My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.

The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.

(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)

I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.

I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.

I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.

Even albums mentioned in the Norwegian business magazine D2 can be impossible to find in legit channels. Your only option is to buy used CDs on Discogs for 50-100 USD, or know your way around the successors of these sites

These CDs weren’t even on Oink or What (or did not survive the transitions)

https://www.dn.no/d2/musikk/stena-line/lars-holte/spotify/ha...

What.cd was so vast a resource that it means something different to everyone. I personally lament the loss of the forums the most. I would post dissertation-length comments there and others reciprocated. I would put hours of research into debating a single topic. It's where I probably wrote my best stuff. The high barrier to entry reduced the noise and selected for people who were invested in being part of a community. The forums are also where I learned about hacker news!

I learned so much about music during those days. Algorithmic recommendations don't hold a handle to the recommendations you'd get in the forumns and in the comments sections of individual albums. Consuming music via What was equal parts learning and consumption.

It was obvious that poor music sales was a distribution problem, not a piracy problem. History played out in a way that proved this to be true. Spotify killed What.cd before the French did.

What got me that feeling of discovery again, decades later, and even surpassed it, was doing release Fridays and just listening.

I mostly know what (sub)-genres I like, I go through upcoming release lists for the next week, open every bandcamp link in a new tab (or for those that don’t have bandcamp, I see if I care about the genre enough to search for a single on YouTube), and then I have maybe a hundred links, I sample everything for a few seconds and decide on yay or nay, and about 10 - 20 % go onto my excel sheet. Then on Fridays (up to Sunday, depending on how busy the release day is) I start listening to all those albums to see which of those I’ll buy (usually 1-2).

It’s some effort, but my appreciation for music was never this high.

Soulseek especially had a community where you found someone who was into the same kind of music as you (obscure breakcore! japanese garage punk!) and could browse their collections, and chat to them also! What a wonderful way to make music friends and get good recommendations.

But these days, I do wonder how much 90s / early 2000s time was any better or if all of us who had experienced them are just getting older and nostalgic for our youth.

The music/movie industry is now way less diverse, because smaller actors cannot live out of it, so only the big players remain and produce stuff that only a very large audience would like but not love (you cannot please everyone whenyou have a 1B audience). Smaller categories in movies and music will just disappear: look at the 2000`s movies like the Ninth gate or some cool thriller, these could not make enough money just with the theater tickets but they could exist thanks to the DVD money. Now with streaming there is not enough revenue to capitalize on second tier movies (not block busters) that would be really loved by a smaller audience.

We have a less fragmented culture so by definition it just slowly looses its richness.

I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like "presave this (you can't listen to it)", "jump back in (you literally already listened to it)", "your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)". There is no joy of discovery of new music that you haven't heard. There is no connection to other humans through music. Audioscrobbler/Last.fm is miles ahead of this. Youtube is miles ahead of this.

Here's how I discover music these days: I swipe Youtube shorts until its algorithm decides to show me an artist, then I look that artist up on Spotify. Thats how bad Spotify is - it's an audio server with search and a hundred layers of irrelevant features bolted on top.

Years later it was uncovered that it was never System of a Down, but one Joe Pleiman

https://kotaku.com/no-system-of-a-down-did-not-make-a-zelda-...

Music piracy also changed the course of my life, thanks to a DVD full of music I discovered my passion for metal, picked up the electric guitar, met a lot of friends, partners and had a lot of fun (I could say it was the best time of my life, but that was just because I was younger and without worries ;)

I also had no money to spend on CDs, nowadays I'm often thinking about buying a blu-ray player to buy the albums and movies I love... but I don't want them to collect dust, so I'm waiting for an excuse...

I do have a Sony Walkman (the new one) with a nice collection of music, but with spotify (which I want to replace with Qobuz) it's not getting used. I'm also selfhosting NaviDrome.

Nobody can "own" a song that I've enjoyed and listened to in my own head.

That's my own experience.

And if I want to have that experience again at any point in the future, I sure as shit should not have to shell out money to some record producer (or band member, whoever has their hand out) to do so.

If you want to make music, make music.

If I want to listen, I'll listen.

If I see them in person and I feel like paying to see them, I will.

I published a sociology paper on this in college that may be of interest! (2000)

The social organization of audio piracy on the Internet (Media, Culture, and Society)

"In this article, we describe and analyze the emerging audio piracy (MP3) subculture on the Internet. As is evident to even the most naïve observer of the contemporary landscape, the explosion of Internet-based communication is radically redefining the nature of social relationships in modern societies, if not creating altogether novel forms of social interaction (Lyotard, 1991; Stone, 1996).

Yet sociologists have yet to take the Internet seriously as a site of ethnographic investigation. Where sociological observation concerning the Internet exists at all, it is through vague generalizations and unqualified assertions about what these new virtual forms of communication portend for “society” (Kellner, 1995), offering little in the way of concrete social research.

We attempt to advance the sociological study of “virtual communities” by embarking on an extremely focused study of one particular Internet subculture that is literally revolutionizing the production and consumption of popular music: audio pirates."

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/q3tcst00gjbwr5t02x38f/Social-...

Those days of the internet were fun, but also a product of their times. Whatever niche worlds we make now won’t be like the past, they have to be new.

In my time pirating I used to take tracks from The Sound Of Music and rename the files / metadata something like <popular metal band> - <popular song by different popular metal band>.

I got a lot of downloads.

Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

So here I see music from what I think is DJ Ronaldo. And this is when download 1 mp3 could easily take half an hour on our dial-up connections. So we only downloading 1 or 2 songs max.

Turns out it’s not the footballer but DJ Rolando with Nights of the Jaguar. Brilliant techno song. First time I heard anything like it. Hooked for life. Bought it on vinyl a few years later. Became a techno DJ and event organiser for a while.

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

At some point the “market” was saturated. 99% of music was on the site, and every release had plenty of seeders and peers.

Unless you had early access to new releases, or maybe a seedbox with insane bandwidth and storage, it was almost impossible to actually meaningfully seed.

For me the only working strategy was to download What.cd releases from other torrent sites, then “downloading” the release from What.cd and then wait weeks until I had seeded enough to be able to “afford” one new download.

The current stream services don't have that feature and their discovery algos are attrocious.

One of the executives describes it as:

"We had a laptop open and we tried to play 'stump the Napster' but not matter which obscure song someone threw out, it was there!"

To put it in modern terms Napster indexed:

- every song

- on every user's computer

- and then indexed all of those songs on a central server

I suspect people would pay for a service that offered this (same for movies) but a combination of licensing, IP protection etc don't allow that to happen.

I miss the old bulletin board days of the mid 2000s to mid 2010s, before Facebook and other social media took over. I'm part of a vintage car building community (LocostUSA) that still uses forums, but is a very small, niche community. What others are still active?

I spent tons of time on Napster and LimeWire roughly between late 1990s and 2005 when I graduated from college.

A few things stood out as related topics:

1. I attended UMass-Amherst - a school not unfamiliar with and perhaps even popular for jam band culture. There was, at one point, a tool distributed that allowed any particular user to search the entirety of the network of users that also used that tool. So, what quickly evolved was this huge searchable library of songs, videos, etc. covering the thousands of students that chose to put something there. I don't recall the balance of my use of other services compared to that specific network tool, but it was an amazing place to discover music and also quite fast compared to everything else.

2. I wasn't sure if this post was lamenting the loss of discovery or the loss of stable revenue streams for artists. Maybe both. I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too. When I want more variety and access to the farther reaches of the music world, I use hypem.com. It's still great, after all these years, and a quite small operation despite the presence of Apple/Spotify. Also love Soundcloud, and as someone who makes electronic music/DJs on the side - Beatport.

3. What.CD reminded me of what I now hear about re: Lobste.rs. I'm not a member, and it's unclear to me if I want that? But it has some similar characteristics - invite only, ICQ chat, active moderation. What I wonder is whether folks here (members of Lobsters) see that community as possessing the same magic/thrill/quality of What.CD?

Heh, I often went a step down and recorded internet radio using RadioSure. This little utility split each track into its own file which was pretty neat and handy to a younger me. Shoutout to Ryan Seacrests' AT40 for the weekly charts on the weekends, it kept my "collection" fresh ;-) Although, it was mostly 128-256kbps mp3 but it didn't matter to me, it was fun.

Concerning the "Joy" element:

Someone at my workplace started a Music League, with a select few music aficionados and hangers on joining, and it has been _the best_ team bonding exercise I've ever been involved with. We have covered a broad spectrum of topics that have challenged pretty much everyone at some point. Music League has a bunch of default Themes that range from boring to OK, so we've been coming up with our own suggestions, and over the course of about 12 months we've had some great ones - but it relies on the participants allowing themselves to be vulnerable when the occasion suits.

This has provided joy amongst all participants in, I think, a similar way to the sharing / discovery of the golden age of music piracy. We even setup our own Slack channel un-affiliated with our workplace because a couple of people have left the company, but wanted to stay in the League.

If I have time tonight, I'll list the Themes we've covered as a reply or edit of this comment.

Concerning the "Music Piracy" element:

I don't really pirate, unless it's some incredibly obscure thing that can only be found on slsk (are we allowed to even mention it's name?).

I use a streaming service, but I also buy the really good shit from Bandcamp, since most streaming services are pretty scummy with their royalties back to artists, and I want them to keep doing what they're doing cough AdP cough.

I also run my own instance of LMS[0] so my FLAC collection is always available to me wherever I am (which kinda feels like piracy, but the collection is almost all legit).

MusicBrainz[1] is also doing god's work.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard took their discography off Spotify for ideological reasons, and I support their decision to follow their morality in doing so, but it does put me in a conundrum due to the phenomenal size of their catalogue. I've bought some, but definitely not all. Just gonna have to grind through it, although they seem to put new music out faster than my monthly purchase quota.

[0]: https://github.com/epoupon/lms (cheers @epoupon, I'm pretty sure you're on HN)

[1]: https://musicbrainz.org/

I would put the uncompressed flac files of my music directly on my website for everyone to download.

That does not mean that I would not be interested in getting paid. But I would approach it differently. I would charge for broadcasting it on YouTube or Spotify. Or for playing it in venues.

But I would not charge a regular Joe for it. They would be free to download it, play it and redistribute it in any noncommercial way they see fit.

The most important part is this. I would encourage the "buy after you like" model. Everyone is free to listen. And who likes what they hear, is welcome to buy it.

In my opinion, many small bands and solo musicians would benefit from that model. And I think it would also create some goodwill among their fans.

It also would not shut down the mainstream delivery channels. So if someone still wanted to listen to it over Spotify and pay for it that way, they would still be able to do so.

I remember when MySpace had this silly flash player that would stream MP3s from users' profiles. This was the main way to find indie and local bands' tracks, but every major artist had a profile too. Looking at the browser requests you could easily see the request format for downloading tracks listed on profiles. And what was worse, they all followed a standard enumerated naming convention, so you could literally download every track on MySpace by simple iteration. There was no rate limit, no cookies, nothing to stop it. The result was great: not only did you get the music you were interested in, you got a lot more you'd never heard of. And you could listen to it all on any device at any time; burn it to a CD, record to cassette tape, put it on a WinAmp playlist, whatever. For a kid with a hard time growing up, that music was an escape to a better world. The freedom to listen to what you wanted, when you wanted, how you wanted, felt like a gift deserved. You'd still go to their shows when you could, pay for albums when you could, but what kid has tons of free cash to spend?

About a year later, the download method was so well known that MySpace changed to a multipart chunked streaming system and randomized the request IDs. It now required complex custom code to stream from their player alone. Access to your favorite local bands' music was now closed. The internet continued to birth to new ways to obtain music, so you could continue to get Nine Inch Nails and Infected Mushroom; but the local bands lost out on valuable word of mouth.

Equivalent of what.cd today is RED.

But, TBH, most of the pirated music today is on YouTube anyway.

Piracy is largely a response to arbitrary rules in media distribution, like how, where, when or even if you can buy something. Hiding piracy behind a "textbook-length list of rules" is bad just as the system it is responding to.

Here’s an example, a Minnesota woman who was fined $1.9 million dollars for 24 downloaded songs.

I’d suspect lobbying from the entertainment industry was a factor.

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2009/06/18/woman-ordered-to-pa...

:)

WeAreHunted was sold to Twitter at the time to launch as Twitter Music! What an idea, music discovery, right in your big feed. Brilliant.

Twitter #Music (https://abcnews.com/Technology/twitter-music-app-launches-ip...) barely lasted a year.

This was the time when Twitter also launched Vine - to also shutter it.

Great ideas, killed prematurely as TikTok took them and ran away with them. TT is now my #1 music discovery service, not great, just the only one that actually works.

The owner of OiNK did nothing wrong and was cleared in court, but the music industry was still able to hire thugs (the police) to raid his home in the early morning and ruin years of his life. He understandable went under the radar but I hope everything is ok now.

I still think about the users of those sites to this day. The internet just isn't what it was any more.

(Thinking of AI generated music which doesn't get more than a few % of total listening time, but give it some time..)

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

Everythings been commoditized, nothing serious can be compiled onboard any more, everything needs permission.

Bring back the compiler, you fuckers!

Its a supercomputer, in my pocket, and I need permission to do things to it.

Not to mention the crime of law enforcement prioritising private profit over a cultural milestone. It really is like they burned the library of Alexandria because it hadn't paid the copyright fee.