weird, I still love pirating music.

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

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

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

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

It's not really about piracy in general, it's mostly about What.CD.

Equivalent of what.cd today is RED.

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

I can vouch for OiNK and What.cd being magical places, unlikely to ever come back. There was also Waffles which was a little more like OiNK in spirit, but What had a much bigger selection and discovery was second to none.

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

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

Edited to add first: nice article covering an important couple of critical pieces of the Internet's history.

Concerning the "Joy" element:

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

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

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

Concerning the "Music Piracy" element:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicotine

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

Isnt REDacted the continuationnof What.cd

Any amount of joy you lost is a fraction of joy lost from people blatantly stealing the fruits of other people's's labor. Communities do not have to be parasites to exist. Similar amounts of joy could be created over a different interest that didn't require stealing and hurting others.

Music piracy is alive and well if you know where to look. Some places has been mentioned in this thread already. Of course there is no replacing the magic of early 2000-2010's p2p sites like OiNK, What and Waffles - but well curated sites still exist.

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

What a cool article. I have good memories of being 13 and my cousin telling me about limewire. Between random pornography titles there was an artist called burial, which I downloaded cause I thought it sounded edgy. How lucky was I!

I don't call it piracy. I call it a human right. Besides, yt-dlp made music "piracy" irrelevant. But, even aside from this, I noticed that I rarely add new music locally. Right now I have 764 songs I collected over almost 30 years; while I may add new music I enjoy, I mostly just listen to semi-random music on youtube these days, just as background noise. So I don't quite have a strong use case, comparing this to the napster era.

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

I've tried all the streaming services, I've regularly bought physical copies of music even in recent years, but nothing has exposed me to such a wide range of music and such a range of artists as a well curated blogspot. Whether that be a wide range of excellent bootlegs or music that has not been moved from cassette to digital, it just provides me with so much more joy. Especially easy to do now iPods are back in vogue

Very fond memories of using Audiogalaxy, and also soulseek.

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