> 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.

    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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

> 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!

+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.)

> 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

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

The result increased the likelihood of irl performance attendance.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

> 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

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.

> 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.

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.

>(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?

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/

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.

"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

"(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

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.

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

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

>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.

> 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.

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.

> 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).

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.

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.

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

> 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!

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.

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.

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

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

What I also miss on Spotify: live mixes.

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

>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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

> 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

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.

> 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.

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

> 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”

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

> 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.)

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.

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.

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

> 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.

What do you mean by "doing release Fridays"?

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.

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.

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.

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_...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Soulseek is still going hard.

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.

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

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 :)

It's still there!

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

> 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.

> 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?)

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

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

[dead]

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.

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

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

[dead]

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?!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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

> 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.

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.

[flagged]

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.

> 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

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.

Ty

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Also by, you know, successful criminal prosecutions.

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

RIP. What was a modern day Library of Alexandria.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Copyright infringement is not stealing.

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

Funny because that is exactly how capitalism works.

[dead]

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

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

Soulseek is great still use it regularly.

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.

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

[flagged]