> I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there

So there was a clever trick that smaller artists did on what.cd: put up a really generous upload credit bounty for your own music, in order to sell digital copies.

I knew a few bands in Toronto who did this as a way to make sales.

They'd put up a big bounty right after setting up a webpage offering the album for sale via Paypal, then spend a few days collecting orders (and they would get a lot of them - hundreds sometimes - because What.cd had a lot of users looking for ratio credits) and then eventually email a link to the album after a few days.

No idea what the scale of this trick/scam (call it whatever) was but anecdotally I heard about it enough.

> There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown.

Music licensing (in the US at least) is actually pretty nice for this (from the licensee perspective anyway). There are mechanical licenses which allow you to use music for many uses without contracting with the rightsholders and clearinghouses whose job is to determine where to send royalties. So you can use the music and send reporting and royalties to the clearing houses and you're done.

Of course, you may want to contract with the rightsholders if you don't like the terms of the mechanical license; maybe it costs too much, etc. If you're Spotify or similar and you have specific contracts for most of the music, and have to pay mechanical license rates for the tail, it might make sense to do so in order to boast of a larger catalog.

I’m still using the “successor” to what.cd and I usually discover artists through random lists, “related artists”, among other things on the platform.

One interesting way of discovering artists is finding an artist that I already like on a compilation CD, and then seeing what else is on the CD.

Yeah, What.CD had a bunch of the local Brisbane post-rock bands from the 00s on there which was amazing to me. I at least have copies of a lot of their records!

email me please

This is true and a category of music that got hit notably hard was live recordings. What had a wide array of live recordings made by sound engineers straight from the mixer. This is something that you simply cannot find now unless you maybe know a guy.

Yes. RIP a ton of very rare material. What.cd has a special place in my heart.

Yeah, it was a great place. I have a paid Spotify account but finally got an ancient hard drive onto my network for all sorts of stuff Spotify doesn’t or can’t have (e.g., Coldcut: 70 Minutes of Madness).

Which also means almost always limited to the latest, almost always crappy (or blind to the original ambiance) remaster! One of the main reasons why I don't bother with streaming, really.

(And because they lack much obscure stuff and I don't like being dependent on the Internet and a renter's whims for something as essential as music, I guess)

>We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore

They're still kind of around, but yeah, everything is very much on it's way out in the music scene, at least in terms of that late 90s early 00s culture. Or has been until recently. There is a renewed interest in self-hosting and "offline" style music collections.

It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes. When self-hosting music comes up this is always one of the top questions people have: How do you find new music?

The answer isn't that hard and really hasn't changed much. People just don't want to spend any time or effort doing it. Music stores still exist, they're amazing. Lots of 2nd hand stores carry vinyl and CDs now, which can give you great ideas for new music. There are self-hosted AI solutions and tools. Last.fm and Scrobbling are still very much around. My scrobble history is so insanely useful. There are music discords. Friends. Asking people what they're listening to in public. Live shows with unique openers(I once went to a Ben Kweller show with 4 opening bands, I still listen to 3 of them.)

I mean, WCD has two healthy replacements, plus slsk