I purchase very little music these days and basically don't pirate at all.
I've had an essay brewing in my head with the title "special internet for cool people", about the greatness of this era and why it's so difficult to bring back. TLDR that the gatekeeping was actually essential; piracy stops working once everybody does it.
>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.
I feel that for sure, but as a kid who grew up in the rural US South, the fact that as a middle-aged person I can read a mention of some random act and listen to it right now is still a staggeringly great experience.
We mostly discover new music from about 15 to 25 or 30, right? It's pretty normal for that to slow down as the concerns of adulthood kinda get in the way of keeping up with whomever is hot now.
Then I subscribed to AppleMusic, and I did so almost exclusively to avoid having to cable-sync music anymore. Turns out, my wife was just using a free Spotify account instead of downloading music to her phone b/c she saw it as too much hassle, and she wasn't wrong. The modest monthly fee was, to me, a way to buy a sync-free existence.
But then the whole "all you can eat" thing hit, and the way it hit the most was in encouraging me to listen widely again. I read a profile of Phoebe Bridgers early in the pandemic, for example. I'm a middle-aged dude, so I'm absolutely not her core demo. I read it b/c it was in The New Yorker, and generally those profiles are worth reading even if you have no idea who the person is, and no real connection to their work. But the author made her work sound interesting.
If it had been twenty years prior, I might've thought "huh, I should check her out," and then forgotten about it. If I was REALLY motivated I'd have put a note in my Palm Pilot that I'd probably neglect to consult the next time I was in a record store. But because it was 2020, I could just pull up her album on my phone and listen as soon as I finished the profile.
That's AMAZING.
>I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums,
I am 100% an album bigot. I admit that sometimes when driving, when I know I won't be able to curate actively, I may ask my phone to play a "station" based on a song whose vibe I like in that moment. This, too, has lead to discovery, but and it usually works at least ok for keeping my ears happy.
But at home, doing intentional listening? It's albums.
>I bought a record player as my protest
I'm 56. I feel like, most of the time in the US, people who were a couple years older than I am DEFINITELY had records growing up, and people who were a couple years younger ABSOLUTELY DID NOT. (There's weight on the scale either way for the presence of music-fan parents or hip older siblings.)
I didn't. When I first heard a song I definitely wanted to have, it was about 1982, and I bought it on a cassette. By the mid-80s when I was well into my teens, CD was already on the horizon and getting cheaper fast, so I bought cassettes sparingly -- I didn't want to buy "The Queen is Dead" on cassette and then have to REbuy on CD a few years later.
CD had completely taken over my music by 1988 or 1989.
But then the dot-com crash happened, and money was TIGHT. A former roommate had abandoned a turntable at my house. Thrift shops had records for like $1 or $2. My girlfriend (who is now my wife) could make a pretty great Saturday afternoon out of cheap tacos and a $5 budget at the used record store.
Now, if I buy physical music, it's probably on vinyl. It doesn't sound better than hi-res digital or CD, but it's more FUN to pull out a record and drop the needle. It's more intentional. And while they're harder to find now than they were 20 years ago, used record bins still have treasures.
One 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.
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.
Exactly. I mean sure, people were definitely pirating music. But lots of people are own huge collections of CDs, and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them. We were kids without money, but older folks at the time did spend money on CDs.
> and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them
Which is "piracy" - not that that makes it ethically wrong. It's actually the main kind of copying that is targeted by DRM since users of the LimeWire kind never see that.
I'd even go as far as argue that all streaming has its origins in piracy - Spotify seeded its catalog with pirated music (allegedly), Crunchyroll started off as an anime piracy site, etc.
My digital collection got really messed up at one point partially due, I'm pretty sure to Apple Match. At one point--early in the pandemic I think--I spent a day or two whacking my collection back into some semblance or order. For example, I had a lot of titles that weren't actually attached to a file.
Just had a friend give one to me. If I want an entire album and the CD is the same or less than the digital version, why not? Ripping takes a minute or two.
i pirated a ton but i also ripped all my cds and all my friends cds (and their parents cds). i took my macbook around everywhere and ripped every cd in could find
> 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 great battery life. But it wasn't an MP3 player. It could only play ATRAC music. That means you had to transcode all of your MP3s to their proprietary format just to listen to them.
I remember trying to debate the virtues of my Sony NW-HD1 versus the iPod, but having to keep my computer on throughout the night just to transcode a couple albums was indefensible.
Yet a few years before that Sony had no qualms selling walkmans, blank tape cassettes and dual-tape portable sound systems, often with double speed copy function. We would gather for afternoons and make actual copy parties. Recording quality wasn't great but we didn't care.
I don't think that's true. People had been amassing CD collections for a decade or two by that point. At the original '1000' songs you're talking around 80 albums which isn't a lot.
It'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)
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!
> It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there.
And even if they did, you'd still need to pirate a copy of your collection to own it (as there's a chance not all of it is sold digitally and DRM-less).
Only one of them had been available in FLAC, but someone made sure to make the rest available in the last two years, and someone else even put them on YouTube...
I had been on the hunt for them a couple years after purchasing The First Winter 25 years ago :)
> 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 tastes that is generally pretty good. I rarely say "hey google play this specific track". Generally when I'm educating my kids ("It's cooooming home, it's coming, England's coming home").
For film and TV there's really not that much good stuff out there. I hear about a specific series, say Severance. Oh it's only available on Apple TV and I only have Netflix, Disney+ and Prime. Piracy it is then!
That's not my experience at all. My most common workflow in these apps is exactly going to a specific song (artist, album, playlist) and playing it. I can scarcely imagine much use for just asking for "music" - my closest equivalent is putting my extremely large "liked songs" playlist on shuffle which takes me down memory lane etc.
I know behaviour like yours is common, however. Spotify themselves say so, and work under that assumption wrt. promoting cheaper (for them) music when they detect passive listening.
>It'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
Ehhh..... I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites. Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days, so everything new gets released there, and by this point the catalog from the CD era is extensive. Music streaming has more music than What or Oink ever did. Streaming also has huge value add over piracy: it's really easy and convenient, it's better socially (shared playlists), and recommendations/discovery are waaaay better.
The vast majority of people do not "need" music piracy any more. If you want ten different versions of every REM album with slightly different mastering then sure, join RED. But it's a niche interest these days.
It's a huge contrast to movie piracy, which is thriving and which provides enormous advantages over any other way of watching movies at home, not just in cost and convenience but also in access and in quality.
> I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites
If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify.
>If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify.
Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.
Sure, there exists music that is on RED that is not on Spotify. There also exists music that is on Spotify that is not on RED (some of which I even listen to!).
I said "pretty much anything" and "most people". I stand by this. Most people do not experience major holes in the Spotify catalog and are perfectly well satisfied by the breadth of the catalog. If you aren't, that's cool, but you're in a minority.
If this weren't the case, music piracy would be more popular. It's not. RED has more music now than What.CD did, but the community is smaller. It's telling that it doesn't even get a mention in the OP. A lot of people who join aren't even particularly interested in music piracy but just want to use it as a stepping stone to other communities.
I'm not saying that music piracy sucks or whatever. I'm just saying that most people don't feel much need for it and are well-served by Spotify--which, again, has some huge advantages over piracy that I gave previously. I think it is useful to be realistic about this because it's easy reading an article or thread like this to feel a kind of FOMO and I think it's valuable to push back against that.
While I must sadly agree with your usage of "most people", I still don't understand why you thought it changed anything to the original claim that there is still a need for music piracy (for the aforementioned people who care). And note that I didn't pick particularly obscure artists, we're talking 10~100k ratings/followers on RYM.
If you take issue with the claim that everyone streams music these days than the only way I can understand your comment is by assuming we live in vastly different cultures.
Do you think the difference between film piracy and music piracy is inherent, due to the differences between film and music; or is there some alternative reality where we ended up with a one-stop shop for films, as well?
For the history of music piracy, I found" How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy" was a good book to read.
I would wager the effective piracy rate of stuff that on prime and Netflix a few years back was close to the effective music piracy rate. IMO the difference is that with Spotify, tidal, Apple, YouTube or Qobuz - you mostly get access to everything. With film, you can pay for Netflix, Disney, Hulu, peacock, HBO, and _still_ not be able to get access to major releases without paying more on top of the subs.
Music being generally 3-10 minutes long while film is 1h30-3h makes a big difference here. A film is a bit more of a commitment than a playlist entry; you can just put music on the virtual sushi belt and grab what comes past, while sitting down for a film is more of a time commitment.
That's an interesting question. I'm not sure. We sort of had that one-stop shop experience with Netflix's DVD service, where you would pay a subscription fee and in exchange you would get to watch movies from a huge catalog. But this didn't translate to the streaming era.
P2P film piracy, at least for the quality-minded, has a few strong competitive advantages over film streaming. It doesn't have to deal with rights issues, for one, which can present huge roadblocks to film distribution. Films are also huge files and the interests of a streaming platform (low bitrate) are in tension with interests of quality. Even in comparison to physical media--the highest quality release of a film might be from a different market than yours, or there might be many competing releases over time. There might be different factors that are better in one release and other factors better in another release, where the pirated copy can combine all the best parts. It's actually somewhat remarkable how good film piracy has gotten these days for those who care.
I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip.
The library for the music streaming platforms is much bigger than for films, of course (about 250 million for Spotify), but there's also a much lower barrier of entry. So perhaps the higher work needed to produce a film necessitates more profit, to a degree that only the fragmented streaming platforms can fulfill. After all, netflix started making originals to counter studios launching their own streaming platforms to raise profit margins, and pulling their content off netflix.
First of all, vinyl is still relatively niche in absolute terms. Second of all, the popularity of vinyl, such as it is, has absolutely nothing to do with availability. It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia (as the technology itself is, of course, inferior from a technical sense of faithful reproduction) plus a desire for personal physical ownership of something.
This is complete bullshit, sorry. Digital is more capable of faithfully reproducing sound than vinyl is. Vinyl does not have technical advantages when it comes to faithful sound reproduction. I mean, it literally degrades over time, for chrissake!
I don't know what kind of "compression issues" you're talking about but I strongly suspect you'd be well served by learning about the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.
> Digital is more capable of faithfully reproducing sound than vinyl is.
That's exactly the problem that makes digital unsuitable.
Theoretically digital can reproduce sound faithfully, but if the medium allows sound engineers to compress the hell out of music, then they will abuse the opportunity.
Vinyl is a very limited format and you can't really do any sort of "creative" audio optimization bullshit with it.
I was a zealous collector of records when we made the switch to digital audio. And let me tell you, there was a significant artistry to the thing: a vinyl record was a standardized work of art. Every album cover was the result of careful design, photography, layout. The inner sleeve oftentimes contained more art, or if we were lucky, all the lyrics we wanted to sing along with. The record label itself, a masterpiece of design. All the smells and all the feels of merely collecting vinyl--even without playing it--are indescribable today.
When CDs came into the market, they were horribly clacky and just clad in layers of tacky plastic. The album art was shrunken, misshapen... and the objects themselves stank of polycarbonate, rather than delicious vinyl. Sure, they sounded great and they lasted a long time, and maintenance was dead simple. But so much artistry was lost. I was still collecting lots of CDs when purely digital distribution hit us, but by then, the smells and feels and experience of collecting vinyl were distant memories.
And that entire experience may be why people argue for the technical superiority of vinyl recordings, and analog tube amplifiers. Because it was all self-reinforcing, and it all fell apart once the clacky, tacky, plasticky CDs took over.
Yeah, that's all part of what I meant by "a kind of retro nostalgia". People enjoy the experience of buying vinyl and of putting on vinyl records. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, for what it's worth. I'm just claiming that this is what's driving vinyl's popularity right now, rather than because people are turning to it due to music availability issues (which is much more of a factor for DVDs/Blu-rays right now).
There's a shitload of valuable vinyl records that don't have any art at all or even any cover. Paper and cardboard doesn't last as long as the record itself.
Look, I am telling you about my own lived experience with collecting vinyl. You can speak for yourself, but I carefully stored all my items in archival sleeves, and the jacket, art, and inner sleeve were often just as important as the disc and the music encoded on it.
There was a real thrill and reward that came from collecting LP albums in particular, and that meant 12" discs, and I also had a particular specialty in finding 12" remixes and DJ versions of singles.
Yes, there were shaped discs, and colored vinyl, and white-labels and acetates that came with no art or plain sleeves, and I collected those with just as much alacrity, but it really was a pleasure to flip through my collection, or someone else's, and drink in that large-format album art.
This is very far from truth unless you only listen freshs pop music. And even then it is easy to click a song only to receive "not available in your region".
This 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.
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.
I 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.
I 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.
I'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.
I 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.
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 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.
I haven't used a public site since Suprnova so I don't know about the health of public p2p sites at all. The private side is absolutely not stagnant, new sites pop up all the time and you can still find all the niche stuff you want to find by just nudging the enthusiasts with requests.
A lot of them seed from home, with humongous servers, and there are preservation programs going on in various places.
Yes, that's true, but the core reason there are private p2p sites is because you're most likely to get a DMCA violation letter from the watchdog company via your ISP or to you directly in the West.
Even if it may be not a punishable offense, that still freaks out people, and they choose not to seed from home or use public websites which are scraped by DMCA watchdogs.
I don't see much point in contributing to closed silos (even if I'm present on the majority of invite-only music trackers and occasionally contribute there) because I have ThePirateBay and RuTracker account: it's the same, but it's open for everyone and google-able.
Some private trackers disallow accessing them via VPN, which I find super strange. They want to access the website with your residential connection, but they allow seeding via VPN (which many do, because see above).
Other private tracker which I used to be on had a timeout on account life time. If you don't log in once in a while (6 months AFAIR), your account will be suspended, even if you're seeding all the content in the torrent client all this time.
Well they shadowban the accounts which share copyrighted content for which they receive copyright claims.
It's a centralized service, they just configure you account to be invisible in the search results of others.
And they don't check whether the file is really reachable. I've 'chmod 000' copyrighted files so they could not be downloaded (but still could be found in search), and Soulseek administrators were not happy with that ether.
I've been shadowbanned 4 times or so. They never unban, need new account.
Oh no, these don't feel very well either, in a sense that there's only a few seeders of the older uploads, if at all, and by older I mean as old as just a few years old.
I'm running my torrent preservation service, and many anime/jrock/jpop downloads start downloading only after weeks or months of waiting for a seeder.
Groups and individuals who used to be active on the scene has switched elsewhere and retracted their archives and XDCC bots.
There are Chinese torrent-to-web download services which seem to cache already downloaded stuff for a very long time if not indefinitely, sometimes you can download it from there if someone managed to use the service (they don't seed it over bittorrent though).
Indeed, Russia and Ukraine are the last major digital libraries of the history and culture of modern western civilization, which is deeply disturbing to write out in text, and says a lot about how far the west has fallen
Indeed. 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.
It is also simple to download from the streaming services so to me things got as simple as pasting a link in the terminal to rip to no internet places like a car
Oh but also the good old IRC channels on Undernet or whatever? Not quite warez to get you banned, just gray area with no official support but allowed to stay. Community chat, music recommendations, admin bots and random trivia - #mp3_...
I really struggle to find new music. I feel like I've already listened way too many times to everything I have on my SD card, but I really don't know what to look for. When I was a kid I was very much into rock and everything adjacent so I do have albums of most iconic rock bands. Nowadays I'm more into electronic music. I love a good techno track and I have a folder with 2000-2010 greatest pop-techno bangers. God damn Basshunter gave me more happiness than my entire career combined. At home I often listen to more ambient music, mostly from SomaFM. There's an artist/band called Hello Meteor and the worst album is still 9/10. On the opposite side of the spectrum there's this guy Darren Tate - most of his music is literal trash, but there are a few golden nuggets with how he operates with dynamic range. Like, Prayer For God is absolutely amazing, it's so energetic. But it's really difficult for me to find electronic music that doesn't suck, most DJs make one good track by pure luck while mass-producing slop.
I find college radio to be a good curator of music. MIT radio is a mix of students and long time music lovers who DJ.
They archive shows for a couple weeks (though it’s automatic so the shown typically starts a couple minutes in). Some shows actually list the songs they play at trackblaster.
Radio Ninja I like for electronic music. They put shows up on mixcloud as well.
- https://dieordiy2.blogspot.com/
- https://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/
- Last.FM Recommendations based on your bands
- Mixtapes and radio mixes, there are countless
Very 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.
I don't use it anymore since getting into private trackers because the network (central server) is proprietary, the experience is much less polished than BT and I want to be sure of the release (LABEL/CATALOGNUMBER) I'm downloading.
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 queued
On the more legal side of services was the original last.fm - as a pupil/student I spend days/hours discovering new music there. Not only due to automatic recommendations, but a lot of time by browsing other people's listening habits - just like browsing the music collection of someone else on soulseek.
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."
What 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!
Closed 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.
I'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.
Piracy 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.
That'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.
The article is mostly an interview with a journalist who wrote a book about Napster. The claim comes from his book. That's the source. I have not read the book. If you have concerns about the methodology you should read it yourself.
I 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.
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.
IMO 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.
I dunno.. even here in new zealand, very much not a musical hub, i still know plenty of jazz musicians who make a living off of music, and there is generally at least 1 jazz gig every week.
I also think the industry is pretty tolerant of more experimental/non-pop music, just that this isn't really true for the rock scene amymore. Hardcore punk, hardstyle, dubstep, hyperpop, shoegaze are all huge genres now, large enough to live off of and perform at festivals as big as coachella.
You may be right about Damon Albarn but that would just be a result of which genres have listeners who are willing to listen to smaller, non-mainstream artists. I think the biggest example of this is that mainstream rock music a la guns and roses has pretty much completely died out, while genres with smaller, more dedicated fanbases like post-rock and noise rock are still going strong as ever. I'm sure if you check your local shows (and you live in a place with reasonably large population) you will be able to find plenty of bands who completely live off their music.
Man 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.
A 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
The 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.
I 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.
Oh, 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.
One 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.
Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO.
I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like "presave this (you can't listen to it)", "jump back in (you literally already listened to it)", "your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)". There 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.
I 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.
> 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?)
How? What's your secret? It's actively fighting me from discovering anything new. "Hey we'll show this artist you stopped listening to two years ago on your start screen forever. Wanna jump back in?" That's Spotify to me.
I 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.
It'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/
There 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.
I 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.
It 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.
Yes I remember even at the time people were laughing about the hilarious requirement for everyone to have a seed ratio greater than 1. Those sites were basically unusable for people who came to them later.
I 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.
Call 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
If you're on Bandcamp or Soundcloud it's usually because you want to support artists directly, I doubt many people are purely interested in getting free music rips.
I 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.
I did this with a japanese punk band and when I finally got on a private tracker, I redownloaded them and the quality difference was night and day. I have a huge backlog of mid-grade MP3s from TPB back in the day and I'll occasionally download a second flac version of the albums just to get the dynamic range.
Hearing 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.
Opus - 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.
I can't tell the difference with most headphones, but with monitors or a good system in a good listening environment there are some details that get lost in compression, but there's essentially 0 difference from losslezd if I rip a CD to opus or mp3 rather than from a stream.
Piracy, 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.
Great 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.
Once 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.
I’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)
Biggest 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.
The 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?!
Fwiw, 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.
One thing I like to do on Spotify is to make a "Blend" playlist with a friend whose music taste overlaps with mine slightly. Not for its intended use of creating a playlist for you both to listen to at the same time, but instead I find it's useful at pulling your recommendations out of the safe zone (and towards the taste of your friend). Sounds a little bit dystopian that I'm cutting my friends out of the friend-recommendation part of music discovery, but if I find a new artist I like I usually make sure to mention it to the friend.
> 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.
If 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.
So long as you don't try to go without any kind of copyright. I've heard stories of people releasing their music for free with no copyright only for somebody to download it, register it as THEIR copyright, and then sell it on all the platforms and even send a copyright takedown notice to the original creator.
Better to protect yourself by registering it under creative commons or a similar licence.
Add a download gate to the mix, remove the optional payment (I promise you nobody's gonna do that) and you're basically describing https://hypeddit.com/.
Instead of paying to download music, the users "pays" by following you across social media / streaming services. Granted it's mostly used for copyright-violating edits, but some musicians use it for original tracks too.
It's how basically any electronic music producer makes a name for himself before they ever sign a contract with a label.
No. No restrictions should be put on downloads. The main point is that the distribution channels should always be free.
What should be gated and limited is the commercial use: reselling, relicensing, using for business, etc.
> the optional payment (I promise you nobody's gonna do that)
Such "promises" seem to be based on no facts. Moreover, they contradict my personal experience.
I would be very interested in using that business model. In fact, I have already used it with other types of services. I have paid for software that is open source, free to download and free to use. Multiple times. Simply because I like the software and I wanted to thank the authors for it in some tangible way.
The 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.
Edited 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.
> 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.
I'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
we traded the thrill of a 3-hour LimeWire download for the convenience of paying 5/month to rent access to songs that disappear when the licensing deal expires. progress.
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.
I 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.
What.CD's real magic was the curation and lossless-everything culture, not just free files. Redacted keeps the archive going but that obsessive completeness is hard to rebuild.
It 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?".
Hard 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.
Quick 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.
Like 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.
Aye. 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!
I 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.
I'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
Oh 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.
I 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.
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
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.
Hey 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.
The article touches on the topic and mentions Nine Inch Nails' and Radiohead's 'free' album releases.
There's also the possibility/likelihood (I can't recall the results of the research) that increasing exposure, via piracy, is actually better for the artist long term.
And then, as others have already responded, the worst offenders are, generally, the industry insiders themselves. Reports of the death of music are greatly exaggerated. Reports of the death of the music industry are widely looked forward to.
I pirated plenty as a kid with no money, it was cheap and it was easy - does anyone here remember high-speed dubbing? I also recorded a _lot_ of music off the radio. On the rare occasion I bough an album I made sure it was worth being the only thing I listen to for weeks - and the only way to know that is to have prior knowledge. I buy plenty as an adult with a music budget. I believe that's how it should be.
>increasing exposure, via piracy, is actually better for the artist long term.
If breaking someone's kneecaps extended their life by 20 years I wouldn't want someone to randomly break my kneecaps and feel good about it because they "did me a favor."
>I pirated plenty as a kid with no money
Neither age nor wealth exempts someone's stealing from being a crime. In fact I see it as worse crime as it sets a bad example that may be hard to change later.
Breaking someone's kneecaps is unquestionably a crime, copyright infringement for private consumption is not a crime, it's a civil offense (because listening to pirated MP3s doesn't make you a danger to society) so equating the two is a fallacy. I'm sure you already knew this since these arguments have been rehashed thousands of times over the past few decades.
I don't think you'd find much (if any) support on the moral angle either when it comes to people who genuinely can't afford to pay the asking price. I've never seen any authors, artists, etc. openly object to fans pirating their work in these circumstances but I've seen many of them openly encourage it. Seeing how you're equating the two, do you think they also like to have their kneecaps broken?
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 forms, the primary concern should be the creator. Not people that want to get stuff for free. And I can assure you: musicians would like to get paid for their work, and they don’t think it’s cool or fun that people just steal their stuff. The occasional super-successful artist being pro-piracy is not representative.
If there was a mainstream way of supporting artists directly and having permanent ownership of music, piracy would be punching down and could possibly be a taboo practice. But as the current order stands, its punching up and fucking the suits more than artists and I really like that.
I can understand the piracy argument 25 years ago, when these didn't exist. But at this point, I think there are plenty of ways to directly support artists.
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.
I 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.
There was an official release that contained just that and a lot of other things like image assets uploaded on Archive.org. You can’t just put a database dump online without doing a lot of cleaning first.
There’s some websites where people made that browsable too so you can go through collages and album and artist pages with the original style sheets too. Just no forums or torrent files or images.
It 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.
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 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.
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? They deleted my account when I moved countries, so I deleted their app. We’re done. Years ago. Now I get music from the library when my kid goes there to pick up books. There’s Bandcamp, Qobuz, what have you. Look at local festivals with weird bands (how I discovered Constantinople and Huun-Huur-Tu). iPod hacks have never been easier! Let’s shake it up a bit :)
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 right back into music and broadened my tastes considerably.
Discoverability and usability in general is godawful on bandcamp. Always has been, and shows no signs of improving. Never heard of Qobuz. What made the mp3 blog era so unique was exactly the network effect referenced above. The curators had audiences, they were aggregated from larger platforms and both deeply specific and hyper erudite. There was a whole culture around this online, and waves of excitement around certain artists, which would spill into 'in the know' circles offline.
Googling who's playing at local festivals or using some random app isn't and can't remotely be the same thing. I could see a music based social network taking off in the future. Currently there's nothing with the buy in, and the existing platforms are way too financially invested in pushing major labels, AI etc to become real recommendation and sharing engines.
It’s true I didn’t grow up with that at all. When music blog were popular I’d have been in university exclusively listening to what I already liked.
Bandcamp is indeed really bad at suggesting things you’ll like…
To your last point: it’s weird how Bandsintown or Last.fm didn’t figure this out. Last.fm has so much potential but just isn’t… interested?
One advantage of the offline scene is that I see a lot more local artists, all knowing each other and playing together. There seems to be some camaraderie/support for each other going on.
It's that the word "discovery" internet platforms have started using for this kind of experience is very misleading.
What real discovery means:
Platforms are selling you efficiency, in reality the've compressed above steps to minutes or even seconds.This is not unique to music platforms by the way. Instagram spoon feeds you reels so you never actually reflect on anything - you don't have time for reflection, because content is coming. Instagram will say they've solved "content discovery" for you, which is good, right?
LLMs spoon feed you tons of data, leaving no room for reflection.
It is logical if you think about it: these platforms do solve accessibility, but they don't solve discovery, deep reflection or retrospection of the user. Why bother marketing things they _don't_ solve? So they oversell accessibility solution like they've solved everything else, while in reality their product teams spend literal zero time addressing the important things.
Unless you consciously prompt yourself to reflect and think (which takes x10 more time than just browsing content) you are missing out.
I've spent good 20 minutes reflecting while writing this comment. Could have been written by LLM based on a short prompt, right? But I write on HN not because I want for everyone to see my thoughts published out there - I write precisely because I want to _reflect on my own thoughts_.
I need help reflecting, not writing or discovering.
I agree, a focus on efficiency, immediacy, and quantity has lead us to a barren experience of discovery. Music streaming certainly has its virtues, it is a shame that they haven't made the discovery process better.
I wonder what it would look like to have a feature that elicited reflection, perhaps purely for its own sake but maybe also to help feed further discovery. You could have a player that didn't immediately start playing the next track but presented an interface where you could write notes or react to the song in a variety of ways. That reflection could deepen your appreciation for the song or help you put into words what you find missing. It would also be a much richer feedback for the system to understand what you are looking for and find the next song. We now have all these fancy tools and vector databases for a nuanced and meaningful search based on text content.
What I find most tiring about the status quo is that you have to skip through a bunch of tracks to find something that resonates. It seems mentally taxing and I can't help but think I may actually like a lot of these songs if I was in the right frame of mind to hear them.
I know the feeling and similarly miss it
I built audile to fill the gap for myself: https://audile.blankenship.io/
It’s not perfect, but it’s still delightful for me. It randomly (Math.random on the catalog) kicks out an album from Deezer’s library.
If I'm hanging out with somebody who's passionate about music, I pull up Spotify (or Apple Music, whatever) and create a blank playlist. I hand them my phone and ask them to add some tracks for me.
Here's the trick that makes it work... I give them strict instructions not to pick something they think I'LL like. I just want some tracks or albums that THEY are passionate about.
I've had a lot of fun doing this! People are also generally touched that you want to know what kind of music they feel strongly about. It's a fun way to build connections.
I think algorithmic music discovery is overrated.
Back in the day I used to use Audioscrobler which was an audio plugin for Winamp which was basically a recommender system for music. I discovered some interesting music through that but nowhere near the amount of music I later discovered through hypem which was a music blog aggregator.
Winamp is where I fell in love with last.fm. It wasn't as fun as going to a lan party and raiding the file server of all of the music to explore it or later, Napster checking out what music the person you were downloading a song from had that seemed interesting but it was super good at finding new similar music and side fun fact that my wife and some lady in Russia are the only close matches to me in music taste on there still. pretty wild. CBS ruined last.fm
Does anyone in 2026 rate algorithmic discovery for music? Or is it widely perceived to be the engagement-reinforcement mechanism that it is?
It really depends, but in general I quite like it. I still sit through my Spotify weekly every week, moving the songs that I like into playlists. I regularly find new artists I like, thankfully I don't see much ai slop yet - the bands I find have tour dates and proper web presence. I've been to see some. But I wonder if it's a function of my niches or what?
I don't tend to let songs autoplay outside of playlists unless I'm commuting, and it usually just picks artists and songs I already know anyways.
Occasionally if I want to find more like an artists I go onto the song radio on Spotify but just read the song titles and artist names, it's not worth setting aside a couple hours for the possibility of two gems.
If I had one complaint or thing I wish I could change about my listening habits it's that I wish I spent more time listening to albums in order. I think something is lost by skipping straight to the best tracks - the dessert as it were, you've got to take the time so it's all the sweeter when it comes.
> 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 been thinking lately about the effect I'm having on the world.
Most people who read or watch something never subscribe. Most people who subscribe never comment.
Your work can be changing the lives of dozens of people but you still feel like you're shouting into a void.
Of the people whose work has changed my life I have reached out to approximately none of them.
And I often do try to make an effort to reach out! But for the most part I, too appreciate things invisibly.
--
P.S. You can just email people, regardless of how legendary they are, and a surprising number of them actually do reply!
A year or so ago I emailed a composer just to tell him how much I enjoyed his arrangements of a great OST. He sent a very kind, thorough response and mentioned that feeling of “shouting into the void.@ He said once he releases a record he doesn’t really tour so he never gets to speak to people or see the emotional response, so the occasional message means a lot.
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 remote pacific, random college radio. It’s all out there, live, amazing!
when I hear something I like, I “shazam” it, then add it to my library later. and I’m always smiling when shazam can’t find any match.
radio.garden (and many others) got neutered in the UK courts by Sony. Offensive, short-sighted, Balkanizing decision.
I haven't bought a Sony product since the rootkit debacle. My only regret is that there's not a "boycott++" mode for the damage they did with that decision.
> radio.garden (and many others) got neutered in the UK courts by Sony
Do tell more, I’m very curious— am I unaffected in the US? I haven’t noticed a big change in the past several years. What happened?
Can't find a good summary link. Maybe this one https://www.rpclegal.com/thinking/entertainment/court-of-app... is a good starting point.
radio.garden feels like spinning an AM radio dial late at night (which is how I discovered John Peel as a youngling). It's a lovely thing, verging on art, and should be treasured.
It seems that radio stations outside the UK cannot be listened to, can you listen to any stations outside your country?
yes definitely, don’t even need a VPN. I can stream/listen from anywhere in the world on radio.garden
I’m sorry the UK cripples your streaming. That really sucks.
Live radio has that someone is actually there feeling that playlists never really have
> and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band
Shoulda posted what you remember (and ideally male / female vocalist) as a post-script. The throwaway comment could be your way back
Agreed, plenty of Canadian's lurking here, even Dang himself.
If you’re gonna capitalize the “D” you should also capitalize the “G” (since it’s the first letter of his last name…)
> 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.
I've been intentionally doing this with my music streaming service. If I hear a song I like or someone in one of many friend groups recommends something, I'll add it to my liked songs, and eventually get around to listening to it. Sometimes I'll find a gem and go into their discography further. I can't agree with never getting this feeling back; there's also a resurgence in popularity for physical media and offline music players, so it might be quite common again soon.
I created my own database of favourite music, to be able to share what I like:
- https://rumca-js.github.io/music
- https://rumca-js.github.io/movies
Interface is clunky, but gets the job done for me.
+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.)
I miss that network discovery as well, as well as the quasi-random element to it. Nowadays I get my kicks by searching for, say, Albanian rock (I don‘t speak Albanian), whatever was trending in Indonesia (I am not from there), who is the national poet/singer of France (I am not French), what was playing on Peruvian radios in 1985 when I born, etc.
Edit: it‘s also a great way to meet other countries/cultures, not only other great music. For example, this is how I got acquainted with the beautiful Wolof language from Senegal and even with traditional regional music in Brazil (where I am actually from) I would have never been exposed to otherwise.
I miss the sharing of mixtapes (or even mix-CDs, later when burning them was possible).
Right now if I want to share music with someone, I first have to check which streaming service they are on ...
I still have the last cd I was ever given. Incredible mix.
I made a mix CD for my wife for her birthday last year. It was my interpretation of Cereal Killer's "Greatest Zukes Album", featuring "great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit" that was mentioned in the 1995 movie Hackers. So to qualify for inclusion, the artist had to either have died of drug or alcohol overdose before September 1995 (when Hackers came out) or be a band one of whose principal members died in such a fashion. It was great fun to make and my wife still listens to it.
The result increased the likelihood of irl performance attendance.
I don't really know what my friends listen to these days.
I wonder if the real difference is that everyone has earbuds versus playing through a speaker
We had earbuds in in early 2000s too, just not the wireless kind.
> 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've mostly been using my own playlists + radio to play music in Spotify and discover music. Recently though, I've started navigating and listening more by the label, and also listening through full albums instead of just picking some songs. Spotify seems to work fine for this, what exact issues are you encountering when listening by albums?
Mostly I find them via the "release radar" today, click on the album title/cover, play first track with shuffle and repeat all off, then listen until it ends. I don't think you need anything else than this :)
Back in my day we used DC++ for music sharing. DC++ was like a decentralized social network + piracy client, with the content shared by users who congregated in self-hosted servers, and it was always interesting to browse people's (sometimes very mixed) music tastes.
Don't forget the "label:" search in Spotify
I used ourTunes in the dorms, people just sharing their entire iTunes with the network. I've always been more of a solo digger, but I never liked Spotify. I have specific dance/electronic tastes so I browse and purchase music on sites like bandcamp or beatport, though actually these days it's strictly junodownload.
I do wonder though how much of what you describe, or some form of it, is still happening in dorm rooms. As we get older we just do less of that kind of stuff. I still connect with a large circle of friends through music, and discuss different artists and such, mostly at events.
There's probably some truth in that although, if you didn't have to collect a large volume of music whether purchased or copied in some form, I'm not sure the incentives are there to get started in any serious way. It is also true that, for me at least, I purchase very little music these days and basically don't pirate at all.
I've had an essay brewing in my head with the title "special internet for cool people", about the greatness of this era and why it's so difficult to bring back. TLDR that the gatekeeping was actually essential; piracy stops working once everybody does it.
People like you where so important as discovery medium - especially when they where amplifiers - for example creating soundtracks for movies.
>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.
I feel that for sure, but as a kid who grew up in the rural US South, the fact that as a middle-aged person I can read a mention of some random act and listen to it right now is still a staggeringly great experience.
We mostly discover new music from about 15 to 25 or 30, right? It's pretty normal for that to slow down as the concerns of adulthood kinda get in the way of keeping up with whomever is hot now.
Then I subscribed to AppleMusic, and I did so almost exclusively to avoid having to cable-sync music anymore. Turns out, my wife was just using a free Spotify account instead of downloading music to her phone b/c she saw it as too much hassle, and she wasn't wrong. The modest monthly fee was, to me, a way to buy a sync-free existence.
But then the whole "all you can eat" thing hit, and the way it hit the most was in encouraging me to listen widely again. I read a profile of Phoebe Bridgers early in the pandemic, for example. I'm a middle-aged dude, so I'm absolutely not her core demo. I read it b/c it was in The New Yorker, and generally those profiles are worth reading even if you have no idea who the person is, and no real connection to their work. But the author made her work sound interesting.
If it had been twenty years prior, I might've thought "huh, I should check her out," and then forgotten about it. If I was REALLY motivated I'd have put a note in my Palm Pilot that I'd probably neglect to consult the next time I was in a record store. But because it was 2020, I could just pull up her album on my phone and listen as soon as I finished the profile.
That's AMAZING.
>I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums,
I am 100% an album bigot. I admit that sometimes when driving, when I know I won't be able to curate actively, I may ask my phone to play a "station" based on a song whose vibe I like in that moment. This, too, has lead to discovery, but and it usually works at least ok for keeping my ears happy.
But at home, doing intentional listening? It's albums.
>I bought a record player as my protest
I'm 56. I feel like, most of the time in the US, people who were a couple years older than I am DEFINITELY had records growing up, and people who were a couple years younger ABSOLUTELY DID NOT. (There's weight on the scale either way for the presence of music-fan parents or hip older siblings.)
I didn't. When I first heard a song I definitely wanted to have, it was about 1982, and I bought it on a cassette. By the mid-80s when I was well into my teens, CD was already on the horizon and getting cheaper fast, so I bought cassettes sparingly -- I didn't want to buy "The Queen is Dead" on cassette and then have to REbuy on CD a few years later.
CD had completely taken over my music by 1988 or 1989.
But then the dot-com crash happened, and money was TIGHT. A former roommate had abandoned a turntable at my house. Thrift shops had records for like $1 or $2. My girlfriend (who is now my wife) could make a pretty great Saturday afternoon out of cheap tacos and a $5 budget at the used record store.
Now, if I buy physical music, it's probably on vinyl. It doesn't sound better than hi-res digital or CD, but it's more FUN to pull out a record and drop the needle. It's more intentional. And while they're harder to find now than they were 20 years ago, used record bins still have treasures.
One 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.
It was also common to have a collection of CDs you owned and wanted to put on a device like this.
We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.
Streaming (which pays labels and artists much less) only exists because it's the compromise that solves the "service problem" side of piracy.
> We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.
One of these attempts that I assume most people are familiar with but is an interesting read for those that aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
> For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.
The movie industry unfortunately never gave up no matter how vain the attempts are.
Apple and Steve Jobs were always taking about ripping your CDs to have your music on the iPod in their presentations to the public.
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.
Exactly. I mean sure, people were definitely pirating music. But lots of people are own huge collections of CDs, and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them. We were kids without money, but older folks at the time did spend money on CDs.
> and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them
Which is "piracy" - not that that makes it ethically wrong. It's actually the main kind of copying that is targeted by DRM since users of the LimeWire kind never see that.
I'd even go as far as argue that all streaming has its origins in piracy - Spotify seeded its catalog with pirated music (allegedly), Crunchyroll started off as an anime piracy site, etc.
Not allegedly, I was there at the time as a user and I and others can confirm that there was plenty of scene releases on Spotify in ~2008:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202117
Sometimes it's cheaper to break the law and pay a fine, than to do everything by law.
Seems quite often it turns out you don't even need to pay a fine if you manage to get big enough quickly enough.
Sometimes it’s impossible. Music labels wouldn’t even get in a room with you to discuss web back in the day.
> One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music
I don't know. iTunes at the time was notorious for deleting all of your library if it thought you didn't buy something through them
There was that time they gave us music though.
Utterly tone deaf Steve, we don’t all like your music.
Also iTunes Match, which legalized all of your pirated music[1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625967
My digital collection got really messed up at one point partially due, I'm pretty sure to Apple Match. At one point--early in the pandemic I think--I spent a day or two whacking my collection back into some semblance or order. For example, I had a lot of titles that weren't actually attached to a file.
The first one had no wifi and less space than a nomad - 5g from memory. That’s about 85 hours at 128k.
I had more than that on CDs at the time.
Now technically it’s “piracy” in the U.K. to rip your own cd.
I really should go back to buying CDs.
Just had a friend give one to me. If I want an entire album and the CD is the same or less than the digital version, why not? Ripping takes a minute or two.
i pirated a ton but i also ripped all my cds and all my friends cds (and their parents cds). i took my macbook around everywhere and ripped every cd in could find
> 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 great battery life. But it wasn't an MP3 player. It could only play ATRAC music. That means you had to transcode all of your MP3s to their proprietary format just to listen to them.
I remember trying to debate the virtues of my Sony NW-HD1 versus the iPod, but having to keep my computer on throughout the night just to transcode a couple albums was indefensible.
Yet a few years before that Sony had no qualms selling walkmans, blank tape cassettes and dual-tape portable sound systems, often with double speed copy function. We would gather for afternoons and make actual copy parties. Recording quality wasn't great but we didn't care.
I don't think that's true. People had been amassing CD collections for a decade or two by that point. At the original '1000' songs you're talking around 80 albums which isn't a lot.
> selling a device to play pirated music.
Am I the only one here who legit purchased MP3s downloads for 99 cents off Amazon? (This was the era after Napster stopped working.)
> 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”
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.
It'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/ha...
I 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.
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!
> 8bit covers and AI music
As someone who loves lsdj... ouch.
> It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there.
And even if they did, you'd still need to pirate a copy of your collection to own it (as there's a chance not all of it is sold digitally and DRM-less).
Took me 1 min to find the first album in FLAC, probably the other two is available too
Only one of them had been available in FLAC, but someone made sure to make the rest available in the last two years, and someone else even put them on YouTube...
I had been on the hunt for them a couple years after purchasing The First Winter 25 years ago :)
What I also miss on Spotify: live mixes.
Soundcloud is great for this
Kind of, Soundcloud has very aggressive copyright claims which is a problem for mixes.
for electronic music di.fm has some great live sets. I wish they had more tho
> 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 tastes that is generally pretty good. I rarely say "hey google play this specific track". Generally when I'm educating my kids ("It's cooooming home, it's coming, England's coming home").
For film and TV there's really not that much good stuff out there. I hear about a specific series, say Severance. Oh it's only available on Apple TV and I only have Netflix, Disney+ and Prime. Piracy it is then!
That's not my experience at all. My most common workflow in these apps is exactly going to a specific song (artist, album, playlist) and playing it. I can scarcely imagine much use for just asking for "music" - my closest equivalent is putting my extremely large "liked songs" playlist on shuffle which takes me down memory lane etc.
I know behaviour like yours is common, however. Spotify themselves say so, and work under that assumption wrt. promoting cheaper (for them) music when they detect passive listening.
>It'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
Ehhh..... I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites. Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days, so everything new gets released there, and by this point the catalog from the CD era is extensive. Music streaming has more music than What or Oink ever did. Streaming also has huge value add over piracy: it's really easy and convenient, it's better socially (shared playlists), and recommendations/discovery are waaaay better.
The vast majority of people do not "need" music piracy any more. If you want ten different versions of every REM album with slightly different mastering then sure, join RED. But it's a niche interest these days.
It's a huge contrast to movie piracy, which is thriving and which provides enormous advantages over any other way of watching movies at home, not just in cost and convenience but also in access and in quality.
> I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites
If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify.
Some examples: Melvins' Lysol is (famously) only available on Apple Music and for good measure I just looked right now at Spotify's page for Midori (https://open.spotify.com/artist/1Qjrx8NtccILLfR3wh1u3o) and it has neither their First EP nor Second LP (https://www.discogs.com/artist/777727-Midori-3); I didn't even choose or try multiple artists, I simply wondered "hmmm, is Midori on Spotify?".
Worthless.
>If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify.
Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.
Sure, there exists music that is on RED that is not on Spotify. There also exists music that is on Spotify that is not on RED (some of which I even listen to!).
I said "pretty much anything" and "most people". I stand by this. Most people do not experience major holes in the Spotify catalog and are perfectly well satisfied by the breadth of the catalog. If you aren't, that's cool, but you're in a minority.
If this weren't the case, music piracy would be more popular. It's not. RED has more music now than What.CD did, but the community is smaller. It's telling that it doesn't even get a mention in the OP. A lot of people who join aren't even particularly interested in music piracy but just want to use it as a stepping stone to other communities.
I'm not saying that music piracy sucks or whatever. I'm just saying that most people don't feel much need for it and are well-served by Spotify--which, again, has some huge advantages over piracy that I gave previously. I think it is useful to be realistic about this because it's easy reading an article or thread like this to feel a kind of FOMO and I think it's valuable to push back against that.
While I must sadly agree with your usage of "most people", I still don't understand why you thought it changed anything to the original claim that there is still a need for music piracy (for the aforementioned people who care). And note that I didn't pick particularly obscure artists, we're talking 10~100k ratings/followers on RYM.
> Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.
Why would I?
> Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days
It's pretty dangerous to assume that what you do is what everyone else does too.
> so everything new gets released there
Previous comment was probably referring to older music.
If you take issue with the claim that everyone streams music these days than the only way I can understand your comment is by assuming we live in vastly different cultures.
Certainly in the US everyone uses streaming to listen to music. This random article claimed that 90% of American adults regularly stream music online, for example: https://cybernews.com/news/us-internet-users-music-streaming...
Do you think the difference between film piracy and music piracy is inherent, due to the differences between film and music; or is there some alternative reality where we ended up with a one-stop shop for films, as well?
For the history of music piracy, I found" How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy" was a good book to read.
I would wager the effective piracy rate of stuff that on prime and Netflix a few years back was close to the effective music piracy rate. IMO the difference is that with Spotify, tidal, Apple, YouTube or Qobuz - you mostly get access to everything. With film, you can pay for Netflix, Disney, Hulu, peacock, HBO, and _still_ not be able to get access to major releases without paying more on top of the subs.
> due to the differences between film and music
Music being generally 3-10 minutes long while film is 1h30-3h makes a big difference here. A film is a bit more of a commitment than a playlist entry; you can just put music on the virtual sushi belt and grab what comes past, while sitting down for a film is more of a time commitment.
That's an interesting question. I'm not sure. We sort of had that one-stop shop experience with Netflix's DVD service, where you would pay a subscription fee and in exchange you would get to watch movies from a huge catalog. But this didn't translate to the streaming era.
P2P film piracy, at least for the quality-minded, has a few strong competitive advantages over film streaming. It doesn't have to deal with rights issues, for one, which can present huge roadblocks to film distribution. Films are also huge files and the interests of a streaming platform (low bitrate) are in tension with interests of quality. Even in comparison to physical media--the highest quality release of a film might be from a different market than yours, or there might be many competing releases over time. There might be different factors that are better in one release and other factors better in another release, where the pirated copy can combine all the best parts. It's actually somewhat remarkable how good film piracy has gotten these days for those who care.
I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip.
The library for the music streaming platforms is much bigger than for films, of course (about 250 million for Spotify), but there's also a much lower barrier of entry. So perhaps the higher work needed to produce a film necessitates more profit, to a degree that only the fragmented streaming platforms can fulfill. After all, netflix started making originals to counter studios launching their own streaming platforms to raise profit margins, and pulling their content off netflix.
> pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites
If that were true, then vinyl sales wouldn't be growing.
First of all, vinyl is still relatively niche in absolute terms. Second of all, the popularity of vinyl, such as it is, has absolutely nothing to do with availability. It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia (as the technology itself is, of course, inferior from a technical sense of faithful reproduction) plus a desire for personal physical ownership of something.
> It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia
Incorrect. The reasons why vinyl specifically is still relevant (as opposed to any other "retro" audio format) are technical.
Vinyl avoids compression issues by design. (Compression both in the computer science sense and in the audio engineering sense.)
This is complete bullshit, sorry. Digital is more capable of faithfully reproducing sound than vinyl is. Vinyl does not have technical advantages when it comes to faithful sound reproduction. I mean, it literally degrades over time, for chrissake!
I don't know what kind of "compression issues" you're talking about but I strongly suspect you'd be well served by learning about the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.
> Digital is more capable of faithfully reproducing sound than vinyl is.
That's exactly the problem that makes digital unsuitable.
Theoretically digital can reproduce sound faithfully, but if the medium allows sound engineers to compress the hell out of music, then they will abuse the opportunity.
Vinyl is a very limited format and you can't really do any sort of "creative" audio optimization bullshit with it.
I was a zealous collector of records when we made the switch to digital audio. And let me tell you, there was a significant artistry to the thing: a vinyl record was a standardized work of art. Every album cover was the result of careful design, photography, layout. The inner sleeve oftentimes contained more art, or if we were lucky, all the lyrics we wanted to sing along with. The record label itself, a masterpiece of design. All the smells and all the feels of merely collecting vinyl--even without playing it--are indescribable today.
When CDs came into the market, they were horribly clacky and just clad in layers of tacky plastic. The album art was shrunken, misshapen... and the objects themselves stank of polycarbonate, rather than delicious vinyl. Sure, they sounded great and they lasted a long time, and maintenance was dead simple. But so much artistry was lost. I was still collecting lots of CDs when purely digital distribution hit us, but by then, the smells and feels and experience of collecting vinyl were distant memories.
And that entire experience may be why people argue for the technical superiority of vinyl recordings, and analog tube amplifiers. Because it was all self-reinforcing, and it all fell apart once the clacky, tacky, plasticky CDs took over.
Yeah, that's all part of what I meant by "a kind of retro nostalgia". People enjoy the experience of buying vinyl and of putting on vinyl records. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, for what it's worth. I'm just claiming that this is what's driving vinyl's popularity right now, rather than because people are turning to it due to music availability issues (which is much more of a factor for DVDs/Blu-rays right now).
There's a shitload of valuable vinyl records that don't have any art at all or even any cover. Paper and cardboard doesn't last as long as the record itself.
No, the reasons for this are entirely technical.
de gustibus non est disputandum
Look, I am telling you about my own lived experience with collecting vinyl. You can speak for yourself, but I carefully stored all my items in archival sleeves, and the jacket, art, and inner sleeve were often just as important as the disc and the music encoded on it.
There was a real thrill and reward that came from collecting LP albums in particular, and that meant 12" discs, and I also had a particular specialty in finding 12" remixes and DJ versions of singles.
Yes, there were shaped discs, and colored vinyl, and white-labels and acetates that came with no art or plain sleeves, and I collected those with just as much alacrity, but it really was a pleasure to flip through my collection, or someone else's, and drink in that large-format album art.
I'm just saying there is a market for vinyl records with no art or sleeves, but no market for sleeves and art with no record.
Clearly the art isn't the driver of this market niche.
Heck, almost everything is available for free on YouTube.
This is very far from truth unless you only listen freshs pop music. And even then it is easy to click a song only to receive "not available in your region".
What? I find plenty of jazz and classical music on youtube. yt-dlp -x is your friend.
I find it amusing that youtube can be the source of my "pirated" music and get away with it. But the piratebay guys got their lives smashed to pieces.
But that I guess, is our civilization today. One set of rules for politicians and corporations, and one set for the slaves.
This 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.
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.
I 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.
I 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.
I'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.
I 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.
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 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.
> Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West.
Orpheus and RED are going extremely strong right now, with very active userbases
That's private p2p, not public.
Ah, my mistake!
I haven't used a public site since Suprnova so I don't know about the health of public p2p sites at all. The private side is absolutely not stagnant, new sites pop up all the time and you can still find all the niche stuff you want to find by just nudging the enthusiasts with requests.
A lot of them seed from home, with humongous servers, and there are preservation programs going on in various places.
Yes, that's true, but the core reason there are private p2p sites is because you're most likely to get a DMCA violation letter from the watchdog company via your ISP or to you directly in the West.
Even if it may be not a punishable offense, that still freaks out people, and they choose not to seed from home or use public websites which are scraped by DMCA watchdogs.
I don't see much point in contributing to closed silos (even if I'm present on the majority of invite-only music trackers and occasionally contribute there) because I have ThePirateBay and RuTracker account: it's the same, but it's open for everyone and google-able.
Some private trackers disallow accessing them via VPN, which I find super strange. They want to access the website with your residential connection, but they allow seeding via VPN (which many do, because see above).
Other private tracker which I used to be on had a timeout on account life time. If you don't log in once in a while (6 months AFAIR), your account will be suspended, even if you're seeding all the content in the torrent client all this time.
Soulseek is still going strong last time i checked
Well they shadowban the accounts which share copyrighted content for which they receive copyright claims.
It's a centralized service, they just configure you account to be invisible in the search results of others.
And they don't check whether the file is really reachable. I've 'chmod 000' copyrighted files so they could not be downloaded (but still could be found in search), and Soulseek administrators were not happy with that ether.
I've been shadowbanned 4 times or so. They never unban, need new account.
Anime (an everything related) torrent sites are also pretty alive.
Oh no, these don't feel very well either, in a sense that there's only a few seeders of the older uploads, if at all, and by older I mean as old as just a few years old.
I'm running my torrent preservation service, and many anime/jrock/jpop downloads start downloading only after weeks or months of waiting for a seeder.
Groups and individuals who used to be active on the scene has switched elsewhere and retracted their archives and XDCC bots.
There are Chinese torrent-to-web download services which seem to cache already downloaded stuff for a very long time if not indefinitely, sometimes you can download it from there if someone managed to use the service (they don't seed it over bittorrent though).
Oh, year, in this sense - p2p is almost dead compare to times when I was frequentin animesuki forums or stoptazmo
There are also western ones. The keyword to look for is "debrid"
Indeed, Russia and Ukraine are the last major digital libraries of the history and culture of modern western civilization, which is deeply disturbing to write out in text, and says a lot about how far the west has fallen
Indeed. 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.
Never bought any merch from what, but I do own a ScT t-shirt :)
It is also simple to download from the streaming services so to me things got as simple as pasting a link in the terminal to rip to no internet places like a car
Oh but also the good old IRC channels on Undernet or whatever? Not quite warez to get you banned, just gray area with no official support but allowed to stay. Community chat, music recommendations, admin bots and random trivia - #mp3_...
I really struggle to find new music. I feel like I've already listened way too many times to everything I have on my SD card, but I really don't know what to look for. When I was a kid I was very much into rock and everything adjacent so I do have albums of most iconic rock bands. Nowadays I'm more into electronic music. I love a good techno track and I have a folder with 2000-2010 greatest pop-techno bangers. God damn Basshunter gave me more happiness than my entire career combined. At home I often listen to more ambient music, mostly from SomaFM. There's an artist/band called Hello Meteor and the worst album is still 9/10. On the opposite side of the spectrum there's this guy Darren Tate - most of his music is literal trash, but there are a few golden nuggets with how he operates with dynamic range. Like, Prayer For God is absolutely amazing, it's so energetic. But it's really difficult for me to find electronic music that doesn't suck, most DJs make one good track by pure luck while mass-producing slop.
I find college radio to be a good curator of music. MIT radio is a mix of students and long time music lovers who DJ.
They archive shows for a couple weeks (though it’s automatic so the shown typically starts a couple minutes in). Some shows actually list the songs they play at trackblaster.
Radio Ninja I like for electronic music. They put shows up on mixcloud as well.
https://www.wmbr.org/cgi-bin/show?id=6883
Go check out ektoplazm.com, electronic music with permissable licenses. Good for the culture of this website. Most things can be downloaded in flac.
Then when you have found a style, soundcloud is likely your home to find stuff and then when you have found it you can either rip it or buy it.
Very 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.
https://nicotine-plus.org/ for the free software/UNIX people, by the way.
I don't use it anymore since getting into private trackers because the network (central server) is proprietary, the experience is much less polished than BT and I want to be sure of the release (LABEL/CATALOGNUMBER) I'm downloading.
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 queued
Soulseek is still going hard.
Don’t tell anyone! Haha
Well we need new users!! Audiogalaxy was super.
There's Android client as well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companynam...
On the more legal side of services was the original last.fm - as a pupil/student I spend days/hours discovering new music there. Not only due to automatic recommendations, but a lot of time by browsing other people's listening habits - just like browsing the music collection of someone else on soulseek.
Did I hear Soulseek? Look for slskd in github. I had a tear on my face when I could find people sharing japanese math rock :)
It's still there!
Oh 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-...
What 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!
Final 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?
The opening of FFX basically is basically an FMV with edgy metal built in. :D
Closed 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.
I'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.
Piracy 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.
That'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...
> 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
The article is mostly an interview with a journalist who wrote a book about Napster. The claim comes from his book. That's the source. I have not read the book. If you have concerns about the methodology you should read it yourself.
Since the explanation for the claim is essentially pay-walled behind the book, I will just choose to ignore it
I 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.
it’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.
IMO 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.
I dunno.. even here in new zealand, very much not a musical hub, i still know plenty of jazz musicians who make a living off of music, and there is generally at least 1 jazz gig every week.
I also think the industry is pretty tolerant of more experimental/non-pop music, just that this isn't really true for the rock scene amymore. Hardcore punk, hardstyle, dubstep, hyperpop, shoegaze are all huge genres now, large enough to live off of and perform at festivals as big as coachella.
You may be right about Damon Albarn but that would just be a result of which genres have listeners who are willing to listen to smaller, non-mainstream artists. I think the biggest example of this is that mainstream rock music a la guns and roses has pretty much completely died out, while genres with smaller, more dedicated fanbases like post-rock and noise rock are still going strong as ever. I'm sure if you check your local shows (and you live in a place with reasonably large population) you will be able to find plenty of bands who completely live off their music.
how many live local shows have you been to in the last month?
Reminds 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-...
Man 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.
Oh. 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.
A 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
DC++
I loved that place, being able to browse people's hard drives was ingenious.
The 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.
I 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.
Oh, 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.
One 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.
Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO.
I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like "presave this (you can't listen to it)", "jump back in (you literally already listened to it)", "your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)". There 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.
I 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.
I haven't used it, but YouTube Music has a samples section which is supposed to show you "shorts" of new (to you) songs.
> 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?)
How? What's your secret? It's actively fighting me from discovering anything new. "Hey we'll show this artist you stopped listening to two years ago on your start screen forever. Wanna jump back in?" That's Spotify to me.
Then switch to YouTube Music or Tidal, they're way better.
I 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.
Is Nights of the Jaguar considered techno now? I associate the genre of techno with, like, very repetitive rhythms.
It'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/
Genres 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?
There 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.
I 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.
It 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.
Reading your reply, I think we have different definitions of “incredibly easy”.
Newer 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.
Yes I remember even at the time people were laughing about the hilarious requirement for everyone to have a seed ratio greater than 1. Those sites were basically unusable for people who came to them later.
I 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.
Call 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
Huh... I'm still waiting for Bandcamp and Soundcloud to close their streaming download hole. It has been a few years now.
If you're on Bandcamp or Soundcloud it's usually because you want to support artists directly, I doubt many people are purely interested in getting free music rips.
Pretty much. There would be some folks who are scraping large amounts of stuff but I don't think it is a giant issue.
Posting that here is one of the more promising ways of achieving that
That's such small potatoes. Anyone putting out an album on Bandcamp is probably thrilled that someone would want to pirate it.
As a musician, I can agree with this 100%.
Ditto!
Yeah probably. But it also depends on how much it is exploited.
If 0.1% of people do it, then it probably isn't worth while. If it 10% of the audience, that needs to be focused on.
does it matter as long as yt-dlp is maintained?
Some people want more than "mystery meat" levels of audio quality.
I 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.
I did this with a japanese punk band and when I finally got on a private tracker, I redownloaded them and the quality difference was night and day. I have a huge backlog of mid-grade MP3s from TPB back in the day and I'll occasionally download a second flac version of the albums just to get the dynamic range.
Hearing 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.
Opus - 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.
I can't tell the difference with most headphones, but with monitors or a good system in a good listening environment there are some details that get lost in compression, but there's essentially 0 difference from losslezd if I rip a CD to opus or mp3 rather than from a stream.
Yeah, but people aren’t uploading high quality music to begin with. It’s probably like two or three levels of compressed by the time you yt-dlp it.
crappy speakers?
But bandcamp is only 128 kbit MP3 for free streaming, now that’s not a mystery, but probably also not worse than whatever YT offers.
If it is 128kbps MP3 then it’s slightly worse than YouTube which generally has 128kbps AAC and OPUS versions of everything.
Piracy, 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.
Great 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.
Once 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.
I’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)
Biggest 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.
The 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?!
Fwiw, 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.
One thing I like to do on Spotify is to make a "Blend" playlist with a friend whose music taste overlaps with mine slightly. Not for its intended use of creating a playlist for you both to listen to at the same time, but instead I find it's useful at pulling your recommendations out of the safe zone (and towards the taste of your friend). Sounds a little bit dystopian that I'm cutting my friends out of the friend-recommendation part of music discovery, but if I find a new artist I like I usually make sure to mention it to the friend.
> 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.
Spending 45 minutes to download a cd, only for it to turn into a 400mb pile of garbled noise, wasn't exactly joy.
If 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.
So long as you don't try to go without any kind of copyright. I've heard stories of people releasing their music for free with no copyright only for somebody to download it, register it as THEIR copyright, and then sell it on all the platforms and even send a copyright takedown notice to the original creator.
Better to protect yourself by registering it under creative commons or a similar licence.
Of course, the music should still be protected against the commercial use or reselling.
Add a download gate to the mix, remove the optional payment (I promise you nobody's gonna do that) and you're basically describing https://hypeddit.com/.
Instead of paying to download music, the users "pays" by following you across social media / streaming services. Granted it's mostly used for copyright-violating edits, but some musicians use it for original tracks too.
It's how basically any electronic music producer makes a name for himself before they ever sign a contract with a label.
No. No restrictions should be put on downloads. The main point is that the distribution channels should always be free.
What should be gated and limited is the commercial use: reselling, relicensing, using for business, etc.
> the optional payment (I promise you nobody's gonna do that)
Such "promises" seem to be based on no facts. Moreover, they contradict my personal experience.
I would be very interested in using that business model. In fact, I have already used it with other types of services. I have paid for software that is open source, free to download and free to use. Multiple times. Simply because I like the software and I wanted to thank the authors for it in some tangible way.
Well. This is what Soundcloud or Bandcamp do. The problem is that: if it's for free, 99% of people won't pay.
The 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.
You're absolutely right
It 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-pa...
Edited 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 (cheers @epoupon, I'm pretty sure you're on HN)
[1]: https://musicbrainz.org/
> 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
Legend, 10x upvotes!
Soulseek is still going strong :)
I would not be surprised if all of this content has now found its way into some music generation AI.
I'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
https://gizmodo.com/ai-music-app-suno-got-hacked-giving-a-gl...
Yeah at one point I lamented the loss of these huge and rare music libraries. Now they've been fed to the machine.
we traded the thrill of a 3-hour LimeWire download for the convenience of paying 5/month to rent access to songs that disappear when the licensing deal expires. progress.
RIP to the golden age of file sharing.
Nicotine
It's incredible how people got convinced, by unrelenting propaganda, that private copy is a crime
Also by, you know, successful criminal prosecutions.
Even before that, it was already the case with cassettes
What are the content discovery options on top of the modern arr stack stuff?
Just setup lidarr and plex. Not happy about having to re-arrange all my loose files, but claude and beets are helping.
*archiving/sharing
If 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).
I 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.
I 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
It'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.
What.CD's real magic was the curation and lossless-everything culture, not just free files. Redacted keeps the archive going but that obsessive completeness is hard to rebuild.
It 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?".
Convenience always wins over nostalgia.
weird, I still love pirating music.
Hard 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.
You couldnt be serious
Still very much alive! Just not as popular with the advent of $10/mo all-you-can-eat streaming services.
This. I do use Spotify, but this has nothing to do with my local music collection. Admittedly, mostly pirated.
I don't use Spotify, but I would consider it if I could download maybe 1 or 2 mp3 per month for offline use.
Quick 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.
Like 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.
Aye. 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!
I 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.
Now 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..)
Its not lost here, still going strong. Lol
Isnt REDacted the continuationnof What.cd
Please step inside the vehicle and don't make a scene.
I'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
Oh 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.
I'm so incredibly happy police resources are being used to "protect" the rest of us from... harm...?
I 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.
Music piracy and copyright infringement are civil matters, the police is (...should not be?) involved.
Police 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.
I 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
Nowadays 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.
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.
Hey 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.
The article touches on the topic and mentions Nine Inch Nails' and Radiohead's 'free' album releases.
There's also the possibility/likelihood (I can't recall the results of the research) that increasing exposure, via piracy, is actually better for the artist long term.
And then, as others have already responded, the worst offenders are, generally, the industry insiders themselves. Reports of the death of music are greatly exaggerated. Reports of the death of the music industry are widely looked forward to.
I pirated plenty as a kid with no money, it was cheap and it was easy - does anyone here remember high-speed dubbing? I also recorded a _lot_ of music off the radio. On the rare occasion I bough an album I made sure it was worth being the only thing I listen to for weeks - and the only way to know that is to have prior knowledge. I buy plenty as an adult with a music budget. I believe that's how it should be.
>increasing exposure, via piracy, is actually better for the artist long term.
If breaking someone's kneecaps extended their life by 20 years I wouldn't want someone to randomly break my kneecaps and feel good about it because they "did me a favor."
>I pirated plenty as a kid with no money
Neither age nor wealth exempts someone's stealing from being a crime. In fact I see it as worse crime as it sets a bad example that may be hard to change later.
Breaking someone's kneecaps is unquestionably a crime, copyright infringement for private consumption is not a crime, it's a civil offense (because listening to pirated MP3s doesn't make you a danger to society) so equating the two is a fallacy. I'm sure you already knew this since these arguments have been rehashed thousands of times over the past few decades.
I don't think you'd find much (if any) support on the moral angle either when it comes to people who genuinely can't afford to pay the asking price. I've never seen any authors, artists, etc. openly object to fans pirating their work in these circumstances but I've seen many of them openly encourage it. Seeing how you're equating the two, do you think they also like to have their kneecaps broken?
Fair enough, I don't think your choice of analogy is very apt , but I won't try to change your mind.
I'm entirely comfortable with my choices and my effect on society in general.
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 forms, the primary concern should be the creator. Not people that want to get stuff for free. And I can assure you: musicians would like to get paid for their work, and they don’t think it’s cool or fun that people just steal their stuff. The occasional super-successful artist being pro-piracy is not representative.
If there was a mainstream way of supporting artists directly and having permanent ownership of music, piracy would be punching down and could possibly be a taboo practice. But as the current order stands, its punching up and fucking the suits more than artists and I really like that.
Bandcamp? Direct sales on their website?
I can understand the piracy argument 25 years ago, when these didn't exist. But at this point, I think there are plenty of ways to directly support artists.
Copyright infringement is not stealing.
Is it stealing if when I buy digital I don't own it?
You have stolen a temporary license!
You own a license when you buy it digitally. Stealing is never okay regardless of if something is technically buying or not.
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.
Funny because that is exactly how capitalism works.
Did everyone forget about soulseek? It's still very much alive, been using it for years.
I still use it, easiest way to download music these days.
And imo slskd is fantastic client for soulseek, I just found it few weeks back
Soulseek is great still use it regularly.
I 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.
There was an official release that contained just that and a lot of other things like image assets uploaded on Archive.org. You can’t just put a database dump online without doing a lot of cleaning first.
There’s some websites where people made that browsable too so you can go through collages and album and artist pages with the original style sheets too. Just no forums or torrent files or images.
I refuse to believe there's not a database backup somewhere. Such careful curators would surely hate to destroy it!
I'd hope so, but wouldn't it have leaked by now?
https://archive.org/details/What.CD_Goodbye_Release
Oh phew, I hadn't heard of this, thank you. Glad this exists, I wonder if Redacted has imported it.
It 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.