alt Hacker NewsThe lost joy of music piracy
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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...
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.
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.
I kind of just stopped listening to music once I got past my early 30s unless it’s incidental. I just don’t have the desire to seek it out and listen to it anymore but I still enjoy music. Is this common?
I owned a recording studio and small label before Napster and lime wire. I know a ton of musicians that lost the joy of making music due to piracy. I am glad you had fun. But also take a little joy in the loss of that joy but some how it seems asymmetric in your benefit.
I miss collecting all kinds of MP3s, burning them to CDs, labelling them, sometimes even printing out the CD artwork for them, organizing them in binders, and then never listening to them. I wish I had that kind of free time as an adult! I should check the garage...
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.
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.
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.
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've always found the idea of song or sound ownership ridiculous.
Nobody can "own" a song that I've enjoyed and listened to in my own head.
That's my own experience.
And if I want to have that experience again at any point in the future, I sure as shit should not have to shell out money to some record producer (or band member, whoever has their hand out) to do so.
If you want to make music, make music.
If I want to listen, I'll listen.
If I see them in person and I feel like paying to see them, I will.
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 searched today for UK garage music blog and stupid LLMs gave me links to services with links to Bandcamp, YouTube and SoundCloud. It didn't understand the phrase "music blog" so I added mp3 and mixtape words. Still couldn't find good place like it was 2000.
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.
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.
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-...
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 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-...
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.
Great read.
Those days of the internet were fun, but also a product of their times. Whatever niche worlds we make now won’t be like the past, they have to be new.
In my time pirating I used to take tracks from The Sound Of Music and rename the files / metadata something like <popular metal band> - <popular song by different popular metal band>.
I got a lot of downloads.
Shameless plug: if you're into keeping track of albums you want to listen or liked and you appreciate small web communities, you might find a site I'm developing useful: https://digs.fm
Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
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
Ah flashback of going to a large LAN party in the late 90s, having an open share on your PC, leaving for dinner and coming back to the disk filled with new and exciting tunes, including one[1] that I still listen to.
Huh... I'm still waiting for Bandcamp and Soundcloud to close their streaming download hole. It has been a few years now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lost? It's as alive as ever, if you're in the right circles.
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.
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.
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.
I still use torrents to find lossless CD rips of various 80s - 90s music. Makes it easy to get multiple different releases and pick best sounding version. Buying used CDs on ebay to rip would be a chore.
I still do it. Spotify is good for making playlists but I don't use it for listening. I collect mp3s, bought on Bandcamp or downloaded from Soulseek, and listen on an old Sansa Clip mp3 player.
I discovered lots of music back when Rhapsody was a thing (2003-2006). When a song was streaming it would show who the band was influenced by and who they influnced. Following those links would lead to more music I enjoyed.
The current stream services don't have that feature and their discovery algos are attrocious.
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.
Are there any communities like this still around and thriving?
I miss the old bulletin board days of the mid 2000s to mid 2010s, before Facebook and other social media took over. I'm part of a vintage car building community (LocostUSA) that still uses forums, but is a very small, niche community. What others are still active?
I really miss What.cd's band-affinity graphs.
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.
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.
My music piracy has been buying a casette recorder and recording anything I want from the aux port of my PC. It’s been fantastic.
Beyond here is something like a utopia - no false advertisement here. Some good memories: COFFE & salinger leak, filling in one of the largest bounties of obsure german electro pop for internet glory points, good memories.
I wasn't familiar with either Oink or What.CD - fascinating to read about them.
I spent tons of time on Napster and LimeWire roughly between late 1990s and 2005 when I graduated from college.
A few things stood out as related topics:
1. I attended UMass-Amherst - a school not unfamiliar with and perhaps even popular for jam band culture. There was, at one point, a tool distributed that allowed any particular user to search the entirety of the network of users that also used that tool. So, what quickly evolved was this huge searchable library of songs, videos, etc. covering the thousands of students that chose to put something there. I don't recall the balance of my use of other services compared to that specific network tool, but it was an amazing place to discover music and also quite fast compared to everything else.
2. I wasn't sure if this post was lamenting the loss of discovery or the loss of stable revenue streams for artists. Maybe both. I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too. When I want more variety and access to the farther reaches of the music world, I use hypem.com. It's still great, after all these years, and a quite small operation despite the presence of Apple/Spotify. Also love Soundcloud, and as someone who makes electronic music/DJs on the side - Beatport.
3. What.CD reminded me of what I now hear about re: Lobste.rs. I'm not a member, and it's unclear to me if I want that? But it has some similar characteristics - invite only, ICQ chat, active moderation. What I wonder is whether folks here (members of Lobsters) see that community as possessing the same magic/thrill/quality of What.CD?
My grandmother used to give me mix CDs as gifts. One time I asked her where she found all the music and she told me "Oh there's this amazing app called Limewire." She then taught me how to pirate music.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.