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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
If I’m remembering right, the tagline on the Mac mini was “rip mix burn”
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
If that were true, then vinyl sales wouldn't be growing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Man, I _had_ a limewire shirt (somewhere); they interviewed at my college. Where is that important piece of history?
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.
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.
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-...
Well, the song was a bit out of style for System of a Down, but the voices are similar enough.
I loved that place, being able to browse people's hard drives was ingenious.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
(Thinking of AI generated music which doesn't get more than a few % of total listening time, but give it some time..)
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.
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)
FYI, they have their entire discography in bandcamp[0] for "name your price", including $0.
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.
Equivalent of what.cd today is RED.
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.
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.
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
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 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?
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.
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’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.