Comment by CoolestBeans
14 hours ago
One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. It doesn't take much look at how much music an iPod could store, how much music cost, and how much people had in disposable income to spend on music to realize that music had to come from other means. The iPod and P2P file sharing were incredibly synergistic in a way that makes me giggle. The iTunes store is just as much about getting the record companies on board as it is about running a legitimate music store. I don't know I guess it reminds me of a time when tech disruption was in the consumer's favor and it was frustrating exploitive companies.
It was also common to have a collection of CDs you owned and wanted to put on a device like this.
We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.
Streaming (which pays labels and artists much less) only exists because it's the compromise that solves the "service problem" side of piracy.
> We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.
One of these attempts that I assume most people are familiar with but is an interesting read for those that aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
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> For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.
The movie industry unfortunately never gave up no matter how vain the attempts are.
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Apple and Steve Jobs were always taking about ripping your CDs to have your music on the iPod in their presentations to the public.
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Exactly. I mean sure, people were definitely pirating music. But lots of people are own huge collections of CDs, and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them. We were kids without money, but older folks at the time did spend money on CDs.
> and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them
Which is "piracy" - not that that makes it ethically wrong. It's actually the main kind of copying that is targeted by DRM since users of the LimeWire kind never see that.
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I still borrow CDs to rip, lol. Half my digital music library comes from my library having a way better library of music than books (at least for my taste)
Yeah, GP is rose-tinting piracy and Apple’s stance a bit…
When I was a teenager we had _dial-up_. My first 2 iPods were strictly playing ripped CDs, which I, friends, or family had bought. Buying the iPod itself was probably cheaper than 2 months worth of internet traffic back then.
It took about 30 minutes to get 3.5 MB mp3 song over dial up. I would let downloads run overnight and could get a dozen songs by next day. I would do my bulk mp3 downloading in the morning before class at schools library to immediately transfer over USB to my 4 GB Archos Jukebox hard drive mp3 player. That was around 2001 - 2003 either before schools blocked p2p or I must have been using public file downloading sites.
GP probably wasn't alive back then in all likelihood.
I mean, sure, but at some point with 3 or 4 thousand cds crated up, it became a lot easier to steal than go crate digging in my own basement. And then when what.cd happened and you could literally grab a torrent of perfectly curated files of an artist’s whole catalog, the laziness really spiked.
Brother, arranging 0s and 1s a particular way on storage you own is not theft in any context.
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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.
Not allegedly, I was there at the time as a user and I and others can confirm that there was plenty of scene releases on Spotify in ~2008:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202117
Sometimes it's cheaper to break the law and pay a fine, than to do everything by law.
Seems quite often it turns out you don't even need to pay a fine if you manage to get big enough quickly enough.
Sometimes it’s impossible. Music labels wouldn’t even get in a room with you to discuss web back in the day.
Also iTunes Match, which legalized all of your pirated music[1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625967
In the early 2010s I uploaded an ALAC copy of an album through iTunes (and I guess iCloud Music???) that still has not appeared on any streaming service, and it remains accessible on any of my devices today. And now that my preferred streaming service is Apple Music, the album is accessible whenever/wherever I want.
When Apple gets something right, they really do get it right. A shame a lot of other aspects of Apple Music are bad or wrong.
My digital collection got really messed up at one point partially due, I'm pretty sure to Apple Match. At one point--early in the pandemic I think--I spent a day or two whacking my collection back into some semblance or order. For example, I had a lot of titles that weren't actually attached to a file.
> 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
Never had that happen to me (or heard of it happening) and I used iTunes for like 15 years.
There was that time they gave us music though.
Utterly tone deaf Steve, we don’t all like your music.
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.
Please do! New releases aren't exactly cheap, but places like goodwill are practically giving them away. Make a list of albums you want, spend a day going to charity/pawn shops, and get what you can. If you can't find it, see what it costs on discogs, and buy it there if it's reasonable. I've gotten to the point that the only albums I have exclusively digital are those that cost an arm and a leg otherwise
Just had a friend give one to me. If I want an entire album and the CD is the same or less than the digital version, why not? Ripping takes a minute or two.
> 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.
> the NW-HD1
Ah, something tells me it wasn't the technical capabilities that held this very pronounceable and fashionable product back.
Arguably it hurt them with the PSP as well by trying to get everyone to buy UMDs for their movies and store music on memory sticks.
Perhaps so, but they were clueless: The PSP was so easy to mod and run pirated games and emulators with that I'm not sure if I've ever tried to run a UMD in the one I have.
Yet a few years before that Sony had no qualms selling walkmans, blank tape cassettes and dual-tape portable sound systems, often with double speed copy function. We would gather for afternoons and make actual copy parties. Recording quality wasn't great but we didn't care.
not to mention minidisc, which was pretty much exclusively used as a format to copy your CDs to
Yes, but that was also the era where Sony was fighting Congress to keep DAT legal. Even when they got their way, no label would touch the format and it was a total, abject failure.
Sony's response to this was to use their bubble-era money to start buying US record labels, purely so they could force them to support their formats. But they ultimately wound up buying the exact same mentality that they were fighting against, and the labels won that fight internally. Sure, Sony had Minidisc releases of major label music, but the format flopped anyway, because they were entirely unwilling to market it for recording in the US. Outside of the US, Minidisc was the Apple "Rip. Mix. Burn" experience half a decade prior to the iPod; but in the US that experience basically didn't exist unless you knew exactly where to look.
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
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.
> 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.)
> 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”
Predates the Mac mini (tagline: The most affordable Mac ever.) by a good few years—predates the iPod even—but it was an Apple ad campaign:
https://youtu.be/K0ZWuhcM7t4
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Apples-Rip-Mix-Burn-camp...
You can’t really call it a pro-piracy message though. Ripping implies you have the original CD already.
> You can’t really call it a pro-piracy message though.
Of course not. That would probably infringe on advertising standards. But it is the clear implication.
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