Much of this content has popped up (or even been extended) on replacement trackers, but it's only a matter of time before the heroic operators of these trackers get forced to shut down too.
P2P could have made archivists jobs so much easier. This is a tech that should have been the next iteration of internet that we killed for no good reason. Not even greed, just a refusal to evolve a profitable but obsolete system.
For some reason the torrent community doesn’t have quite the same problem.
Other older platforms like Napster or DC++ (which actually still exists) let people share their own collection at the click of a button. This gave access to a really really long tail of rarities that perhaps only a handful of people were interested in, while torrent sites are mostly mainstream content.
What do you mean by that? You can upload your torrents to any of the big public torrent sites and if it's a private site just being a member allows you to upload already. Public trackers are also all using DHT which makes this not centralized.
Context: Torrent is hugely popular in Hungary, basically everyone is a member who uses the internet under ~40 years and is even remotely technical, which means more than a million people (with the single most popular site having over 700k members, with account sharing explicitly allowed). Perhaps not so much for the newest teenager generation (I don't know). Until very recently (and still now) streaming services have been limited contentwise and people just cannot afford to buy all the movies, songs, games etc. with the same ease as in Western Europe / North America.
Now that there are crowdfunding campaigns and tons of tools for microtransaction, that is even less excusable than when you had the effort to imagine the apparition of these obvious solutions.
It means we spend more effort on metadata (What are we allowed to do with it? Who owns it?) than the actual data.
It has stood directly in the way of new creative types (sampling in music, for example) and locked away content where the metadata is faulty/lost (orphan works problem)
It falls apart badly at scale (if you wanted to get distribution rights for everything on an OSX/Windows installation image, imagine the number of third parties alone, plus the original developers, you'd need to sign off)
and then it only really incentivizes work that's commercially appealing, not necessarily the technical best.
I dream of a day where people who want to create will be able to get a stipend-- it might cover a modest lifestyle, but ensures they can live the dream of being an artist/musician/programmer without having to clutch tight over every scrap of their output to keep their income streams alive. If we did it through a tax-funded endowment rather than market forces, we could probably finance a lot more creativity that way (think how many touring singers we could finance at 50k per year for the price of one Taylor Swift, or how many programmers we could hire to work om their passion projects in database theory for what is currently being spent on Oracle licenses.)
The only thing that gives me pause is that we transitioned to a system where individual music tracks are nearly free-on-demand* a decade ago and the sky never fell.
There were transition costs, and artists get way more from live performances now, but there's still an industry.
More than anything I'd just like to experiment with shorter copyright terms. I don't think the founders were crazy when they set them at around a generation. I agree that it might be risky to blow everything up, but I think there's a lot of bargaining we could do over term lengths that would be pretty harmless.
* To a first order approximation. Sure, many artists technically can get something when I pull up a track on YouTube. But if I'm not playing a whole playlist, I might not even see any ads.
What should we value more: hacker principles or phony outdated business models that aren't compatible with the realities of the digital age?
Copyright was created back when industrial capacity was required in order to make copies at scale. People had to own stuff like printing presses in order to infringe copyright at a scale that caused any damage. This is no longer the case. Copyright infringement is trivial now. It's as easy as copy paste. To solve this, the copyright industry intends to lock us out of computing. They think unlimited computers are too powerful for mere citizens like us and we should have access to nothing but limited versions that can execute nothing but predefined functions approved by them.
The mere existence of copyright is an existential threat to hackers and their values. If the preservation of free computing and internet requires sacrificing the entertainment industry, then so be it. The alternative is to sacrifice free computing.
Due to the existence of subversive technologies such as encryption, governments have been increasingly adopting the same perspective as the copyright industry.
The downside is that the post what community is so much smaller. Spotify et al really put a huge damper on the music tracker community, and that makes it less resilient.
People were saying the same thing in 2007 when OiNK shut down and What was starting up. The community is not smaller; it's more fragmented, and that's a good thing. Centralization is no better in our societal constructs than it is in our technological ones. I'll trade some immediacy and convenience for longevity any day.
I can only estimate because exact numbers are hard to find, but I'd say peak what era music tracker community total users was in the 350k region and we're probably somewhere around 100k now.
It does because private trackers use buffer as currency. The music trackers have had to adapt to use points systems now to encourage downloading activity. But even still, activity is way down from the what.cd days. It's just easier to stream the easily accessible stuff.
People didn't go to what.cd and jump through all those hoops to find rare music, they went to find good music, and now Spotify and YouTube do a good enough job of that with a lot less effort.
As a funny example of that I discovered Billie Eilish when Ocean Eyes first came out from a private tracker and now she's about as big as anyone. So it isn't just about discovering rare czech folk singers, but any music that you might like.
I think the hardcore demographic you mentioned is spot on and does exist, but they were always a minority and the evaporation of the less hardcore users explains why the scene is so much smaller now.
it was that process that helped to curate one of the highest quality audio libraries to have ever been.
it's not all that important for most folks to listen to and compare 20 different releases of Bowie's 'Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars', but to those of us that enjoy music cataloguing as a hobby , the loss of what.cd was pretty terrible.