Comment by eisa01
15 hours ago
It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there. There is still a need for music piracy
Even albums mentioned in the Norwegian business magazine D2 can be impossible to find in legit channels. Your only option is to buy used CDs on Discogs for 50-100 USD, or know your way around the successors of these sites
These CDs weren’t even on Oink or What (or did not survive the transitions)
https://www.dn.no/d2/musikk/stena-line/lars-holte/spotify/ha...
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.
If only they had gobs of cash to pay people to curate content… or, I don’t know, AI that can check if something is AI. Or ask uploaders for some kind of proof, since we’re in the age of asking citizens to prove they’re adults. If only there was _something_ they could do!
I can't speak for other streaming services, but at Apple Music we did pay musical industry professionals a lot of money to do human evaluation of specific searches. We had people with specific deep knowledge of genres and niches. At least in my little corner Apple that was quite a bit of effort put into this.
> 8bit covers and AI music
As someone who loves lsdj... ouch.
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.
> 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).
I'm confused. Spotify wouldn't work?
spotify doesn't contain every music album released.
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.
This! The only album I consider perfect (Regional at Best by Twenty Øne Piløts) is only available on I think Deezer?
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.
What I also miss on Spotify: live mixes.
Soundcloud is great for this
Kind of, Soundcloud has very aggressive copyright claims which is a problem for mixes.
for electronic music di.fm has some great live sets. I wish they had more tho
Took me 1 min to find the first album in FLAC, probably the other two is available too
Only one of them had been available in FLAC, but someone made sure to make the rest available in the last two years, and someone else even put them on YouTube...
I had been on the hunt for them a couple years after purchasing The First Winter 25 years ago :)
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.
I agree with you that you are never "forced" to pirate; you can simply not listen to the missing album.
But many many many many excellent albums are not available for sale anywhere at any price. They essentially do not exist, except in the hands of a few collectors.
The bands themselves, the creators of said music, want their music to be heard.
The fact that they aren't available for sale or streaming is often because a rich bureaucrat can't be bothered, not for any legal reason.
> 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!
That's not my experience at all. My most common workflow in these apps is exactly going to a specific song (artist, album, playlist) and playing it. I can scarcely imagine much use for just asking for "music" - my closest equivalent is putting my extremely large "liked songs" playlist on shuffle which takes me down memory lane etc.
I know behaviour like yours is common, however. Spotify themselves say so, and work under that assumption wrt. promoting cheaper (for them) music when they detect passive listening.
Less common mayhaps, but some of my more blissful moments are when I sit down in the couch, load up one of my favourite albums, close my eyes and go on a musical journey!
What I listen to is definitely not interchangeable. And contrary to TV series, there is no limit to how much I can enjoy it!
>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.
> I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites
If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify.
Some examples: Melvins' Lysol is (famously) only available on Apple Music and for good measure I just looked right now at Spotify's page for Midori (https://open.spotify.com/artist/1Qjrx8NtccILLfR3wh1u3o) and it has neither their First EP nor Second LP (https://www.discogs.com/artist/777727-Midori-3); I didn't even choose or try multiple artists, I simply wondered "hmmm, is Midori on Spotify?".
Worthless.
>If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify.
Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.
Sure, there exists music that is on RED that is not on Spotify. There also exists music that is on Spotify that is not on RED (some of which I even listen to!).
I said "pretty much anything" and "most people". I stand by this. Most people do not experience major holes in the Spotify catalog and are perfectly well satisfied by the breadth of the catalog. If you aren't, that's cool, but you're in a minority.
If this weren't the case, music piracy would be more popular. It's not. RED has more music now than What.CD did, but the community is smaller. It's telling that it doesn't even get a mention in the OP. A lot of people who join aren't even particularly interested in music piracy but just want to use it as a stepping stone to other communities.
I'm not saying that music piracy sucks or whatever. I'm just saying that most people don't feel much need for it and are well-served by Spotify--which, again, has some huge advantages over piracy that I gave previously. I think it is useful to be realistic about this because it's easy reading an article or thread like this to feel a kind of FOMO and I think it's valuable to push back against that.
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> Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days
It's pretty dangerous to assume that what you do is what everyone else does too.
> so everything new gets released there
Previous comment was probably referring to older music.
If you take issue with the claim that everyone streams music these days than the only way I can understand your comment is by assuming we live in vastly different cultures.
Certainly in the US everyone uses streaming to listen to music. This random article claimed that 90% of American adults regularly stream music online, for example: https://cybernews.com/news/us-internet-users-music-streaming...
If you listen to non-western music the streaming library shrinks a lot.
here's a counter example: the opening to mirror's edge is not hosted on spotify (last time I checked, in my region at least), and it's an old favourite of mine (and I'm sure many people who played the game too)
Do you think the difference between film piracy and music piracy is inherent, due to the differences between film and music; or is there some alternative reality where we ended up with a one-stop shop for films, as well?
For the history of music piracy, I found" How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy" was a good book to read.
I would wager the effective piracy rate of stuff that on prime and Netflix a few years back was close to the effective music piracy rate. IMO the difference is that with Spotify, tidal, Apple, YouTube or Qobuz - you mostly get access to everything. With film, you can pay for Netflix, Disney, Hulu, peacock, HBO, and _still_ not be able to get access to major releases without paying more on top of the subs.
That's an interesting question. I'm not sure. We sort of had that one-stop shop experience with Netflix's DVD service, where you would pay a subscription fee and in exchange you would get to watch movies from a huge catalog. But this didn't translate to the streaming era.
P2P film piracy, at least for the quality-minded, has a few strong competitive advantages over film streaming. It doesn't have to deal with rights issues, for one, which can present huge roadblocks to film distribution. Films are also huge files and the interests of a streaming platform (low bitrate) are in tension with interests of quality. Even in comparison to physical media--the highest quality release of a film might be from a different market than yours, or there might be many competing releases over time. There might be different factors that are better in one release and other factors better in another release, where the pirated copy can combine all the best parts. It's actually somewhat remarkable how good film piracy has gotten these days for those who care.
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> due to the differences between film and music
Music being generally 3-10 minutes long while film is 1h30-3h makes a big difference here. A film is a bit more of a commitment than a playlist entry; you can just put music on the virtual sushi belt and grab what comes past, while sitting down for a film is more of a time commitment.
There are fewer music rights holders, so it is easier to get them together in a room and agree to, for example, a piece of Spotify in exchange for licensing the music. Thus, Spotify becomes like a defacto standard with reasonably all popular music. Just one subscription for what the average listener will want.
Right now, there are too many film distributors and services, let alone TV, plus a lot of exclusives that people want to watch. These video streaming services seem to be trending towards consolidation, but I think film distributors remain diverse.
If you have a pretty vanilla taste, sure.
> pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites
If that were true, then vinyl sales wouldn't be growing.
First of all, vinyl is still relatively niche in absolute terms. Second of all, the popularity of vinyl, such as it is, has absolutely nothing to do with availability. It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia (as the technology itself is, of course, inferior from a technical sense of faithful reproduction) plus a desire for personal physical ownership of something.
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Heck, almost everything is available for free on YouTube.
This is very far from truth unless you only listen freshs pop music. And even then it is easy to click a song only to receive "not available in your region".
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