Why pirating music is old school

http://www.tuxx-home.at/archives/2009/12/29/T10_37_21/

by Corrado • 16 years ago

23 33 16 years ago

Who pays you to spend hours cleaning up downloads?

nodata• 16 years ago

Comparing my usual hourly rates against the price of all 5 albums on the iTunes store, I actually won money by purchasing them there,

He didn't win (earn) any money. Unless he cancelled a billable hour with a customer, he didn't save any money either. He saved time.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

In roundabout language he's talking about saving the opportunity cost of doing it manually.

silvestrov• 16 years ago

But time IS money (i.e. valuables), especially as you get older. You won't have time for everything you'd like to do, and you won't have the energy. Young people think energy is unlimited, old people know energy and time are the precious valuables.

And even for young people: the time you spend cleaning up downloads are time you can't spend on getting better at whatever you're good at.

hackermom3• 16 years ago

Spot on. This can't be repeated enough: it's not about saving a few bucks, it's about getting your goods in spotless quality, instantly, without hassle. People want ease; instant ease; not a labyrinthal click-fest. Even if you are a seasoned P2Per who does not need many minutes to locate at least one available source of the album in question, it usually takes a while to find a proper AAC or FLAC rip (contra usual MP3 slush), and unless you're into vacuous pop music you're almost always faced with anything but snappy download speeds.

$0.99 for a pristine 256kbps AAC track, with no waiting, is a good deal. The iTunes Store isn't a money-making behemoth for no reason.

Snoddas• 16 years ago

Unless you live in another country (say a backwater like Sweden).

Then you are told by iTunes: "The item you've requested is not currently available in the Swedish store"

hackermom3• 16 years ago

I live in a backwater like Sweden. In fact, I actually live in Sweden. I've bought a great deal of tracks from the iTunes Store, but I have yet to encounter what you mention. Is this perhaps the type of "region staging" scheme we see in the film industry, game industry, gaming console industry etc.?

othello• 16 years ago

You can then turn to Spotify, which was actually founded in Sweden ;)

I don't use iTunes and thus can't compare their respective librairies, but I know first hand that even in more remote corners of the musical world (think obscure recording of a jazz reprise of Bach), Spotify almost always delivers.

gyardley• 16 years ago

I agree with the general point you're making about friction, but you're underestimating how quickly and thoroughly free distribution sources have evolved.

A 'seasoned P2Per' already belongs to one or more invitation-only torrent sites where nearly everything you could ever want is available and well-seeded in multiple formats, including FLAC. (One's already been mentioned on this thread, but there are others.)

If I were the type of person to steal music, I would log into one of these communities, do a quick search on a pretty decent search engine, throw the .torrent into a Dropbox folder synced with my media server. The media server then would automatically do the downloading / adding to my music library / etc. I hear this is often faster than downloading from iTunes, and completely ad-free. Even better, it doesn't involve iTunes.

$0.99 is a hell of a deal if you've never pirated music and don't know where to start, but when faced with paying vs. a bit of hassle, the core P2P community has again and again decided to forego paying and focus their efforts on eliminating the hassle.

hackermom3• 16 years ago

"A 'seasoned P2Per' already belongs to one or more invitation-only torrent sites where nearly everything you could ever want is available and well-seeded in multiple formats, including FLAC. (One's already been mentioned on this thread, but there are others.)"

This is only true if you're into pop music from "the big five" labels, or at best looking for some generic "Ibiza X-treme Tribal Goa Trance Collection #392". Now, I know that arguing about taste is pointless, but I still feel like saying this: if you try to get your hands on something remotely sophisticated and with musical substance, you will have a hard time finding it via the scene releases; your best shot is to find it among like-minded people with an artistic mind, and you probably know that comes down to only about three places on the net: Karagarga, Cinema Obscura, and ~drumroll~ The Pirate Bay (the cultural cauldron of the Internet).

I'm actually a "scener" (both demo scene and "xvid scene"), and I frequent my share of private trackers, so I got an up-close relation with the available assortment.

wladimir• 16 years ago

I agree completely. After iTunes dropped DRM, I've legally downloaded most of my music: Guaranteed quality, and no need anymore to search through tons of fakes, viruses, to get the songs I want, and then hope someone actually comes online to share them.

I 'pirated' because I don't feel like going to a store, spending hours to find music I liked, buying it, then ripping the CD. Or ordering the CD somewhere and impatiently waiting before it arrives... Not because of the cost savings.

Let's hope this is a lesson for the movies and software industry as well, if you make it easy for people to get your stuff, in the same or better quality than a pirated version (so, no DRM, annoying restrictions, or difficult download process), they will prefer to get it legally from you.

usingp2p• 16 years ago

This might be true if you're looking on public sites, but there are very good private music trackers (What, Waffles) and if you have an account on one of those it's completely wrong. Things are well-seeded, download speeds are fast, the selection is huge, and there's almost always a FLAC (or at least a v0 or 320k mp3) version available. (And I don't listen to "vacuous pop music".)

makeramen• 16 years ago

anyone else have a what.cd account?

this is what I see when I search for an album: http://d.pr/OFXu

you get pretty much any format/bitrate of any song/album you can imagine, most are almost always well seeded.

cloug• 16 years ago

seems interesting, do you have any invite ?

xiongchiamiov2• 16 years ago

Giving invites to people you don't know is a bad idea, as you're responsible for them.

They have an irc channel for applications; take a look at http://whatinterviewprep.webs.com/ .

spindritf• 16 years ago

Including "perfect" FLAC rips, quality not available on iTunes. And no geographical restrictions (well... almost).

danparsonson• 16 years ago

And the moral of the story is... outsource! :-)

bound008• 16 years ago

1.open new tab in google chrome

2. type demonoid hit tab, type the band name followed by discography

3. hit download button.

everything else happens automatically. torrent file gets automatically added to Transmission, and when done, the music gets moved into the "Automatically add files to iTunes Folder" and iTunes takes it from there.

But don't steal music. Its wrong.

Tichy• 16 years ago

But how can he buy the music for his wife? iTunes music is still DRMed (owner encoded in the files).

Also 2 hours is way overblown.

rb2k_• 16 years ago

While I agree that "legal" music downloads are really cheap these days, most of his criticism is just not true if you actually know what you're doing...

"scene releases" have a fixed quality scheme (encoding, ID3, ...) and the proper torrent community orftp/usenet server will max out your home connection easily.

That being said, if you actually have a regular income, music should not be that big of a problem to buy...

J3L2404• 16 years ago

I get my music the old fashioned way, I record it off the radio. (via internet)

robryan• 16 years ago

I think there is a real opportunity for Apple to identify when people have loaded in pirated music to iTunes and try and sell them the legal equivalent.

unicornporn2• 16 years ago

This person has obviously not tried the better specialized torrent sites like what.cd. When browsing through the Queen discography at what the other day I realized it is far better then what iTunes offers me. Releases sorted by catalog number, 24/96 lossless FLAC vinyl rips, you name it. Run the files through MP3Tag with the Discogs "plugin" installed and you've got flawless metadata in seconds.

rick8882• 16 years ago

It's interesting that after all of the people in the pirate community screaming that the cost of songs are "too high" and the quality isn't "good enough" and music has too many "draconian" protection schemes like DRM that piracy is bigger than ever, even when they can get everything they wanted.

Why can't people just admit that they pirate because they just want free stuff?

unicornporn2• 16 years ago

It might be that some people are screaming that, but I'm not. I'm saying, if you are interested in a multitude of releases for each album to chose from and the technical aspects of digital audio you might be more pleased visiting a private torrent site. They are impressive pieces of collaborative work. I do not judge people buying music from iTunes, nor do I judge people that "pirate" music. Each to his/her own.

Why pirating music is old school

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