alt Hacker NewsThe lost joy of music piracy
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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.
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.
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)
Soulseek is still going strong :)
I’ve stopped to use streaming at the moment they started to remove content, also, I have a very peculiar taste for music, which makes impossible to find it on streaming (when it is available I buy it, when not… Torrent)
If I was a musician and produced music nowadays, I would not induce regular copyright rights on it. Because, in my opinion, it makes no practical sense. It mostly alienates the users.
I would put the uncompressed flac files of my music directly on my website for everyone to download.
That does not mean that I would not be interested in getting paid. But I would approach it differently. I would charge for broadcasting it on YouTube or Spotify. Or for playing it in venues.
But I would not charge a regular Joe for it. They would be free to download it, play it and redistribute it in any noncommercial way they see fit.
The most important part is this. I would encourage the "buy after you like" model. Everyone is free to listen. And who likes what they hear, is welcome to buy it.
In my opinion, many small bands and solo musicians would benefit from that model. And I think it would also create some goodwill among their fans.
It also would not shut down the mainstream delivery channels. So if someone still wanted to listen to it over Spotify and pay for it that way, they would still be able to do so.
I would not be surprised if all of this content has now found its way into some music generation AI.
I still have that joy in my heart and on my server
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?
the i2p network has a steady and active community around the postman tracker, it's worth checking out. contribute if you can!
A successor site exists. It's called [REDACTED].
Nicotine
Spending 45 minutes to download a cd, only for it to turn into a 400mb pile of garbled noise, wasn't exactly joy.
Just setup lidarr and plex. Not happy about having to re-arrange all my loose files, but claude and beets are helping.
It's incredible how people got convinced, by unrelenting propaganda, that private copy is a crime
Anybody remember what.cd?
I have to disagree it’s much easier now: turn on your portable speaker start playing music with your friends and then you pass your phone around and they choose songs to play next and then low and behold your recommendations become mixed with your friends tastes.
What are the content discovery options on top of the modern arr stack stuff?
we traded the thrill of a 3-hour LimeWire download for the convenience of paying 5/month to rent access to songs that disappear when the licensing deal expires. progress.
*archiving/sharing
I wouldn't say the joy was the piracy.
I remember when MySpace had this silly flash player that would stream MP3s from users' profiles. This was the main way to find indie and local bands' tracks, but every major artist had a profile too. Looking at the browser requests you could easily see the request format for downloading tracks listed on profiles. And what was worse, they all followed a standard enumerated naming convention, so you could literally download every track on MySpace by simple iteration. There was no rate limit, no cookies, nothing to stop it. The result was great: not only did you get the music you were interested in, you got a lot more you'd never heard of. And you could listen to it all on any device at any time; burn it to a CD, record to cassette tape, put it on a WinAmp playlist, whatever. For a kid with a hard time growing up, that music was an escape to a better world. The freedom to listen to what you wanted, when you wanted, how you wanted, felt like a gift deserved. You'd still go to their shows when you could, pay for albums when you could, but what kid has tons of free cash to spend?
About a year later, the download method was so well known that MySpace changed to a multipart chunked streaming system and randomized the request IDs. It now required complex custom code to stream from their player alone. Access to your favorite local bands' music was now closed. The internet continued to birth to new ways to obtain music, so you could continue to get Nine Inch Nails and Infected Mushroom; but the local bands lost out on valuable word of mouth.
It's not really about piracy in general, it's mostly about What.CD.
Equivalent of what.cd today is RED.
But, TBH, most of the pirated music today is on YouTube anyway.
I feel like when you glorify gatekeeping piracy like oink or apparently what.cd had, you've lost the plot.
Piracy is largely a response to arbitrary rules in media distribution, like how, where, when or even if you can buy something. Hiding piracy behind a "textbook-length list of rules" is bad just as the system it is responding to.
RIP to the golden age of file sharing.
It was chilling how government and courts squashed musical piracy by making very public examples of a few violators.
Here’s an example, a Minnesota woman who was fined $1.9 million dollars for 24 downloaded songs.
I’d suspect lobbying from the entertainment industry was a factor.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2009/06/18/woman-ordered-to-pa...
So, it appears just enough time has passed that what.cd domain is availabe. There is nothing stopping anyone (just a few $$$) from rebuilding it very quietly. The lost joy can return if you're stupid enough to try.
Convenience always wins over nostalgia.
Bring back Muxtape.
nicotine+
:)
Quick reminder: it appears to seen as perfectly acceptable to pirate content for the purposes of training intelligence models. If anyone questions whether you have correct license for particular content, tell them that is it fine anyway because you are just using it to train the intelligence model that runs between your ears.
43.6MB for that huge gif at the top of the article. This could have been a 2MB video at most
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.
Tangent - I still mourn the death of WeAreHunted. What a great music discovery site that was, unmatched in its ability to give you a curated feed of new artists to check out.
WeAreHunted was sold to Twitter at the time to launch as Twitter Music! What an idea, music discovery, right in your big feed. Brilliant.
Twitter #Music (https://abcnews.com/Technology/twitter-music-app-launches-ip...) barely lasted a year.
This was the time when Twitter also launched Vine - to also shutter it.
Great ideas, killed prematurely as TikTok took them and ran away with them. TT is now my #1 music discovery service, not great, just the only one that actually works.
If I had $20 a month when I was 17, I would’ve paid for Apple Music in a heartbeat (if it were available at the time).
Now music pirates itself.
(Thinking of AI generated music which doesn't get more than a few % of total listening time, but give it some time..)
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
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'm so incredibly happy police resources are being used to "protect" the rest of us from... harm...?
Nowadays the only thing thats truly being pirated, is peoples' attention.
Everythings been commoditized, nothing serious can be compiled onboard any more, everything needs permission.
Bring back the compiler, you fuckers!
Its a supercomputer, in my pocket, and I need permission to do things to it.
Its not lost here, still going strong. Lol
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.
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Did everyone forget about soulseek? It's still very much alive, been using it for years.
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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.