> 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.

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

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.

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.

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).

    My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships

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.

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 :)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Am I the only one here who legit purchased MP3s downloads for 99 cents off Amazon? (This was the era after Napster stopped working.)

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I had been on the hunt for them a couple years after purchasing The First Winter 25 years ago :)

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.

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.

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

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?!

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.

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

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.

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?)

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

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Bandcamp is indeed really bad at suggesting things you’ll like…

To your last point: it’s weird how Bandsintown or Last.fm didn’t figure this out. Last.fm has so much potential but just isn’t… interested?

One advantage of the offline scene is that I see a lot more local artists, all knowing each other and playing together. There seems to be some camaraderie/support for each other going on.

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

A lot of them seed from home, with humongous servers, and there are preservation programs going on in various places.

Myself I have gone through phases in my adult life where I tried hard to expand my musical interests. Like around the time my son was born I was really into obscure psychedelia, both vintage and contemporary and also prog rock and other rock B-sides from the 1970s. Then later I got into the british 1980s music I missed. Then it was Ingsoc and then the Super Furry Animals, lately Tyler the Creator. One thing that's driven it is that I make these cards

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115939341268444811

and don't want them to show my age!

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

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

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

i wish i wouldve bought more!

i wish i had a legit music torrent site nowadays too

https://litter.catbox.moe/od8vcq.png

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.

As someone who loves lsdj... ouch.

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

But also their algorithmic playlists have gotten worse and worse. They overfit user data. They all recommend the same singles over and over and over. I've found they also don't make sense, recommending music that doesn't even belong in the playlist.

I've switched to user created playlists more often than the algo ones, although a lot of user playlists are just saved copies of Spotify generated recommendations.

I listen to the "Deep Cuts" recommender on Plexamp a lot, it uncovers a lot of good music that I haven't heard before out of my large collection, I've got no idea how it works.

One funny thing about it is that I do not play it through the speakers at home because my family tends to find anything selected by a recommender really provocative, not necessarily in a bad way, but the last thing I want to do is answer questions about music I didn't select myself. I mean I can play through a Charlie XCX or Tyler the Creator or rock-opera phase Kinks album and nobody says anything about it but if they do I have a good story to tell about it, but it's too annoying to get hassled about some UB40 track I never heard before that's between a BTO and Olivia Newton-John track.

(Generally I find that recommender selected content is "provocative", like if anyone is looking over my shoulder, they are very unlikely to see what I am actually interested in and working on but instead they want to ask me questions about things on my screen that I'm either just a little warm or totally cold to)

definitely engagement bait and they lean hard on popular (both pop, and just well loved / common) music.

no idea if the "payolla" system is still in effect like with radio but it feels like it sometimes.

I don't tend to let songs autoplay outside of playlists unless I'm commuting, and it usually just picks artists and songs I already know anyways.

Occasionally if I want to find more like an artists I go onto the song radio on Spotify but just read the song titles and artist names, it's not worth setting aside a couple hours for the possibility of two gems.

If I had one complaint or thing I wish I could change about my listening habits it's that I wish I spent more time listening to albums in order. I think something is lost by skipping straight to the best tracks - the dessert as it were, you've got to take the time so it's all the sweeter when it comes.

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

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.

https://radio.garden/api/geo

Do tell more, I’m very curious— am I unaffected in the US? I haven’t noticed a big change in the past several years. What happened?

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

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.

I always think, how different the internet was back then. Oh well, nostalgia:)

I also think the industry is pretty tolerant of more experimental/non-pop music, just that this isn't really true for the rock scene amymore. Hardcore punk, hardstyle, dubstep, hyperpop, shoegaze are all huge genres now, large enough to live off of and perform at festivals as big as coachella.

You may be right about Damon Albarn but that would just be a result of which genres have listeners who are willing to listen to smaller, non-mainstream artists. I think the biggest example of this is that mainstream rock music a la guns and roses has pretty much completely died out, while genres with smaller, more dedicated fanbases like post-rock and noise rock are still going strong as ever. I'm sure if you check your local shows (and you live in a place with reasonably large population) you will be able to find plenty of bands who completely live off their music.

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...

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.

Of course not. That would probably infringe on advertising standards. But it is the clear implication.

There is a world in which lastfm is the one of the most popular social networks, tiktok before tiktok (which started as music.ly) if you like. There's another in which it developed into a Tidal like successful boutique streaming platform. Instead it's a half forgotten not really working nonsense.

My favourite lastfm story, is that back when it was somewhat popular (at least indie popular), someone commented on my lastfm profile to say they'd been in Tokyo and been approached by the members of a hyper niche Swedish band (Strip Squad) because one of the members had heard their music being played in a park. The guy playing them had found them because of my lastfm. Lastfm at the time actively suggested connecting with other users who had similar psychographic taste.

I'm all in favour of supporting local music scenes. Just personally I don't enjoy gigs, never have really. Sound is bad, always too loud, vibes are too alcohol based (at least here in Ireland), they're pricey etc. I'd actually love it if there was more of a 'listening cafe' Japanese style venue / scene here. There's a popular bar that poses as one, but it has a terrible, wildly over loud sound system in a box room with a loud open bar next door.

Thank you for the inspiration for a weekend project!

The movie industry unfortunately never gave up no matter how vain the attempts are.

It's a centralized service, they just configure you account to be invisible in the search results of others.

And they don't check whether the file is really reachable. I've 'chmod 000' copyrighted files so they could not be downloaded (but still could be found in search), and Soulseek administrators were not happy with that ether.

I've been shadowbanned 4 times or so. They never unban, need new account.

I am absolutely sure others can, but not me. I also think credit goes to far better encoders today than what we had 25 years ago.

One of these attempts that I assume most people are familiar with but is an interesting read for those that aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Even if it may be not a punishable offense, that still freaks out people, and they choose not to seed from home or use public websites which are scraped by DMCA watchdogs.

I don't see much point in contributing to closed silos (even if I'm present on the majority of invite-only music trackers and occasionally contribute there) because I have ThePirateBay and RuTracker account: it's the same, but it's open for everyone and google-able.

Some private trackers disallow accessing them via VPN, which I find super strange. They want to access the website with your residential connection, but they allow seeding via VPN (which many do, because see above).

Other private tracker which I used to be on had a timeout on account life time. If you don't log in once in a while (6 months AFAIR), your account will be suspended, even if you're seeding all the content in the torrent client all this time.

I'm running my torrent preservation service, and many anime/jrock/jpop downloads start downloading only after weeks or months of waiting for a seeder.

Groups and individuals who used to be active on the scene has switched elsewhere and retracted their archives and XDCC bots.

There are Chinese torrent-to-web download services which seem to cache already downloaded stuff for a very long time if not indefinitely, sometimes you can download it from there if someone managed to use the service (they don't seed it over bittorrent though).

Sony's response to this was to use their bubble-era money to start buying US record labels, purely so they could force them to support their formats. But they ultimately wound up buying the exact same mentality that they were fighting against, and the labels won that fight internally. Sure, Sony had Minidisc releases of major label music, but the format flopped anyway, because they were entirely unwilling to market it for recording in the US. Outside of the US, Minidisc was the Apple "Rip. Mix. Burn" experience half a decade prior to the iPod; but in the US that experience basically didn't exist unless you knew exactly where to look.

Made. My. Day.

radio.garden feels like spinning an AM radio dial late at night (which is how I discovered John Peel as a youngling). It's a lovely thing, verging on art, and should be treasured.

Which is "piracy" - not that that makes it ethically wrong. It's actually the main kind of copying that is targeted by DRM since users of the LimeWire kind never see that.

The article you linked does not provide any source and / or a methodology for how this was calculated and attributed specifically to piracy

Maybe I should have mentioned the threat of criminal charges, or defined piracy as downloading (but it seems like you understood it this way too as you mentioned "downloading a public torrent"). Rights holders do make sure there are news stories every so often about lawsuits around some act related to piracy, but of course regular people can be bullied in the courts, whether they are truly liable or not.

People just like saying something doesn't exist when they just didn't bother to look at their emails.

And to think that if I want to publish an app I need to submit to Google for retinal scanning and anal probing to prove my identity (which wouldn't help because my identity is banned from submitting apps, but still).

Approaching 50, with less sensitive ears and a bit of tinnitus, I’m happy with the convenience of Bluetooth headphones and whatever format Spotify uses.

"To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC. iPod users can and do acquire their music from many sources, including CDs they own. Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM. This music can be played on iPods or any other music players that play these open formats."

And this part might be interesting in the context of the article:

"The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy."

I’m sorry the UK cripples your streaming. That really sucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

We have Derek Fawcus, "mdx", "DVD Jon" et al to thank for making DVDs worthwhile.

In otherwords, it's theft if the law says it is. Simple as that.

I use a dual A7X setup with a Sub10 Mk2 in a proper studio listening environment, and I can easily hear the difference between a low‑quality MP3 and a fully lossless WAV/FLAC. I do have trained ears, but even an untrained listener could probably notice that level of difference.

Now, 480i is something I'd rather leave behind but even that is a lesser concern than the content of the film.

I use a pair of calibrated Genelec 8341 btw.

"Your claim is poorly supported."

"Well it came from a book. Check it out if you're interested."

"What? It's not free? Hell no I won't pay!"

> "What? It's not free? Hell no I won't pay!"

I am also sceptical that my burning questions will be answered in the book, thus I choose to not buy it. Also, the Goodreads reviews don't look too good

A contrived example I have in my head "My friend has more definitive proof in HIS book that <claim>, it only costs $1 trillion. Go read it yourself." For this particular thread its a bit disingenuous, but in a general case how does one go about understanding / disproving arguments made like this?