Comment by a-french-anon
13 hours ago
> 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.
I think you and OP are arguing different things. Netflix/Spotify are the McDonalds/Olive Garden of media. They are basic, uncomplicated, and flawed, yet they serve most people's tastes. People whose needs they don't serve well go somewhere else.
I'm not sure why people keep bringing up Netflix. Last I checked, they weren't a music streaming service.
There's a huge difference in Spotify for music vs Netflix for TV and movies. Netflix's catalog is absolutely tiny. Spotify's is not.
I also continue to disagree with the idea that Spotify's catalog is only for people with basic or mainstream tastes. This is far too reductive. Like I said above, the vast majority of newly released music is released onto Spotify. For many new or small artists, streaming is the only way their music is released. There is no "somewhere else" to go.
Personally, I listen to a lot of contemporary French indie pop, including a lot of pretty obscure stuff. This stuff is most available through streaming services. To the extent it is available via pirate channels, it's because someone bothered to take the time to rip it from a streaming service. There is nothing which music piracy offers in this domain, and there is a lot that it lacks (both in availability and in all the service factors that make streaming appealing, as I've said--convenience, sharing, discoverability). A further factor I haven't brought up yet is that it just feels shitty and pointless to pirate this kind of stuff when listening to it on Spotify at least provides some benefits to the artists themselves: royalties (tiny as they may be), increased play counts, exposure via recommendation algorithms.
A large fraction of what is uploaded to music piracy sites currently is sourced from music streaming platforms. Not all of it, certainly. A large fraction of the CD- and vinyl-sourced uploads are also available on music streaming platforms too though. As I've mentioned a few times previously, Spotify has a bigger catalog than RED does (even if you ignore all the 0 play AI slop spam that's been flooding Spotify lately).
I would say that the median user of private music torrent sites now is one of two things: either they are there because they want to join other communities for things beside music (TV, movies, video games, anime, porn, whatever), or they are someone who has been pirating music for a long time, probably Gen X, listens to mainly music from 30+ years ago, and has made music piracy a part of their identity and self-perception on some level (you can see a certain sense of smug superiority about it even in this HN thread).
All of this is to say that I think that the comparison to McDonalds or Olive Garden is just way, way off base. Spotify and Netflix do not belong in the same conversation either. Is there some stuff that's not available on music streaming platforms? Sure, it exists. If people find that streaming is not meeting their needs, of course they should look elsewhere. But the picture that is being painted in this thread is simply far off from reality.
While I must sadly agree with your usage of "most people", I still don't understand why you thought it changed anything to the original claim that there is still a need for music piracy (for the aforementioned people who care). And note that I didn't pick particularly obscure artists, we're talking 10~100k ratings/followers on RYM.
> Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.
Why would I?