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.
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.
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 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.
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).
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
> Only Russian Rutracker is still going strong, but everything other is either stagnating or defunct.
But rutracker is still going very strong, and shows up in every magnet link scraper.
> 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.
I don't think this is true at all. I think most are seeded through simple residential connections. The main reasons people use seedboxes are because everybody has a laptop that travels with them and isn't powered up and networked all the time (rather than a desktop that is never turned off), or because they don't want to hear from their ISP. It's not because of "beefiness." The amount of data it takes to store or transfer an album is trivial.
I just think that a lot of people with very mainstream tastes drifted away from p2p as they realized that spotify etc. satisfied all their needs. The people left on private p2p are largely the people who trading things that aren't available on streaming, or who just don't like the streaming experience at all.
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.
- https://dieordiy2.blogspot.com/
- https://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/
- Last.FM Recommendations based on your bands
- Mixtapes and radio mixes, there are countless
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.
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 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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
SSK is the best of anything mentioned here. You can find everything. Community is extremely big and it is there 25 years and will hopefully be another 25. The coverage level is so good that you can find any release in loseless format.
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
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.
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
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. 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
They might not care but anyone who literally can't tell the difference of a good 4K source and a 1080p source on an appropriate display needs to go see an eye doctor. But that most people don't care about quality also isn't particularly shocking.
And as gp indicated, quality isn't just about the encode resolution and bitrate but also about the master itself. Unfortunately not all directors and companies behind great movies have the resepect for their creations that it deserves and the current release which might be the only release on streaming platforms might have significant flaws such as unwanted cuts/restorations, missing audio tracks, replaced sound effects, inaudible mixes, missing subtitles, bad upscales, excessive denoising, reframing from the original aspect ratio that cuts of content and/or shows parts of the originally captured film frames that were never meant to be seen, or various other "enhancements".
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.
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".
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.
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.
Compression in the audio waveform sense has nothing at all to do with the medium. You can absolutely press the same compressed masters on vinyl or release the uncompressed masters digitally. It's a matter of what the customer base is looking for.
Give me a break. CDs aren't compressed and sound flawless if the mixing is good. it also isn't dependent on things like the quality or age of the disc. And sure, a bad player might sound a bit worse than a high quality one, but that mostly comes down to the DAC in it, whereas with vinyl depends on the player a lot more by virtue of being a mechanical format
> 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.
> Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.
Why would I? Because vague relativist soundgood claims about taste?
> 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.
Recently I found out that the Translucent Blues album by Ray Manzarek and Roy Rogers isn't on any legal streaming platform. Only one full-album upload on YouTube. Made me sad.
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.
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.
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 still borrow CDs to rip, lol. Half my digital music library comes from my library having a way better library of music than books (at least for my taste)
"To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC. iPod users can and do acquire their music from many sources, including CDs they own. Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM. This music can be played on iPods or any other music players that play these open formats."
Still why I like DVDs. Smaller in size, easy to rip, and 480p is good enough that I don't mind the quality loss. Blu-ray is great, but if I'm buying something I'm not sure about or just want to have because it's worth having, DVD all the way
I recently started collecting Blu-ray because of thrift and second hand stores. In a few cases, I was able to purchase some of my all time favorite movies unopened in the original retail packaging for a dollar. Not to mention my local library has a larger Blu-ray selection than my local video rental place did before they closed.
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.
I mean, sure, but at some point with 3 or 4 thousand cds crated up, it became a lot easier to steal than go crate digging in my own basement. And then when what.cd happened and you could literally grab a torrent of perfectly curated files of an artist’s whole catalog, the laziness really spiked.
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.
Please do! New releases aren't exactly cheap, but places like goodwill are practically giving them away. Make a list of albums you want, spend a day going to charity/pawn shops, and get what you can. If you can't find it, see what it costs on discogs, and buy it there if it's reasonable. I've gotten to the point that the only albums I have exclusively digital are those that cost an arm and a leg otherwise
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.
> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music.
On the flip side, Sony lost the consumer devices market for this same 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. 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.
Yes, but that was also the era where Sony was fighting Congress to keep DAT legal. Even when they got their way, no label would touch the format and it was a total, abject failure.
Sony's response to this was to use their bubble-era money to start buying US record labels, purely so they could force them to support their formats. But they ultimately wound up buying the exact same mentality that they were fighting against, and the labels won that fight internally. Sure, Sony had Minidisc releases of major label music, but the format flopped anyway, because they were entirely unwilling to market it for recording in the US. Outside of the US, Minidisc was the Apple "Rip. Mix. Burn" experience half a decade prior to the iPod; but in the US that experience basically didn't exist unless you knew exactly where to look.
Perhaps so, but they were clueless: The PSP was so easy to mod and run pirated games and emulators with that I'm not sure if I've ever tried to run a UMD in the one I have.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 72.3 ms ] threadIf 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.
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.
But, TBH, most of the pirated music today is on YouTube anyway.
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.
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.
[0]: https://github.com/epoupon/lms (cheers @epoupon, I'm pretty sure you're on HN)
[1]: https://musicbrainz.org/
FYI, they have their entire discography in bandcamp[0] for "name your price", including $0.
[0]: https://kinggizzard.bandcamp.com
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.
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.
I'm entirely comfortable with my choices and my effect on society in general.
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.
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.
A lot of them seed from home, with humongous servers, and there are preservation programs going on in various places.
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.
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).
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.
Orpheus and RED are going extremely strong right now, with very active userbases
But rutracker is still going very strong, and shows up in every magnet link scraper.
> 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.
I don't think this is true at all. I think most are seeded through simple residential connections. The main reasons people use seedboxes are because everybody has a laptop that travels with them and isn't powered up and networked all the time (rather than a desktop that is never turned off), or because they don't want to hear from their ISP. It's not because of "beefiness." The amount of data it takes to store or transfer an album is trivial.
I just think that a lot of people with very mainstream tastes drifted away from p2p as they realized that spotify etc. satisfied all their needs. The people left on private p2p are largely the people who trading things that aren't available on streaming, or who just don't like the streaming experience at all.
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.
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
Legislations define rules to protect "us" from harm, but police is for policing only.
They do not protect people. They protect the law.
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
Man, I _had_ a limewire shirt (somewhere); they interviewed at my college. Where is that important piece of history?
https://bash-org-archive.com/?104052
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.
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-...
I loved that place, being able to browse people's hard drives was ingenious.
Well, the song was a bit out of style for System of a Down, but the voices are similar enough.
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
https://www.dn.no/d2/musikk/stena-line/lars-holte/spotify/ha...
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.
As someone who loves lsdj... ouch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They might not care but anyone who literally can't tell the difference of a good 4K source and a 1080p source on an appropriate display needs to go see an eye doctor. But that most people don't care about quality also isn't particularly shocking.
And as gp indicated, quality isn't just about the encode resolution and bitrate but also about the master itself. Unfortunately not all directors and companies behind great movies have the resepect for their creations that it deserves and the current release which might be the only release on streaming platforms might have significant flaws such as unwanted cuts/restorations, missing audio tracks, replaced sound effects, inaudible mixes, missing subtitles, bad upscales, excessive denoising, reframing from the original aspect ratio that cuts of content and/or shows parts of the originally captured film frames that were never meant to be seen, or various other "enhancements".
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.
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.
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.
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...
If that were true, then vinyl sales wouldn't be growing.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.
Why would I? Because vague relativist soundgood claims about taste?
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).
I had been on the hunt for them a couple years after purchasing The First Winter 25 years ago :)
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!
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202117
If I’m remembering right, the tagline on the Mac mini was “rip mix burn”
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.
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.
Streaming (which pays labels and artists much less) only exists because it's the compromise that solves the "service problem" side of piracy.
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...
"To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC. iPod users can and do acquire their music from many sources, including CDs they own. Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM. This music can be played on iPods or any other music players that play these open formats."
The movie industry unfortunately never gave up no matter how vain the attempts are.
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.
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.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625967
On the flip side, Sony lost the consumer devices market for this same 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. 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.
Sony's response to this was to use their bubble-era money to start buying US record labels, purely so they could force them to support their formats. But they ultimately wound up buying the exact same mentality that they were fighting against, and the labels won that fight internally. Sure, Sony had Minidisc releases of major label music, but the format flopped anyway, because they were entirely unwilling to market it for recording in the US. Outside of the US, Minidisc was the Apple "Rip. Mix. Burn" experience half a decade prior to the iPod; but in the US that experience basically didn't exist unless you knew exactly where to look.
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
Utterly tone deaf Steve, we don’t all like your 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.)
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.
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.
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.