Rob Sheridan on the Lost Joy of Music Piracy and Nine Inch Nails
I recall how downloading leaked tracks of Nine Inch Nails radicalized me into a music pirate, eventually leading me to work with Trent Reznor. We realized the industry was failing fans by making music too expensive, so we embraced piracy as a distribution model. By releasing albums like The Slip for free, we proved that collecting an audience directly was more valuable than traditional sales, a lesson the streaming era still struggles to fully appreciate.
It was the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known, and I would gladly pay a large monthly fee for any legal music service of the same level.
- devonsolomon
The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.
My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.
The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.
(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)
I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I li […]
- eisa01
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...
- CoolestBeans
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.
- postalcoder
This is a wonderful piece. I really appreciate the author for writing this – I thought I lost the ability to read longform on the internet.
What.cd was so vast a resource that it means something different to everyone. I personally lament the loss of the forums the most. I would post dissertation-length comments there and others reciprocated. I would put hours of research into debating a single topic. It's where I probably wrote my best stuff. The high barrier to entry reduced the noise and selected for people who were invested in being part of a community. The forums are also where I learned about hacker news!
I learned so much about music during those days. Algorithmic recommendations don't hold a handle to the recommendations you'd get in the forumns and in the comments sections of individual albums. Consuming music via What was equal parts learning and consumption.
It was obvious that poor music sales was a distribution problem, not a piracy problem. History played out in a way that proved this to be true. Spotify killed What.cd before the French did.
- Semaphor
I loved OiNK (and had the t-shirt), but neither What.cd nor waffles ever were a proper replacement for me.
What got me that feeling of discovery again, decades later, and even surpassed it, was doing release Fridays and just listening.
I mostly know what (sub)-genres I like, I go through upcoming release lists for the next week, open every bandcamp link in a new tab (or for those that don’t have bandcamp, I see if I care about the genre enough to search for a single on YouTube), and then I have maybe a hundred links, I sample everything for a few seconds and decide on yay or nay, and about 10 - 20 % go onto my excel sheet. Then on Fridays (up to Sunday, depending on how busy the release day is) I start listening to all those albums to see which of those I’ll buy (usually 1-2).
It’s some effort, but my appreciation for music was never this high.
- omgmajk
Music piracy is alive and well if you know where to look. Some places has been mentioned in this thread already. Of course there is no replacing the magic of early 2000-2010's p2p sites like OiNK, What and Waffles - but well curated sites still exist.
- minikomi
Very fond memories of using Audiogalaxy, and also soulseek.
Soulseek especially had a community where you found someone who was into the same kind of music as you (obscure breakcore! japanese garage punk!) and could browse their collections, and chat to them also! What a wonderful way to make music friends and get good recommendations.
- maxaw
What a cool article. I have good memories of being 13 and my cousin telling me about limewire. Between random pornography titles there was an artist called burial, which I downloaded cause I thought it sounded edgy. How lucky was I!
- ilvez
Closed private trackers are bastions of hope of preserving human culture. Every iteration since oink, they have become better and better and while at one point they will close the current ones, we will persevere. Where else would we find forgotten underground music only few people remember and how specific vinyl sounds. It's the community and love for music.
- losvedir
Heh, blast from the past here from the "information wants to be free" and "you wouldn't download a car" days. Sometimes HN feels unrecognizable with how much the comments I read are pro- intellectual property.
But these days, I do wonder how much 90s / early 2000s time was any better or if all of us who had experienced them are just getting older and nostalgic for our youth.