The lost joy of music piracy

https://www.pigeonsandplanes.com/read/music-piracy-what-cd-oink-nine-inch-nails-streaming

by mcgin • 7 days ago

849 605 7 days ago

pigeonsandplanes.com

yesbut• 7 days ago

weird, I still love pirating music.

dxbednarczyk• 7 days ago

Still very much alive! Just not as popular with the advent of $10/mo all-you-can-eat streaming services.

ocd2• 7 days ago

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.

tonyhart77• 7 days ago

You couldnt be serious

konart7• 7 days ago

This. I do use Spotify, but this has nothing to do with my local music collection. Admittedly, mostly pirated.

silon42• 7 days ago

I don't use Spotify, but I would consider it if I could download maybe 1 or 2 mp3 per month for offline use.

ColdStream4• 7 days ago

Huh... I'm still waiting for Bandcamp and Soundcloud to close their streaming download hole. It has been a few years now.

9dev• 7 days ago

Posting that here is one of the more promising ways of achieving that

noduerme2• 7 days ago

That's such small potatoes. Anyone putting out an album on Bandcamp is probably thrilled that someone would want to pirate it.

ColdStream4• 7 days ago

Yeah probably. But it also depends on how much it is exploited.

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.

markasoftware• 7 days ago

does it matter as long as yt-dlp is maintained?

BoingBoomTschak3• 7 days ago

Some people want more than "mystery meat" levels of audio quality.

nmfisher• 7 days ago

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.

ColdStream4• 7 days ago

Pretty much. There would be some folks who are scraping large amounts of stuff but I don't think it is a giant issue.

flipped• 7 days ago

Did everyone forget about soulseek? It's still very much alive, been using it for years.

fawnwind• 7 days ago

I still use it, easiest way to download music these days.

bayesianbot• 7 days ago

And imo slskd is fantastic client for soulseek, I just found it few weeks back

majkinetor2• 6 days ago

Its 0 compared to nicotine++

ZlibraryKO• 7 days ago

Soulseek is great still use it regularly.

stavros3• 7 days ago

I can't believe the operators of what.cd would choose to delete everything without at least a warning, or letting people back it up. So much music and metadata just lost!

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.

thrtythreeforty2• 7 days ago

I refuse to believe there's not a database backup somewhere. Such careful curators would surely hate to destroy it!

stavros3• 7 days ago

I'd hope so, but wouldn't it have leaked by now?

dewey2• 7 days ago

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.

self_awareness2• 7 days ago

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.

globular-toast• 7 days ago

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.

BLKNSLVR6• 7 days ago

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)

[1] https://musicbrainz.org/

eltercero• 7 days ago

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.

[0] https://kinggizzard.bandcamp.com

BLKNSLVR6• 6 days ago

Legend, 10x upvotes!

SkintMesh• 7 days ago

Nicotine

userbinator• 7 days ago

I would not be surprised if all of this content has now found its way into some music generation AI.

detrapdoor• 7 days ago

https://gizmodo.com/ai-music-app-suno-got-hacked-giving-a-gl...

Cthulhu_4• 7 days ago

Yeah at one point I lamented the loss of these huge and rare music libraries. Now they've been fed to the machine.

whacked_new• 7 days ago

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

klipen• 7 days ago

Isnt REDacted the continuationnof What.cd

hexfish• 7 days ago

Please step inside the vehicle and don't make a scene.

charcircuit9• 7 days ago

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.

sandcat_• 7 days ago

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.

charcircuit9• 6 days ago

The parasitic community I was referring to was what.cd.

b3452• 7 days ago

Funny because that is exactly how capitalism works.

ktallett5• 7 days ago

Is it stealing if when I buy digital I don't own it?

BLKNSLVR6• 7 days ago

You have stolen a temporary license!

charcircuit9• 7 days ago

You own a license when you buy it digitally. Stealing is never okay regardless of if something is technically buying or not.

BLKNSLVR6• 7 days ago

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.

charcircuit9• 7 days ago

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.

keiferski2• 7 days ago

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.

b3452• 7 days ago

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.

Telaneo3• 7 days ago

omgmajk4• 7 days ago

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.

muppetman• 7 days ago

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.

omgmajk4• 7 days ago

Never bought any merch from what, but I do own a ScT t-shirt :)

whatcd2• 6 days ago

i only have what.cd stickers.

i wish i wouldve bought more!

i wish i had a legit music torrent site nowadays too

marysol521• 6 days ago

Here's the other side of the issue for these platforms, they're profiteering from the criminality of the users

ValdikSS10• 7 days ago

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.

omgmajk4• 7 days ago

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.

greenavocado• 7 days ago

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

konart7• 7 days ago

Anime (an everything related) torrent sites are also pretty alive.

twelvechairs• 7 days ago

Soulseek is still going strong last time i checked

bean4696• 6 days ago

Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West.

Orpheus and RED are going extremely strong right now, with very active userbases

pessimizer• 6 days ago

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.

grishka• 6 days ago

Fun fact: Rutracker is one of the few remaining places on the internet where random Russians and Ukrainians talk respectfully to each other, and do so in Russian.

inigyou15• 6 days ago

Isn't this largely because bandwidths got fast enough to not need P2P for music any more? You can use SLSK which is DirectConnect-style, or direct downloads, or Spotify/YouTube downloaders.

anal_reactor• 7 days ago

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.

omgmajk4• 7 days ago

Go check out ektoplazm.com, electronic music with permissable licenses. Good for the culture of this website. Most things can be downloaded in flac.

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.

ValdikSS10• 7 days ago

    - https://dieordiy2.blogspot.com/
    - https://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/
    - Last.FM Recommendations based on your bands
    - Mixtapes and radio mixes, there are countless

acomjean• 6 days ago

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.

https://www.wmbr.org/cgi-bin/show?id=6883

Multicomp• 6 days ago

rainwave.cc has a chiptune mode, that's not electronic necessarily, but its an internet streaming radio that I've used to learn lots of new soundtracks I wouldn't otherwise encounter.

gosub100• 3 days ago

radio.garden has been great for me.

ThatMedicIsASpy• 7 days ago

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

soco• 6 days ago

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_...

marysol521• 6 days ago

Still lots of XDCC around, of course vast majority of it is stored on hacked servers....

alex11382• 7 days ago

I'm so incredibly happy police resources are being used to "protect" the rest of us from... harm...?

BLKNSLVR6• 7 days ago

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.

self_awareness2• 7 days ago

Police exists to enforce the policy set by legislations.

Legislations define rules to protect "us" from harm, but police is for policing only.

They do not protect people. They protect the law.

alex11382• 7 days ago

I know. I'm just, allowed to be sad

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

Cthulhu_4• 7 days ago

Music piracy and copyright infringement are civil matters, the police is (...should not be?) involved.

maxaw• 7 days ago

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!

ndesaulniers2• 7 days ago

Final Fantasy FMVs set to edgy nu metal.

Man, I _had_ a limewire shirt (somewhere); they interviewed at my college. Where is that important piece of history?

juvvel2• 7 days ago

The opening of FFX basically is basically an FMV with edgy metal built in. :D

shevy-java• 7 days ago

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.

https://bash-org-archive.com/?104052

ktallett5• 7 days ago

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

herecomesyour_• 7 days ago

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.

ktallett5• 6 days ago

Haha! Yes exactly! I had a music taste that was primarily based around TV (such as MTV), family and friends exposure, and old cassettes and CDs I bought in charity shops (thrift stores). Blogspot allowed me to find new artists in genres I already loved such as grunge. Both my love for Green River and Alice in Chains came from a blogspot. There are still a few dedicated bloggers out there. One in particular that allows you to do deep dives into punk from many countries.

minikomi2• 7 days ago

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.

jbaiter• 7 days ago

It's still there!

smcleod• 7 days ago

Soulseek is still going hard.

tomduncalf2• 7 days ago

Don’t tell anyone! Haha

archi42• 7 days ago

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.

brunorro• 7 days ago

Did I hear Soulseek? Look for slskd in github. I had a tear on my face when I could find people sharing japanese math rock :)

tomduncalf2• 7 days ago

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

slackerIII• 6 days ago

Audiogalaxy dev here. That was my favorite part of the design.

One of my other favorite parts was that prioritized matches based on how similar their domain name was to yours, so a lot of times you would end up grabbing files from someone in the same dorm or city (cable modem IPs had hostnames back then had the city in the name).

a-french-anon3• 7 days ago

https://nicotine-plus.org/ for the free software/UNIX people, by the way.

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.

majkinetor2• 6 days ago

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. There are folks having millions of audio files and 50TB of highly organized data.

I pretty much doubt it can be taken down at this point.

crowfunder• 5 days ago

Obscure breakcore hell yeah! Wish SSK channel was more alive or there was a better place to network.

0xbadcafebee• 7 days ago

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.

soundworlds• 7 days ago

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-...

artemonster• 7 days ago

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

DaanDL4• 7 days ago

DC++

I loved that place, being able to browse people's hard drives was ingenious.

Cthulhu_4• 7 days ago

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.

lukan• 7 days ago

Oh. That was my mind blown for today.

Well, the song was a bit out of style for System of a Down, but the voices are similar enough.

eisa012• 7 days ago

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...

wodenokoto• 7 days ago

I think the streaming sites are in a difficult position.

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.

applfanboysbgon• 7 days ago

8bit covers and AI music

As someone who loves lsdj... ouch.

port117• 6 days ago

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!

DaanDL4• 7 days ago

What I also miss on Spotify: live mixes.

Blahah• 7 days ago

Soundcloud is great for this

cobbzilla7• 7 days ago

for electronic music di.fm has some great live sets. I wish they had more tho

marysol521• 6 days ago

themixingbowl.org is a good tracker, lots of radio rips on there too

bugufu8f839• 7 days ago

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.

Gander57392• 7 days ago

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.

taneq• 7 days ago

Heck, almost everything is available for free on YouTube.

lopis2• 7 days ago

Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days

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.

otabdeveloper46• 7 days ago

pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites

If that were true, then vinyl sales wouldn't be growing.

a-french-anon3• 7 days ago

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.

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.

itsmartapuntocm2• 6 days ago

If you listen to non-western music the streaming library shrinks a lot.

meindnoch2• 6 days ago

If you have a pretty vanilla taste, sure.

fl4regun2• 6 days ago

here's a counter example: the opening to mirror's edge is not hosted on spotify (last time I checked, in my region at least), and it's an old favourite of mine (and I'm sure many people who played the game too)

Hoodedcrow• 7 days ago

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).

haunter• 7 days ago

Took me 1 min to find the first album in FLAC, probably the other two is available too

eisa012• 7 days ago

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 :)

IshKebab2• 7 days 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!

RugnirViking2• 6 days ago

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.

black_knight• 6 days ago

Less common mayhaps, but some of my more blissful moments are when I sit down in the couch, load up one of my favourite albums, close my eyes and go on a musical journey!

What I listen to is definitely not interchangeable. And contrary to TV series, there is no limit to how much I can enjoy it!

mabedan• 6 days ago

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.

mghackerlady8• 6 days ago

This! The only album I consider perfect (Regional at Best by Twenty Øne Piløts) is only available on I think Deezer?

throwaway20372• 6 days ago

    > Even albums mentioned in the Norwegian business magazine D2 can be impossible to find in legit channels.

I'm confused. Spotify wouldn't work?

fl4regun2• 6 days ago

spotify doesn't contain every music album released.

charcircuit9• 6 days ago

Just because you can't stream it, that doesn't justify piracy. I buy the CD for music I want to listen to but can't stream. The idea that you are forced to pirate is made up.

teach• 6 days ago

I agree with you that you are never "forced" to pirate; you can simply not listen to the missing album.

But many many many many excellent albums are not available for sale anywhere at any price. They essentially do not exist, except in the hands of a few collectors.

The bands themselves, the creators of said music, want their music to be heard.

The fact that they aren't available for sale or streaming is often because a rich bureaucrat can't be bothered, not for any legal reason.

beloch• 6 days ago

Some music is a lot like abandoned video games. It can sometimes be tricky to figure out who owns the rights and, even having done that, more difficult still to track them down and get their permission. Also, it's not a given that the answer will be, "Yes.". If you ask an obscure artist to fill out forms and jump through hoops for 6 cents in streaming royalties, they may tell you to piss off.

There are likely many albums that would have met oblivion were it not for piracy.

bobdvb• 6 days ago

There was a black and white fantasy TV show called "Adam Adamant Lives!" from the 60s. The BBC always wanted to re-release it but the original contracts for the show were written when no one ever considered re-runs and physical releases. The BBC didn't have rights from the original actors for anything other than the original broadcast. And one of the actors who appeared in a few episodes didn't want it to be shown again, even if they were paid, the BBC didn't want to release a box-set without all the episodes. Eventually they just waited until that actor died and they were then able to release it.

I'm lead to believe that in music there are some similar contractual issues. The rights for some artists were for radio, and physical media, but no one considered streaming or downloads because those things didn't exist. So they have to go back and tidy up the contracts to cover their asses. And it doesn't just have to be the headliner on the recording, you may need to get every performer/contributor.

qingcharles2• 4 days ago

This is where YouTube Music really shines, in a way. It lets every Tom, Dick & Harry upload whatever-the-hell, and as long as it doesn't ping off the major labels' copyright signatures then it stays and YouTube (supposedly) does some accounting around the back to try and figure out where the royalties should go.

dyauspitr3• 6 days ago

The one pirate site I miss more than anything is demonoid. I could find just about anything on there. Is there anything similar now? What happened to all their archives once they were taken offline.

burnermore• 5 days ago

Deimos passed away (may he rest in peace) and the old staff members brought it back online. But contents are lost. And it feels malwarish TBH. Archives of cartoons which you can never have now. It was nuts. Waiting for the invite window to open was nuts!!! Good ol' memories.

Sammi• 1 day ago

I got access to the original closed demonoid and I could find anything I was looking for there. But I was never able to download anything as they required you to upload before you could download. I had nothing of value to share, so I was just stuck. How did people solve this?

marysol521• 6 days ago

Neither do pirates, even less so because it's P2P. LOTS of dead torrents out in the world

CoolestBeans• 7 days ago

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.

Cthulhu_4• 7 days ago

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.

scadge• 7 days ago

Sometimes it's cheaper to break the law and pay a fine, than to do everything by law.

ninjin• 7 days ago

Not allegedly, I was there at the time as a user and I and others can confirm that there was plenty of scene releases on Spotify in ~2008:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202117

rusk3• 7 days ago

Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music

If I’m remembering right, the tagline on the Mac mini was “rip mix burn”

SllX2• 7 days ago

Predates the Mac mini (tagline: The most affordable Mac ever.) by a good few years—predates the iPod even—but it was an Apple ad campaign:

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.

erikschoster• 7 days ago

It was also common to have a collection of CDs you owned and wanted to put on a device like this.

lopis2• 7 days ago

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.

pjc503• 7 days ago

We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.

Streaming (which pays labels and artists much less) only exists because it's the compromise that solves the "service problem" side of piracy.

port117• 6 days ago

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.

tclancy4• 6 days ago

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.

hdgvhicv• 7 days ago

The first one had no wifi and less space than a nomad - 5g from memory. That’s about 85 hours at 128k.

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.

ghaff3• 7 days ago

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.

mghackerlady8• 6 days ago

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

wasmitnetzen• 7 days ago

Also iTunes Match, which legalized all of your pirated music[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625967

ghaff3• 7 days ago

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.

raydev2• 6 days ago

In the early 2010s I uploaded an ALAC copy of an album through iTunes (and I guess iCloud Music???) that still has not appeared on any streaming service, and it remains accessible on any of my devices today. And now that my preferred streaming service is Apple Music, the album is accessible whenever/wherever I want.

When Apple gets something right, they really do get it right. A shame a lot of other aspects of Apple Music are bad or wrong.

postalcoder2• 7 days ago

Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music.

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.

speed_spread2• 7 days ago

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.

itsmartapuntocm2• 6 days ago

Arguably it hurt them with the PSP as well by trying to get everyone to buy UMDs for their movies and store music on memory sticks.

akersten• 6 days ago

the NW-HD1

Ah, something tells me it wasn't the technical capabilities that held this very pronounceable and fashionable product back.

dwedge• 7 days ago

One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music

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

lostlogin• 7 days ago

There was that time they gave us music though.

Utterly tone deaf Steve, we don’t all like your music.

RandallBrown• 6 days ago

Never had that happen to me (or heard of it happening) and I used iTunes for like 15 years.

basisword• 7 days ago

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.

efficax• 6 days ago

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

francisofascii• 6 days ago

selling a device to play pirated 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.)

marysol521• 6 days ago

Not really, you have to rip CD's and import them into their software to load up the iPod.

Ripping CD's for personal usage and storage is perfectly legal everywhere

sondr3• 7 days ago

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.

abhikul0• 7 days ago

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.

Semaphor4• 7 days ago

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.

emsixteen• 7 days ago

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.

sixtyj• 7 days ago

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.

sexy_seedbox2• 6 days ago

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.

rconti2• 6 days ago

What do you mean by "doing release Fridays"?

Semaphor4• 6 days ago

The paragraph following that explains what I mean. It’s technically not always all on Friday, as Japan doesn’t join in, and smaller labels or non-labels sometimes also pick others days, but the bulk of releases happens every Friday. For tomorrow I have 9 albums on my list, plus an extra one that releases on Sunday.

ilvez• 7 days ago

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.

ndesaulniers2• 7 days ago

Just setup lidarr and plex. Not happy about having to re-arrange all my loose files, but claude and beets are helping.

dewey2• 7 days ago

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.

DaanDL4• 7 days ago

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.

jillesvangurp• 7 days ago

The way around this is the people that listened to this also listened to that feature. That's the main way I discover new music these days. I find something new that I like and then I explore whatever it is that people listen to that also listened to that song. If you don't do that, the recommendations are basically more of the same shit. All the B-singles of an artist you like some songs of. Or worse: "you're old, here's some old music for you!". Or even worse, "your ip address is in Germany! You know you are a closet German! Here's some German hoompahpah music for you!".

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?!

fragmede• 7 days ago

Fwiw, it's annoying, but you can go into your YouTube watch history and delete that one video from it, which should stop the recommender from suggesting those going forwards.

DaanDL4• 6 days ago

Yes, this is the way. Also, everything is still connected with last.fm too, so once a while I'll also take a look at my neighbours there.

GiveOver• 7 days ago

One thing I like to do on Spotify is to make a "Blend" playlist with a friend whose music taste overlaps with mine slightly. Not for its intended use of creating a playlist for you both to listen to at the same time, but instead I find it's useful at pulling your recommendations out of the safe zone (and towards the taste of your friend). Sounds a little bit dystopian that I'm cutting my friends out of the friend-recommendation part of music discovery, but if I find a new artist I like I usually make sure to mention it to the friend.

rdwrrr• 7 days ago

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

postalcoder2• 7 days ago

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.

abanana• 6 days ago

I thought I lost the ability to read longform on the internet

Same here. It's great to read a well-written piece that keeps my interest. I'm sick of reading the overused AI cliches and all the long-form articles that spend many paragraphs on irrelevant parts of the life stories of all involved, before getting anywhere near to the point.

merryocha2• 6 days ago

I miss the What.CD forums as well. I learned so much there. What.CD felt like attending a conference full of people from all over, full of ideas and willing to put effort into posts. The successor sites are much smaller and less active and it feels more like visiting a bar full of regulars who all know each other. I still love those sites for the music discovery and I still collect music as a hobby but What.CD's forum was the best forum I've ever been on. I wish someone archived it so I could go back and read some of the old threads.

bfors• 6 days ago

I loved the forums as well, being an invite only music piracy site turned out to be a pretty good foundation for a community. My posts however, were definitely not very high quality.

eric6071• 6 days ago

We're all hackers here, somebody should build one!

barbs• 6 days ago

Were the forums ever backed up anywhere? Given the quality of writing it'd be a shame if it didn't get archived.

devonsolomon6• 7 days ago

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.

user_7832• 7 days ago

+1. A friend's pendrive full of songs was how I actually bothered to get "into" many artists that until then I didn't really care about.

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.)

embedding-shape• 7 days ago

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'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.

AlecSchueler• 7 days ago

Don't forget the "label:" search in Spotify

moostii• 7 days ago

The result increased the likelihood of irl performance attendance.

I don't really know what my friends listen to these days.

drdec2• 7 days ago

I wonder if the real difference is that everyone has earbuds versus playing through a speaker

mvdtnz• 6 days ago

Most of my friend nowadays (40-42 year old group) either don't listen to music at all or just put on pop radio at work and pay no attention. And almost all of them are weirdly proud of their lack of interest in music and wear it like a bizarre badge of honour. Sucks being the only one left who is interested in music.

cobbzilla7• 7 days ago

Similar experience and I would never trade it in a lifetime.

For the “me” today, new music discovery is all about live radio. and I don’t mean pop/satellite/corporate programmed radio. I mean radio where a human still cares.

I mostly use radio.garden (sometimes TuneIn) and find crazy local stations around the world.

K-Pop from Seoul, Parisian hiphop, live EDM from clubs in Ibiza, weird/fun island music from the remote pacific, random college radio. It’s all out there, live, amazing!

when I hear something I like, I “shazam” it, then add it to my library later. and I’m always smiling when shazam can’t find any match.

flir3• 7 days ago

radio.garden (and many others) got neutered in the UK courts by Sony. Offensive, short-sighted, Balkanizing decision.

I haven't bought a Sony product since the rootkit debacle. My only regret is that there's not a "boycott++" mode for the damage they did with that decision.

erayack3• 6 days ago

Live radio has that someone is actually there feeling that playlists never really have

gaudystead• 6 days ago

Can I offer you a SomaFM[0] in these trying times?

They're entirely listener supported and the music they play is - to my knowledge - entirely human curated. I've found many tracks and artists new to me, with some artists not even having a presence (or a very small one) on Spotify.

Their curation is so good that they've become a significant resource I go to when seeking out new music. It feels like a warm hug from people who probably were also users of what.cd back in the day. Some of the humans who make up their team are the ones who play the music at DEF CON each year, so I take that as a good endorsement that they are well equipped to have good taste and be fellow music nerds - a compliment of the highest regard.

They're worth your time (and money, should you choose to donate).

[0] https://somafm.com/

xethos• 7 days ago

and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band

Shoulda posted what you remember (and ideally male / female vocalist) as a post-script. The throwaway comment could be your way back

brailsafe2• 7 days ago

Agreed, plenty of Canadian's lurking here, even Dang himself.

devonsolomon6• 6 days ago

I selfishly wanted to but: 1. It’s a little besides the point 2. I didn’t want to embarrass myself with how badly I remember it.

Anyway, here’s my shot: Male singer + (from other comment) It was pretty alt-grungy (something like TV on The Radio or Blockparty at the time). Lyric I remember is from a song starting with something along the lines of: throw away your newspaper/ no more bad news today.

jrowen2• 7 days ago

I used ourTunes in the dorms, people just sharing their entire iTunes with the network. I've always been more of a solo digger, but I never liked Spotify. I have specific dance/electronic tastes so I browse and purchase music on sites like bandcamp or beatport, though actually these days it's strictly junodownload.

I do wonder though how much of what you describe, or some form of it, is still happening in dorm rooms. As we get older we just do less of that kind of stuff. I still connect with a large circle of friends through music, and discuss different artists and such, mostly at events.

ghaff3• 7 days ago

There's probably some truth in that although, if you didn't have to collect a large volume of music whether purchased or copied in some form, I'm not sure the incentives are there to get started in any serious way. It is also true that, for me at least, I purchase very little music these days and basically don't pirate at all.

pjc503• 7 days ago

I've had an essay brewing in my head with the title "special internet for cool people", about the greatness of this era and why it's so difficult to bring back. TLDR that the gatekeeping was actually essential; piracy stops working once everybody does it.

brailsafe2• 7 days ago

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.

I've been intentionally doing this with my music streaming service. If I hear a song I like or someone in one of many friend groups recommends something, I'll add it to my liked songs, and eventually get around to listening to it. Sometimes I'll find a gem and go into their discography further. I can't agree with never getting this feeling back; there's also a resurgence in popularity for physical media and offline music players, so it might be quite common again soon.

renegat0x0• 7 days ago

I created my own database of favourite music, to be able to share what I like:

- https://rumca-js.github.io/music

- https://rumca-js.github.io/movies

Interface is clunky, but gets the job done for me.

CTDOCodebases• 7 days ago

I think algorithmic music discovery is overrated.

Back in the day I used to use Audioscrobler which was an audio plugin for Winamp which was basically a recommender system for music. I discovered some interesting music through that but nowhere near the amount of music I later discovered through hypem which was a music blog aggregator.

piker• 7 days ago

Does anyone in 2026 rate algorithmic discovery for music? Or is it widely perceived to be the engagement-reinforcement mechanism that it is?

hypercube33• 6 days ago

Winamp is where I fell in love with last.fm. It wasn't as fun as going to a lan party and raiding the file server of all of the music to explore it or later, Napster checking out what music the person you were downloading a song from had that seemed interesting but it was super good at finding new similar music and side fun fact that my wife and some lady in Russia are the only close matches to me in music taste on there still. pretty wild. CBS ruined last.fm

smugglerFlynn3• 6 days ago

  > 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 think algorithms are to blame (bear with me).

It's that the word "discovery" internet platforms have started using for this kind of experience is very misleading.

What real discovery means:

  - Spending more time and attention when selecting next artist
  - Reflecting on what you like about the song/album, and why
  - Taking time to curate your collection
  - Exchanging thoughts with other people, and reflecting on their opinions

Platforms are selling you efficiency, in reality the've compressed above steps to minutes or even seconds.

This is not unique to music platforms by the way. Instagram spoon feeds you reels so you never actually reflect on anything - you don't have time for reflection, because content is coming. Instagram will say they've solved "content discovery" for you, which is good, right?

LLMs spoon feed you tons of data, leaving no room for reflection.

It is logical if you think about it: these platforms do solve accessibility, but they don't solve discovery, deep reflection or retrospection of the user. Why bother marketing things they _don't_ solve? So they oversell accessibility solution like they've solved everything else, while in reality their product teams spend literal zero time addressing the important things.

Unless you consciously prompt yourself to reflect and think (which takes x10 more time than just browsing content) you are missing out.

I've spent good 20 minutes reflecting while writing this comment. Could have been written by LLM based on a short prompt, right? But I write on HN not because I want for everyone to see my thoughts published out there - I write precisely because I want to _reflect on my own thoughts_.

I need help reflecting, not writing or discovering.

erayack3• 6 days ago

Yeah, this is the part I miss too. Not really the downloading, more the weird little rituals around finding stuff and talking about it. What do you think a modern version of that would look like without just becoming another feed?

doginasuit• 6 days ago

I agree, a focus on efficiency, immediacy, and quantity has lead us to a barren experience of discovery. Music streaming certainly has its virtues, it is a shame that they haven't made the discovery process better.

I wonder what it would look like to have a feature that elicited reflection, perhaps purely for its own sake but maybe also to help feed further discovery. You could have a player that didn't immediately start playing the next track but presented an interface where you could write notes or react to the song in a variety of ways. That reflection could deepen your appreciation for the song or help you put into words what you find missing. It would also be a much richer feedback for the system to understand what you are looking for and find the next song. We now have all these fancy tools and vector databases for a nuanced and meaningful search based on text content.

What I find most tiring about the status quo is that you have to skip through a bunch of tracks to find something that resonates. It seems mentally taxing and I can't help but think I may actually like a lot of these songs if I was in the right frame of mind to hear them.

PaulHoule5• 6 days ago

At a verbal level LLMs are great: questions like "tell me about hip hop artists similar to MF doom" or "is there anything new like jefferson starship?" can be the start of great conversations. They will talk your ear off about what is going on with tracks like "Dangerous" off the Yes Union Album.

bee_rider• 6 days ago

I think I agree with this.

A possibly interesting quirk of it is that this is a fairly intellectualized description (specifically):

- Spending more time and attention when selecting next artist
- Reflecting on what you like about the song/album, and why
- Taking time to curate your collection
- Exchanging thoughts with other people, and reflecting on their opinions

Of a process that at the time could have been summed up as “chit-chatting with your friends and picking the next song.” I wonder what it costs us, that these sort of process have become something we have to actively reflect on and make an effort. In the past this didn’t feel at all effortful, it was just fun and the easiest way to get music.

This isn’t intended as a criticism of your line of thought, I think you’ve accurately described a good process. Just a thought about how the accurate current description somehow doesn’t quite match the feeling of the past.

trinsic22• 6 days ago

The idea of how algorithms and scrolling get in the way of contemplation is an intriguing idea.

I had some other similar ideas come up in that past that are similar to this concept.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45217545

https://aeon.co/essays/tech-vexed-how-digital-life-threatens...

chriscyber• 4 days ago

LLMs give more serendipitous music recommendations than spotify.

21asdffdsa12• 6 days ago

People like you where so important as discovery medium - especially when they where amplifiers - for example creating soundtracks for movies.

amelius• 6 days ago

I miss the sharing of mixtapes (or even mix-CDs, later when burning them was possible).

Right now if I want to share music with someone, I first have to check which streaming service they are on ...

Affric• 6 days ago

I still have the last cd I was ever given. Incredible mix.

bitwize• 6 days ago

I made a mix CD for my wife for her birthday last year. It was my interpretation of Cereal Killer's "Greatest Zukes Album", featuring "great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit" that was mentioned in the 1995 movie Hackers. So to qualify for inclusion, the artist had to either have died of drug or alcohol overdose before September 1995 (when Hackers came out) or be a band one of whose principal members died in such a fashion. It was great fun to make and my wife still listens to it.

dkga• 6 days ago

I miss that network discovery as well, as well as the quasi-random element to it. Nowadays I get my kicks by searching for, say, Albanian rock (I don‘t speak Albanian), whatever was trending in Indonesia (I am not from there), who is the national poet/singer of France (I am not French), what was playing on Peruvian radios in 1985 when I born, etc.

Edit: it‘s also a great way to meet other countries/cultures, not only other great music. For example, this is how I got acquainted with the beautiful Wolof language from Senegal and even with traditional regional music in Brazil (where I am actually from) I would have never been exposed to otherwise.

andai• 6 days ago

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 been thinking lately about the effect I'm having on the world.

Most people who read or watch something never subscribe. Most people who subscribe never comment.

Your work can be changing the lives of dozens of people but you still feel like you're shouting into a void.

Of the people whose work has changed my life I have reached out to approximately none of them.

And I often do try to make an effort to reach out! But for the most part I, too appreciate things invisibly.

P.S. You can just email people, regardless of how legendary they are, and a surprising number of them actually do reply!

Forgeties79• 6 days ago

A year or so ago I emailed a composer just to tell him how much I enjoyed his arrangements of a great OST. He sent a very kind, thorough response and mentioned that feeling of “shouting into the void.@ He said once he releases a record he doesn’t really tour so he never gets to speak to people or see the emotional response, so the occasional message means a lot.

ubermonkey• 6 days ago

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.

I feel that for sure, but as a kid who grew up in the rural US South, the fact that as a middle-aged person I can read a mention of some random act and listen to it right now is still a staggeringly great experience.

We mostly discover new music from about 15 to 25 or 30, right? It's pretty normal for that to slow down as the concerns of adulthood kinda get in the way of keeping up with whomever is hot now.

Then I subscribed to AppleMusic, and I did so almost exclusively to avoid having to cable-sync music anymore. Turns out, my wife was just using a free Spotify account instead of downloading music to her phone b/c she saw it as too much hassle, and she wasn't wrong. The modest monthly fee was, to me, a way to buy a sync-free existence.

But then the whole "all you can eat" thing hit, and the way it hit the most was in encouraging me to listen widely again. I read a profile of Phoebe Bridgers early in the pandemic, for example. I'm a middle-aged dude, so I'm absolutely not her core demo. I read it b/c it was in The New Yorker, and generally those profiles are worth reading even if you have no idea who the person is, and no real connection to their work. But the author made her work sound interesting.

If it had been twenty years prior, I might've thought "huh, I should check her out," and then forgotten about it. If I was REALLY motivated I'd have put a note in my Palm Pilot that I'd probably neglect to consult the next time I was in a record store. But because it was 2020, I could just pull up her album on my phone and listen as soon as I finished the profile.

That's AMAZING.

I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums,

I am 100% an album bigot. I admit that sometimes when driving, when I know I won't be able to curate actively, I may ask my phone to play a "station" based on a song whose vibe I like in that moment. This, too, has lead to discovery, but and it usually works at least ok for keeping my ears happy.

But at home, doing intentional listening? It's albums.

I bought a record player as my protest

I'm 56. I feel like, most of the time in the US, people who were a couple years older than I am DEFINITELY had records growing up, and people who were a couple years younger ABSOLUTELY DID NOT. (There's weight on the scale either way for the presence of music-fan parents or hip older siblings.)

I didn't. When I first heard a song I definitely wanted to have, it was about 1982, and I bought it on a cassette. By the mid-80s when I was well into my teens, CD was already on the horizon and getting cheaper fast, so I bought cassettes sparingly -- I didn't want to buy "The Queen is Dead" on cassette and then have to REbuy on CD a few years later.

CD had completely taken over my music by 1988 or 1989.

But then the dot-com crash happened, and money was TIGHT. A former roommate had abandoned a turntable at my house. Thrift shops had records for like $1 or $2. My girlfriend (who is now my wife) could make a pretty great Saturday afternoon out of cheap tacos and a $5 budget at the used record store.

Now, if I buy physical music, it's probably on vinyl. It doesn't sound better than hi-res digital or CD, but it's more FUN to pull out a record and drop the needle. It's more intentional. And while they're harder to find now than they were 20 years ago, used record bins still have treasures.

myself2483• 6 days ago

We mostly discover new music from about 15 to 25 or 30, right? It's pretty normal for that to slow down as the concerns of adulthood kinda get in the way of keeping up with whomever is hot now.

Maybe, I guess? I still listen to some of the stuff from that era, but I've gotten wonderfully addicted to a music trivia game called Whatsamusic, which introduces me to a ton of music played by whoever's in the round. But only 30 seconds at a time (it's fairly fast-paced), so when I hear something that's intriguing enough to want to hear the rest of the track, I go add it to a "check this out later" playlist elsewhere. (I could also bookmark it in the game.)

My tastes have exploded in the 2 years since I found the game. There's so much good stuff out there! And playing with hosts that pick good themes ("Songs that're a good source of protein" was a recent favorite. The first play was "Maneater" and it went downhill from there.), you can't help but find more.

JohnBooty• 6 days ago

    My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships

Hey! You can bring this back in 2026! In a fit of random inspiration (possibly inspired by a glass of wine or two) I began a new practice.

If I'm hanging out with somebody who's passionate about music, I pull up Spotify (or Apple Music, whatever) and create a blank playlist. I hand them my phone and ask them to add some tracks for me.

Here's the trick that makes it work... I give them strict instructions not to pick something they think I'LL like. I just want some tracks or albums that THEY are passionate about.

I've had a lot of fun doing this! People are also generally touched that you want to know what kind of music they feel strongly about. It's a fun way to build connections.

myself2483• 6 days ago

I love this idea!

Yeeeeears ago, I was in the middle of some late-night hacking session, hanging with friends on IRC, and I had shared my screen via VNC so they could watch/help. (ISTR I had found the UART port on some piece of embedded hardware and we were muddling our way through U-boot incantations or something.)

At some point, I tabbed over to Winamp to change the music, which everyone saw, and one of the crew was like "oh hey you have artist X on your playlist, do you like artist Y?", and I admitted that I had not heard of artist Y. Seconds later there was a DCC file transfer.

Artist Y fit the mood perfectly. This was great.

This evolved into spawning Winamp on a second box that could be separately VNC'd into, where anyone could upload and play music they thought was appropriate for the session, without interrupting the main console. And someone installed a Shoutcast server on it too, so everyone could listen.

After a little while this was our little Friday-night routine, regardless of whatever other hacking was happening. The collaborative deejay stage -- we popped a Notepad on the Winamp box to track who was playing and who was up next, though ephemeral chat remained on IRC -- defined a brief era of my internet experience.

Many years later, I ran across a Spotify plugin called Jqbx that did basically the same thing. It was short-lived, but there seem to be several work-alikes. Sadly the community disbanded, but now it's got me thinking...

diseasedyak• 6 days ago

This is a fantastic idea, and I'm going to start doing this immediately!

burningChrome• 6 days ago

> Here's the trick that makes it work... I give them strict instructions not to pick something they think I'LL like. I just want some tracks or albums that THEY are passionate about.

This is exactly how I used to find music in the 80's when I was growing up. I had two guys I hung out with that were music aficionados. Both had older siblings who were really into music and so by proxy they would inherit their siblings music and musical tastes. I would hand over blank cassette tapes for them to put the stuff they were listening to. My god, the amount of music I amassed in junior high and high school was mind boggling.

This is a great updated version of this, thank you for this!

mjrbrennan• 5 days ago

This is a cool idea! Hope whoever gives me the blank playlist is prepared to listen to a lot of Bob Dylan :P

port117• 6 days ago

Okay, a bit of devil’s advocate but how much of that network effect was caused by being young?

I’m making an assumption, true, but a lot of us that grew up with ripped CDs were teenagers or young adults back then. Sharing music was inherently part of what we did because we were young and that was an activity we shared.

And as to Spotify: why do we keep complaining about these platforms but also keep patronising them? They deleted my account when I moved countries, so I deleted their app. We’re done. Years ago. Now I get music from the library when my kid goes there to pick up books. There’s Bandcamp, Qobuz, what have you. Look at local festivals with weird bands (how I discovered Constantinople and Huun-Huur-Tu). iPod hacks have never been easier! Let’s shake it up a bit :)

dbspin4• 6 days ago

To counter this - if you were around in the blog music era, being young had little to do with the network effect. Shitty pop music was in the ascendent culturally at the time, and the huge indie revival of the late 2000s and early 2010s happened primarily online. Hypemachine and the hundreds of mp3 blogs pushed novelty, obscurity, cross genre experiments, lost records etc. I'd finished college by this point, but dove right back into music and broadened my tastes considerably.

Discoverability and usability in general is godawful on bandcamp. Always has been, and shows no signs of improving. Never heard of Qobuz. What made the mp3 blog era so unique was exactly the network effect referenced above. The curators had audiences, they were aggregated from larger platforms and both deeply specific and hyper erudite. There was a whole culture around this online, and waves of excitement around certain artists, which would spill into 'in the know' circles offline.

Googling who's playing at local festivals or using some random app isn't and can't remotely be the same thing. I could see a music based social network taking off in the future. Currently there's nothing with the buy in, and the existing platforms are way too financially invested in pushing major labels, AI etc to become real recommendation and sharing engines.

hylaride• 6 days ago

The problem with subscription music is that the streaming platforms have no incentive to get you to discover new music - you're already paying either way.

Before Apple Music, when it was just the iTunes Store, Apple introduced iTunes Genius and it was scary good at recommending music; it worked so well I shudder to think what I spent in total buying $1 songs off of it.

But apple's music "play similar songs" just seems to take the same artists and pump their other album filler songs.

desecratedbody• 6 days ago

I forget why exactly I did this, but years ago I deleted Spotify for something related to offline playlists. I kept my music offline, and I'm guessing they messed that up. Plus, they would randomly re/move songs or whole albums, which I know isn't entirely their fault, but the poor UX surrounding these occurrences was annoying enough to help drive me away.

I've tried going back a few times, but it just isn't worth the money.

r3trohack3r• 6 days ago

I know the feeling and similarly miss it

I built audile to fill the gap for myself: https://audile.blankenship.io/

It’s not perfect, but it’s still delightful for me. It randomly (Math.random on the catalog) kicks out an album from Deezer’s library.

PaulHoule5• 6 days ago

One strategy is to look at the records on pitchfork's top 100 lists, say

https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ratings/1-pitchfork-highest-r...

and listen to the discography of those artists. You will find some stuff you liked there. I had another round of adventures when I plugged in a Sony 300 disc CD changer into my home theater and loaded it exclusively with DTS Music CDs

https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ratings/1-pitchfork-highest-r...

through an SPIDF connector. There were a lot of bands I already knew like Kraftwerk and Deep Purple and Don Fagan and Bjork but there were a lot of 5.1 mixes around 2000 made by musicians who cared about sound and I'd say anything like that is worth a listen.

sailfast• 6 days ago

These deep dives are fun, but it’s a lot more fun to have a conversation with someone about this sort of deep dive, get to know their taste and trust their next rec is probably going to be good.

I miss the community around music sites more than the content. Curation and passion was top notch and fun. Nobody was angling for ad dollars or revenue. They just did it to build the community.

philamonster• 6 days ago

Exactly this. There were even curated collections on Oink/what.cd of these lists which is where I obtained a large portion of my collection. Those days were the end of the era for me. I still had access to an FTP-ish site that was an offshoot of Something Awful Forums but that decayed probably 10-12 years ago.

I still have a turntable/cd-changer in my living room which is used monthly at least, but it is mostly a social thing (kids, friends etc). For mobile digital, I had been using Subsonic and subsequent forks since 2010 but self-hosting is too much work with real work and life taking a front seat, still have iSub on my phone with around 4k songs cached which is all I listen to in the car, no paid streaming services at all for over 2 years now. There is a 5k song limit for my car but the plan is to dump my whole collection into multiple USB sticks and rotate as I see fit.

I'm constantly reminded of those past days when certain songs roll through of my youth (90's, 2000's) and the who, when and where of it all. I also get to pass it on to my kids as they discover this musical past in real-time next to me which makes it even sweeter.

baliex• 6 days ago

I made a thing for this https://dailyalbum.art/

12 random albums every day, picked from a list of curated lists that I've curated over the years; some of which are pitchfork lists

I'm an active Spotify user, with increasing tendencies to find a more sustainable alternative, but the inertia is real

Electricniko• 6 days ago

I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band.

In the last couple of months, I've found that Gemini has actually become really good at finding those missing songs and obscure albums. It might take a few minutes of going back and forth and false leads, but I've found very obscure songs from the 80s and 90s that I've been searching for for decades without success. It helps if you give it everything you remember about the song, style, maybe who it sounded like or other bands that may have been around at the time.

Aurornis• 6 days ago

Reading this is weird because those network effects and friend group sharing experiences are exactly how my music lover friends use Spotify.

They share playlists instead of the files. They make friends of friends through playlist recommendations.

I was at a get together a few years ago where someone met a friend of mine and exclaimed, “Oh you’re _____ of the _____ playlist series! Those are amazing!” and then they talked about music and concerts for the next hour.

I don’t think piracy was as key to your experience and joy of music. It was the way you acquired the music, but your enjoyment and the social networks came from the novelty of it all and likely your age at the time. It was all new and fun and you still enjoyed it all.

Your story quickly shifted from being about piracy to complaining about music these days:

and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.

I think you’ve just fallen out of love with music in general. Piracy had nothing to do with it other than being the means to an end at the time of your honeymoon phase.

I remember substantially similar stories from older generations trying to explain how online piracy had ruined music discovery because the real fun was from their younger days of trading bootleg tapes, mix tapes from friends, and going to concerts. The cycle continues.

thirtygeo3• 6 days ago

"(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!)"

Try the HN hive mind! Can you remember a year, +/-?

I'm hoping it will turn out to be Metric or The Murder Plans or The Constantines or.... Some other great 2000s Canadian indie act I can bond with a stranger over :D

wk_end• 6 days ago

The Constantines are amazing!

_whiteCaps_• 6 days ago

My bet is Broken Social Scene.

devonsolomon6• 6 days ago

I probably should have just included it in the post, because now I’m replying the same thing hoping someone finds it…

I don’t think it’s BSS unless there are EPs from before what’s on Spotify. It was more punk rock than BSS, I think.

From the other comment TLDR… Male singer; Something like Blockparty/ TV on The Radio, song lyric was (maybe) something about throwing away your newspaper / no bad news today

tonylemesmer• 6 days ago

music-map.com is a wonderful music discovery tool I still use from time to time. Not just listing similarity but also weighted similarity. Its a fun tool!

[0] https://www.music-map.com/

canadiantim• 6 days ago

How does your Canadian indie band song go? I’m intimately familiar with a looot of Canadian indie music, could help ya find it

1vuio0pswjnm7• 6 days ago

"There's this whole world where people exist just to show up in the middle and take a big chunk of the money from something they had no part in creating."

This world is called "Silicon Valley"

Using a middleman, a so-called "tech" company, is not the same as trading music peer-to-peer

Historically, before the public internet, we traded music in-person or via postal mail

When I first accessed Oink I looked for the type of stuff that I liked to trade before the public internet existed: live, rare and unreleased material, e.g., outtakes. Old music

It passed the test. It was there

Today, there are bits and pieces of this stuff on YouTube but it's not the same

For this type of material, Spotify is a joke

This article should have discussed user-controlled peer-to-peer networking versus so-called "tech" company middleman

cdrnsf• 6 days ago

As someone with a tattoo of a clickwheel iPod, I can't help but endorse this.

All of my favorite recommendations and artists have come from friends I know in real life, online or both. Zines, blogs and other music communities are all wonderful sources as well. last.fm's trove of recommendations are still accurate and I hope it holds on.

I have different friends who I ask for recommendations from different genres and then end up in exploring further once they've opened the door.

Everything I listen to is from MP3s streamed through Navidrome living in an S3 bucket. My larger library is in another bucket and mirrored elsewhere. I collect some records but opt for the convenience of listening digitally and that listening consists of whole albums, never playlists (and never anything AI generated).

crazygringo• 6 days ago

and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.

You must not be using Spotify the way I do.

I access my friends' playlists and they access mine. Spotify lets you do exactly what you're describing, only faster and easier.

For a lot of people, they use Spotify specifically because of the network effects, because that's where people can find their playlists. Because everyone's culturally bought-in to the idea that Spotify is where you share that.

I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this

It literally was built for this. If you aren't using shared playlists, then you have only yourself to blame. Not Spotify.

digs-fm2• 6 days ago

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.

That's precisely the reason I'm building Digs[1]. If you like listening to whole albums and discovering things via friends, you might like it!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

volkl48• 6 days ago

I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this

I rarely say this, but you're using it wrong.

There are a number of good ways to utilize Spotify for music discovery that aren't "pray to the auto-play algorithm". The best resource IMO is artist pages.

- Artist pages:

- Artist Playlists - Many artists, especially smaller ones, curate their own playlists. I've found many good, new to me artists through what other small bands I like recommend on their playlists. If I hear a track I like on it then I click through to that artist and dive into their stuff.

- Discovered on - sometimes you'll find interesting user-curated playlists in here.

- Fans also like - I suppose it's "an algorithm" as well, but it's a deterministic one, and in most genres you're going to find other real bands there of similar popularity levels.

- Live Events: Pick your area, see who's playing. I'm not sure why but at least in North America it seems to be pretty much the most comprehensive nationwide concert listing at this point (better than BandsInTown, the remnants of Songkick, etc), and has a lot of little bar-tier shows that don't make it on most other live music trackers. (Some cities with a strong local scene have some kind of good local resource but they're only for that metro area + may only be for a specific set of genres.). I find a lot of the little shows I attend through this now.

- Playlists - not the ones algo-generated by Spotify, search for something and go down to the user-curated ones. Still have to check them over a bit to see that you're not getting AI slop, but there's a lot of gems.

But ultimately, you are never going to find + fall in love with much if you are just acting in a purely passive way. If you hear a song you like, you need to....actually hit like on that song, click on the artist, and explore that artist's discography.

monkeywork• 6 days ago

(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!)

what were the lyrics you recall?

devonsolomon6• 6 days ago

It was pretty alt-grungy (something like TV on The Radio or Blockparty at the time). Lyric I remember is from a song starting with something along the lines of: throw away your newspaper/ no more bad news today.

kylestratis2• 6 days ago

This has never gone away though, you just chose to stop doing it. I go to local shows pretty frequently, have made tons of friends (in bands and not) in the process, found new bands - some that produce an EP and breakup, others who chug along locally for years, others who tour nationally regularly but stay playing intimate shows here at home.

I've discovered so much wonderful music and even better people this way, it flummoxes me when people act like you can't go to a show or a record store or even use Soulseek and find new music.

jml78• 6 days ago

I can explain it. I graduated college, got a job, got married, had kids. Going to shows just didn’t happen.

Now I am getting back into it with my teenager.

On the flip side, I was part of an irc group back in the day where with permission of local bands, I would take their cds and get them released by music piracy groups. I would rip and release them. It got more ears on their music. This was all in the heavy metal scene.

marysol521• 6 days ago

Yeah their complaint seems to be "I don't socialise with my friends enough" rather than some platform specific change

trinsic22• 6 days ago

We get what we invest in. My feeling is there are other services to invest in like Bandcamp where at least you get an option to download a copy of the music. If people invest in Spotify with out thinking about the consequences then the the world we live in is exactly what we deserve. This same thing is happening with other form of art. Until people start making conscious decisions for world they want to create, the dark times will prevail.

tikhonj• 6 days ago

I've had the opposite experience, where Spotify (and, to a lesser extent, YouTube) has been a great way to find different music that I enjoy. The Discover Weekly playlist in particular has been surprisingly good at surfacing music that I enjoy but would have never encountered on my own.

This is handy for me because my taste in music runs pretty different from most of my friends.

I don't know how much of this comes from using Spotify in a different way, and how much is Spotify's algorithm adapting to my weird preferences.

marysol521• 6 days ago

Have you thought about sharing Spotify playlists with your friends?

I mean you can find other peoples shared playlists too. You have more ability to do what you describe now, than you did then

afzalive• 5 days ago

Instead of solving difficult, unsolvable problems, the goal of the tech industry has become to replace these sub-cultures with a subscription or social media. In doing so, first they offer convenience for cheap, once they've replaced the sub-culture, they ramp up their prices to profit.

khalic2• 7 days ago

It's incredible how people got convinced, by unrelenting propaganda, that private copy is a crime

inigyou15• 7 days ago

Also by, you know, successful criminal prosecutions.

khalic2• 7 days ago

Even before that, it was already the case with cassettes

meerita• 7 days ago

Convenience always wins over nostalgia.

pbasista4• 7 days ago

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.

caporaltito2• 7 days ago

Well. This is what Soundcloud or Bandcamp do. The problem is that: if it's for free, 99% of people won't pay.

pbasista4• 6 days ago

The users usually not paying is a problem introduced by those platforms, in my opinion. They make the entire experience too generic for the regular users to care.

It seems to me that the bands or musicians should distribute their music via their own websites. I think that then the users would care much more.

input_sh• 7 days ago

Add a download gate to the mix, remove the optional payment (I promise you nobody's gonna do that) and you're basically describing https://hypeddit.com/.

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.

pbasista4• 6 days ago

No. No restrictions should be put on downloads. The main point is that the distribution channels should always be free.

What should be gated and limited is the commercial use: reselling, relicensing, using for business, etc.

the optional payment (I promise you nobody's gonna do that)

Such "promises" seem to be based on no facts. Moreover, they contradict my personal experience.

I would be very interested in using that business model. In fact, I have already used it with other types of services. I have paid for software that is open source, free to download and free to use. Multiple times. Simply because I like the software and I wanted to thank the authors for it in some tangible way.

everyday7732• 7 days ago

So long as you don't try to go without any kind of copyright. I've heard stories of people releasing their music for free with no copyright only for somebody to download it, register it as THEIR copyright, and then sell it on all the platforms and even send a copyright takedown notice to the original creator.

Better to protect yourself by registering it under creative commons or a similar licence.

pbasista4• 6 days ago

Of course, the music should still be protected against the commercial use or reselling.

aa-jv• 7 days ago

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.

DuncanCoffee• 7 days ago

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.

BeetleB• 6 days ago

The Donkey Network (Emule's network) is still going these days.

leokennis2• 7 days ago

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.

inigyou15• 7 days ago

Newer torrent sites try to solve this with rewards for long-term seeding, which also helps keep the site alive but isn't zero-sum like the ratio.

xzel• 7 days ago

It was incredibly easy to get upload credit for seeding freeleech torrents (which included 10-20 albums of staff picks once a month or so) or re-encoding releases that were missing v2 or 320 encodings and scripts would pick up the releases. You could also just watch for new releases or follow trends and you'd easily get 5-10x ratio seeds. Also, you can get a $5/m seedbox to keep your downloads alive and you'd easy get back to 1.0 ratio assuming it wasn't some truly unlistenable album. I had a ratio of like 15 or something on what by leaving my computer on. At no point was it impossible or even difficult to get upload credit on any of these websites unless you were just leeching/turning off uploads. I just pulled up a larger site and I have 15 TB up, 1.15 TB down, and I'm doing absolutely nothing besides downloading stuff and deleting the torrents once I need space.

leokennis2• 6 days ago

Reading your reply, I think we have different definitions of “incredibly easy”.

IshKebab2• 6 days ago

Yes I remember even at the time people were laughing about the hilarious requirement for everyone to have a seed ratio greater than 1. Those sites were basically unusable for people who came to them later.

nubinetwork• 7 days ago

Spending 45 minutes to download a cd, only for it to turn into a 400mb pile of garbled noise, wasn't exactly joy.

mechazawa• 7 days ago

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.

apples_oranges• 7 days ago

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..)

infinite_spin• 7 days ago

*archiving/sharing

enahs-sf• 7 days ago

What are the content discovery options on top of the modern arr stack stuff?

anygivnthursday• 7 days ago

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.

andruby2• 7 days ago

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.

inigyou15• 7 days ago

Is Nights of the Jaguar considered techno now? I associate the genre of techno with, like, very repetitive rhythms.

have_faith• 6 days ago

It's a bit "bright" for a lot of techno, but it is very repetitive. Techno is a very broad genre with lot's of fuzzy edges. I'm suddenly reminded of Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music: https://music.ishkur.com/

andruby2• 6 days ago

Genres are fuzzy. It opened the door for me towards Derrick May, Adam Beyer, Carl Cox, etc.

If you had to put a label on it, what genre would you file it under?

dspillett2• 7 days ago

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.

inigyou15• 7 days ago

Like many things though, it's only acceptable if you are rich. You can do exactly the same thing OpenAI does, get served the exact same lawsuit, present the exact same defense, and lose because you're not OpenAI.

dspillett2• 6 days ago

Aye. Saying it makes me feel marginally better though, despite knowing it wouldn't get me anywhere as a real legal defense. The fact that acknowledging the hypocrisy won't help me really, will not stop me from pointing out the hypocrisy with boorish regularity!

damienmeur2• 7 days ago

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.

cobbzilla7• 7 days ago

it’s only less diverse at the top.

go down a couple of layers and various genres of music are experiencing renaissance’s like you would not believe.

pop music has always (mostly) sucked

[EDIT] Bring on the downvotes. You never bothered to explore. If you take what’s given to you by those who are selling, you’re in the seller’s market. Your downvotes are pride to me.

damienmeur2• 7 days ago

IMO it's just very scattered across very huge players / very small players that dont really live out of their artist work (it s just like a "hobby").

If you look at this year rock werchter festival in Belgium, it's ofcourse very good artists: Gorillaz, The XX, Franz Ferdinand,...

But almost only groups from the 90`s / 2000`s that could make their name when the industry was more tolerant with non-pop / blockbuster music.

I m over caricaturing ofcourse, but probably that if Gorillaz was created in 2026, Damon Albarn would post his work on a forgotten soundcloud, do some bartmitzvah during the weekend to roundup the end of the months while working as a ubereats delivery driver.

kmeisthax3• 6 days ago

What you are getting at is that discovery platforms do not give attention for free anymore and you are expected to pay for it. In the radio era this was called payola, it was illegal, and people did it anyway because radio was the gatekeeper to financial success in the medium. Payola isn't even restricted to streaming services anymore. For example, Amazon expects you to buy advertising on their own platform if you publish a Kindle book.

The fact that home video would provide a second boost of cash for a production was important, and I do mourn the slow death of physical media. But it is not directly connected to the discoverability problem we have. Even when people were buying CDs and DVDs, you still had to contend with a distribution system that largely had already decided what you could and could not buy. Midlisters still made shit money, because publishers do not actually care about their midlist and they don't want to sell you originality. They want to sell you IP they already own.

luciana1u• 7 days ago

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.

semiquaver• 7 days ago

Soulseek is still going strong :)

losvedir2• 7 days ago

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.

GuB-42• 6 days ago

AI changed the perception of the "information wants to be free" idea.

In a sense, AI companies did a lot to "free" the information, they took everything they could, including pirated data, and put them all into a model, which you can then query to get something similar to "not free" information, but clean of copyright.

But now that information is actually free (or at least, freer than before) people realize that it didn't come out of nowhere. People worked to produce that content, and many of them are people like you and me, not billionaires and faceless corporations, and it is affecting them and their ability to produce more content.

That part didn't change, what changed was that before, piracy was a rebellious act, done by poor teenagers, something easy to sympathize with. Now, it is done by trillion (!) dollar companies on an industrial scale, not much sympathy to give here.

inigyou15• 6 days ago

It would probably be easier to reconcile if the AI itself was free, but it isn't, the AI is completely locked down, and that just makes it pure hypocritical theft.

account4210• 6 days ago

Sometimes HN feels unrecognizable with how much the comments I read are pro- intellectual property.

How so? Many people just rightfully care mainly about the cultural exploitation aspect and the impact on society. Under that lens you can be anti-copyright when it is used by corporations to exploit individuals and pro-copyright or at least pro-equal enforcement when it is ignored by corporations to exploit individuals.

ryandrake4• 6 days ago

This nuanced take is appreciated less and less as HN grows.

losvedir2• 6 days ago

To be clear, I was never actually really one of the pro-piracy types. Honestly, I think very few people are really all that high-falutin' principled anyway. It really is hard when it's free to reproduce; you having something isn't preventing someone else from having it as well.

The one clear straight line I can draw is: people are pro- or anti-IP when it benefits them.

If you're a broke student, you were anti-IP (and convincing yourself you were really just sticking it to the record companies, not the musicians). If you were an indie musician who benefited from name recognition you could afford to be anti-IP to get your name out there. If you were a well-known musician back then, you were relatively pro-IP, to get your royalties.

These days, if you're a struggling artist you're pro-IP and screw the AI companies for crawling your work. If you're a small business plumber scrambling to make ends meet and AI helps you make business cards and flyers, you're anti-IP. (At least as far as AI and its training goes - if someone tries to use your brand, you're back to pro-IP.)

Anyway, since there's no physical basis, IP is a weird legal restriction solely there to benefit certain groups, and whether you support it (or should support it) or not depends on context and which groups you're in at the moment.

marysol521• 6 days ago

I used to be a member, and activist for The Pirate Party and Open Rights Group. Went to all the meetings and spoke with people, and found them to have a much more nuanced view on "piracy" than your average. Thinly-veiled "I want to access everything for free, big corp bad! Shhh I know it's a indie production, but bad SONY!"

dfxm124• 6 days ago

Can you objectively think about what was/wasn't better? Aside from download speeds, I don't think piracy is any easier or harder today than it was back then. As a negative for back then, I think the threat of legal action against regular folks downloading stuff loomed larger. I think today groups focus more on quality/file size than time to market.

Overall, I think piracy is in a healthier state today.

inigyou15• 6 days ago

Maybe the threat of serious legal action was stronger back then but I think the threat of light legal action is stronger now. They've streamlined the processes for getting your ISP to ban you (largely by copyright troll companies buying up all the ISPs).

In Germany, if you download a public torrent, there is a brief legal process which always ends with 100-2000€ being deducted from your bank account and given to the copyright holder. Not that it could end with that - it does end with that, every time. First your ISP sends you an email forwarded from the copyright holder demanding that you pay an amount of money or you'll be sued for a larger amount of money. You either pay immediately, or you accept getting sued, you lose the lawsuit, and you pay a larger amount of money. If you don't pay that, the court calls your bank and subtracts an even larger amount of money directly from your account. If you don't have a bank account, bailiffs show up at your house to seize property to sell. One of these things always happens. There is zero wiggle room.

The US isn't quite as strict as the notoriously strict Germany, but it has been trending in that direction.

nirvael2• 7 days ago

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.

speed_spread2• 7 days ago

Piracy encouraged buying music. You'd learn of this cool band through a friend and would buy their next album when it came out. People still had the same budget for music but weren't so much at the whim of what music executives wanted to push at the moment. The network effects more than made up for the "lost" revenue.

Diogenesian2• 6 days ago

That's total bullshit. Global music revenue fell by 50% because of piracy[1]. What music piracy did was make it impossible for artists to sell albums without engaging in parasocial celebrity-building and shameless merch.

And everyone knows this is true!!! Music pirates also like to point out that historically musicians only played live, so it's totally a-okay that jazz musicians can no longer make a living from the studio, that even John Scofield, the greatest guitarist alive, is only middle-class because he is constantly on tour in his 70s.

People talk out of both sides of their mouth on piracy because their only real motivation is "I like getting stuff for free and don't like moral responsibility." There is nothing more contemptible than tech folks telling easily falsifiable lies about how digital music affects working musicians. The cynical dishonesty is so depressing. Ever since I was a kid I knew it was just people rationalizing theft.

[1] https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/napster-made-monster...

jMyles• 6 days ago

I get that artists aren't paid enough, but it's better than the $0 they get from piracy.

No it's not. We'd _much_ rather you steal our music if it means we are part of a free, permissionless, seeking-to-be-comprehensive library of the traditions of humankind.

We don't give a fuck about whether you get our music according to the prescribed notions of some particular state or corporation.

I'm a bluegrasser, so maybe my lens is pretty shifted (given that our tradition is one of passing on copyright-unencumbered tunes from time immemorial). But this view is very widespead - essentially universal - in bluegrass. There's a reason that every IBMA and bluegrass grammy has gone to a drm-free record the past bunch of years.

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free

albedoa3• 6 days ago

it's the same infinite music library

No it's not. That is absurdly wrong. You can ignore whoever led you to believe it.

I get that artists aren't paid enough, but it's better than the $0 they get from piracy.

I was going to say that you should talk to some artists, but one has already replied to you.

This should clear your confusion enough to update your opinion.

drumhead• 7 days ago

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.

parasti2• 7 days ago

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.

motbus3• 7 days ago

I had spotify premium for ~10 years i think. I recently cancelled. I travel a lot, so now they started complaining i was not listening near my address.

then they started blocking family members because i was not around.

then they wanted to charge in a different coin because i was not home, but EVEN if i would their login doesnt work because it redirects me to a different country if i am abroad.

they are vibe coding too hard that they add all bs they think is a good idea. it was a good push for me to cancel that.

rkharsan64• 7 days ago

I haven't used it, but YouTube Music has a samples section which is supposed to show you "shorts" of new (to you) songs.

HackerThemAll• 7 days ago

Then switch to YouTube Music or Tidal, they're way better.

plastic-enjoyer2• 7 days ago

There is no joy of discovery of new music that you haven't heard.

I have my problems with Spotify, but this is not one of them. I discover new artists, or long forgotten artists, regularly - even some weird obscure shit like Tänzelcore.

But I have to agree, that the magic of discovering new music is not the same as, for example, digging records in a record store or via obscure boards and platforms (remember FF-Shrine?)

parasti2• 6 days ago

How? What's your secret? It's actively fighting me from discovering anything new. "Hey we'll show this artist you stopped listening to two years ago on your start screen forever. Wanna jump back in?" That's Spotify to me.

roryokane• 6 days ago

If you liked FF-Shrine, there are some active successor sites. Search for Sitting on Clouds (which is like FFShrine’s Galbadia Hotel) and SquidBoard (a forum).

m_w_• 6 days ago

There is no joy of discovery of new music that you haven't heard. There is no connection to other humans through music.

Hard disagree here.

For new music, Discover Weekly is great, if you take some time to engage with it on a routine basis. Even better, if you have an artist/genre you already like, the Fans Also Like or Discovered On will link you to other artists and playlists. Super easy to go down rabbit holes of new artists and playlists.

As far as connecting with others, I do like the spotify DMs (in-app share), the friend activity tab, and particularly the share attribution. When you share a song via link (url with ?si=), you'll permanently be linked to it. For a number of my favorite songs, I see "From {friend}" at the bottom while listening. Makes me feel super connected to friends I've bonded with over music.

starky• 6 days ago

It seems like every recommendation algorithm gets into a state that is broken eventually. For the music streaming services, I find they end up in one of two states, either it shows me the exact same artists and songs over and over again even if I skip their songs constantly, or I'll play a song once out of curiosity or accident and it decided that that genre is all I am interested in listening to for the next month. Is it really that hard to map artists

I got so frustrated with Tidal recently that I finally sat down and finally setup a media player on Linux to play my locally saved music (most of which is from What.cd).

belthesar• 6 days ago

I still find that, even after all these years, Pandora's recommendation engine still seems to be the best. I can tune into stations that I created, jeez, 15+ years ago, and it might play one or two tracks that I know, but it quickly diverges into new tracks that are still within the "flavor" of the station, but I've never heard of.

juvvel2• 7 days ago

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.

delduca• 7 days ago

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)

alexpotato• 6 days ago

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.

erayack3• 6 days ago

RIP to the golden age of file sharing.

skeater15• 6 days ago

Its not lost here, still going strong. Lol

paulcole• 6 days ago

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).

joncooper• 6 days ago

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-...

merryocha2• 6 days ago

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.

RickJWagner• 6 days ago

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...

THansenite• 6 days ago

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?

grvdrm• 6 days ago

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?

albedoa3• 6 days ago

I wasn't sure if this post was lamenting the loss of discovery or the loss of stable revenue streams for artists.

I haven't read the article yet, but the most devastating loss was the catalog itself. It was the largest archive of music in history. Of course, discovery was enabled in part by that.

I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too.

It's not even comparable. If your definition of discovery considers what you can find on Spotify, then you're talking about a completely different thing. That's not to say that Spotify and elsewhere don't have discoverability — they're just not filling the void.

as someone who makes electronic music

Your stuff was probably on there :D

What I wonder is whether folks here (members of Lobsters) see that community as possessing the same magic/thrill/quality of What.CD?

I'm missing the comparison here too. There are communities that possess that thrill (some of the best of which don't even offer invites), so I know what you mean by it. I just haven't seen or heard that about Lobster.

dfxm124• 6 days ago

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.

kyboren2• 6 days ago

No, it was a much better system.

Like all piracy, it didn't condition access on payment. And like all P2P, more users (because free) meant more content available to everybody.

The rules weren't perfect, but they imposed order and organization and prevented harmful (for P2P networks) duplication and fragmentation. Like any society, the rules helped to provide a framework to solve a coordination problem in a hopefully-global-utility-maximizing way.

The result was a vibrant community cooperatively maintaining a virtual Library of Alexandria of music where library cards were cost free.

shadowtree• 6 days ago

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.

throw4847285• 6 days ago

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.

athrow• 6 days ago

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.

efilife• 6 days ago

43.6MB for that huge gif at the top of the article. This could have been a 2MB video at most

socalgal23• 6 days ago

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.

duxup• 6 days ago

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.

inigyou15• 6 days ago

A successor site exists. It's called [REDACTED].

pimeys• 6 days ago

1970-01-01• 6 days ago

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.

Aeolun• 6 days ago

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.

kulshan• 6 days ago

I still have that joy in my heart and on my server

snitzr• 6 days ago

Bring back Muxtape.

f8e6a7d4-58d2• 6 days ago

the i2p network has a steady and active community around the postman tracker, it's worth checking out. contribute if you can!

4lx87• 6 days ago

Anybody remember what.cd?

coss• 6 days ago

I really miss What.cd's band-affinity graphs.

ranprieur• 6 days ago

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.

magicalhippo• 6 days ago

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrCn5VSjSrE

AntronX4• 6 days ago

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.

digs-fm2• 6 days ago

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

doawoo• 6 days ago

nicotine+

meindnoch2• 6 days ago

Lost? It's as alive as ever, if you're in the right circles.

bethekidyouwant• 6 days ago

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.

johnnyApplePRNG• 6 days ago

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.

gitowiec• 6 days ago

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.

stronglikedan• 6 days ago

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...

digitaltrees• 6 days ago

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.

dyauspitr3• 6 days ago

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?

IndySun• 6 days ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L23UJfvptd8&ra=m

raydev2• 6 days ago

Not really the point of the article but the praise for NIN participating in the culture bothers me, because in the late 90s one could visit nineinchnails.net and just straight up download decent quality MP3s (and some MP2s!!) of the entire NIN discog, until one day (I think in 1999? 2000?) they removed all the tracks. :(

Of course, my bother is rooted in my little unemployed unmoneyed 13 year old self who didn't have access to NIN CDs at the time, but did have access to my friend's internet when I visited his house.

thom• 6 days ago

Perhaps I am the only person well served by the modern music industry, but I absolutely love Apple Music. The new music playlist it gives me each week has introduced me to hundreds of new artists and dozens of songs that rank up there with my teenage heart songs. I think I mostly skipped the golden age of piracy as my formative music experiences were the Evening Session and John Peel on the BBC, coupled with lax parenting and a proximity to Camden.

There are still some CDs and MP3s I take special care of because I know they’re not in Apple’s catalogue, and I’ve no doubt I’m contributing to the death of the very thing I love by participating in capitalism, but until access to all my music is unilaterally rescinded I will continue to be a very happy (paying) customer.

emmp• 6 days ago

I was in OiNK, and later I was an Elite on what.cd. I had access to college radio station cd shipments at the time too. Filled my fair share of requests. Nothing that has come since compares to those days

vegenaise2• 6 days ago

pretty sure red has surpassed wcd in the size of archive, # of torrents, albums, etc. fewer ppl tho, much quieter forums, which was a big draw for people i've gathered.

whatcd2• 6 days ago

Oink.me.uk, What.CD, and waffles.fm were amazing

RIP

matheusmoreira2• 6 days ago

RIP. What was a modern day Library of Alexandria.

sourcecodeplz• 5 days ago

always remember there is yandex... you can find anything there, like an unlocked google

CrimsonCape2• 5 days ago

Asking for a friend, do we have a modern distributed peer-to-peer end-to-end encrypted file sharing system?

miladyincontrol• 4 days ago

I will never let Sloppify or similar define my music tastes. I still do digital music discovery the old fashion way, and enjoy several TBs of music with nary a single western publicly released album in sight.

esotericwarfare• 4 days ago

Now I downnload my music with yt-dlp.

yt-dlp -f worstaudio "ytsearch1: system of a down lost in hollywood"

The lost joy of music piracy

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