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Comment by hackermom | Hacker News Reader

Spot on. This can't be repeated enough: it's not about saving a few bucks, it's about getting your goods in spotless quality, instantly, without hassle. People want ease; instant ease; not a labyrinthal click-fest. Even if you are a seasoned P2Per who does not need many minutes to locate at least one available source of the album in question, it usually takes a while to find a proper AAC or FLAC rip (contra usual MP3 slush), and unless you're into vacuous pop music you're almost always faced with anything but snappy download speeds.

$0.99 for a pristine 256kbps AAC track, with no waiting, is a good deal. The iTunes Store isn't a money-making behemoth for no reason.

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I agree with the general point you're making about friction, but you're underestimating how quickly and thoroughly free distribution sources have evolved.

A 'seasoned P2Per' already belongs to one or more invitation-only torrent sites where nearly everything you could ever want is available and well-seeded in multiple formats, including FLAC. (One's already been mentioned on this thread, but there are others.)

If I were the type of person to steal music, I would log into one of these communities, do a quick search on a pretty decent search engine, throw the .torrent into a Dropbox folder synced with my media server. The media server then would automatically do the downloading / adding to my music library / etc. I hear this is often faster than downloading from iTunes, and completely ad-free. Even better, it doesn't involve iTunes.

$0.99 is a hell of a deal if you've never pirated music and don't know where to start, but when faced with paying vs. a bit of hassle, the core P2P community has again and again decided to forego paying and focus their efforts on eliminating the hassle.

"A 'seasoned P2Per' already belongs to one or more invitation-only torrent sites where nearly everything you could ever want is available and well-seeded in multiple formats, including FLAC. (One's already been mentioned on this thread, but there are others.)"

This is only true if you're into pop music from "the big five" labels, or at best looking for some generic "Ibiza X-treme Tribal Goa Trance Collection #392". Now, I know that arguing about taste is pointless, but I still feel like saying this: if you try to get your hands on something remotely sophisticated and with musical substance, you will have a hard time finding it via the scene releases; your best shot is to find it among like-minded people with an artistic mind, and you probably know that comes down to only about three places on the net: Karagarga, Cinema Obscura, and ~drumroll~ The Pirate Bay (the cultural cauldron of the Internet).

I'm actually a "scener" (both demo scene and "xvid scene"), and I frequent my share of private trackers, so I got an up-close relation with the available assortment.

You just need to know the right places to look.

I'm a member of a private tracker that has cassette rips of 80s jpop - you probably won't find that on a general music tracker (much less an online store), but it's relatively common for a Japanese-music site.

if you try to get your hands on something remotely sophisticated and with musical substance, you will have a hard time finding it via the scene releases

I like how you propose that the music the majority of the world finds value in is trash.

Anyways, who said you had to get it from release groups? There are plenty of people who are perfectly able to use EAC on a CD they bought.

Unless you live in another country (say a backwater like Sweden).

Then you are told by iTunes: "The item you've requested is not currently available in the Swedish store"

I live in a backwater like Sweden. In fact, I actually live in Sweden. I've bought a great deal of tracks from the iTunes Store, but I have yet to encounter what you mention. Is this perhaps the type of "region staging" scheme we see in the film industry, game industry, gaming console industry etc.?

You can then turn to Spotify, which was actually founded in Sweden ;)

I don't use iTunes and thus can't compare their respective librairies, but I know first hand that even in more remote corners of the musical world (think obscure recording of a jazz reprise of Bach), Spotify almost always delivers.

I agree completely. After iTunes dropped DRM, I've legally downloaded most of my music: Guaranteed quality, and no need anymore to search through tons of fakes, viruses, to get the songs I want, and then hope someone actually comes online to share them.

I 'pirated' because I don't feel like going to a store, spending hours to find music I liked, buying it, then ripping the CD. Or ordering the CD somewhere and impatiently waiting before it arrives... Not because of the cost savings.

Let's hope this is a lesson for the movies and software industry as well, if you make it easy for people to get your stuff, in the same or better quality than a pirated version (so, no DRM, annoying restrictions, or difficult download process), they will prefer to get it legally from you.

This might be true if you're looking on public sites, but there are very good private music trackers (What, Waffles) and if you have an account on one of those it's completely wrong. Things are well-seeded, download speeds are fast, the selection is huge, and there's almost always a FLAC (or at least a v0 or 320k mp3) version available. (And I don't listen to "vacuous pop music".)

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