| ▲ | eisa01 3 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... |
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| ▲ | wodenokoto 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | IshKebab 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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! |
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| ▲ | Hoodedcrow 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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). |
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| ▲ | DaanDL 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What I also miss on Spotify: live mixes. |
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| ▲ | haunter 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Took me 1 min to find the first album in FLAC, probably the other two is available too |
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| ▲ | eisa01 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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 :) |
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| ▲ | bugufu8f83 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >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. |
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| ▲ | a-french-anon an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | lopis 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | bugufu8f83 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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... |
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| ▲ | Gander5739 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | bugufu8f83 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Gander5739 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip. The library for the music streaming platforms is much bigger than for films, of course (about 250 million for Spotify), but there's also a much lower barrier of entry. So perhaps the higher work needed to produce a film necessitates more profit, to a degree that only the fragmented streaming platforms can fulfill. After all, netflix started making originals to counter studios launching their own streaming platforms to raise profit margins, and pulling their content off netflix. |
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| ▲ | maccard 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | bugufu8f83 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia Incorrect. The reasons why vinyl specifically is still relevant (as opposed to any other "retro" audio format) are technical. Vinyl avoids compression issues by design. (Compression both in the computer science sense and in the audio engineering sense.) | |
| ▲ | ButlerianJihad an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I was a zealous collector of records when we made the switch to digital audio. And let me tell you, there was a significant artistry to the thing: a vinyl record was a standardized work of art. Every album cover was the result of careful design, photography, layout. The inner sleeve oftentimes contained more art, or if we were lucky, all the lyrics we wanted to sing along with. The record label itself, a masterpiece of design. All the smells and all the feels of merely collecting vinyl--even without playing it--are indescribable today. When CDs came into the market, they were horribly clacky and just clad in layers of tacky plastic. The album art was shrunken, misshapen... and the objects themselves stank of polycarbonate, rather than delicious vinyl. Sure, they sounded great and they lasted a long time, and maintenance was dead simple. But so much artistry was lost. I was still collecting lots of CDs when purely digital distribution hit us, but by then, the smells and feels and experience of collecting vinyl were distant memories. And that entire experience may be why people argue for the technical superiority of vinyl recordings, and analog tube amplifiers. Because it was all self-reinforcing, and it all fell apart once the clacky, tacky, plasticky CDs took over. | | |
| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There's a shitload of valuable vinyl records that don't have any art at all or even any cover. Paper and cardboard doesn't last as long as the record itself. No, the reasons for this are entirely technical. |
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| ▲ | taneq 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Heck, almost everything is available for free on YouTube. | | |
| ▲ | konart an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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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