Hacker News Reader

Comment by JasserInicide | Hacker News Reader

Lots of rare music found nowhere else was lost when what.cd got shut down

This may sound like a conspiracy but I think the industry wants people to buy new content not enjoy the hits from yesteryear.

I think they want you to rebuy old content in new forms, pure profit. Or better yet, rent it in perpetuity.

This is more or less what the entire entertainment industry is doing with endless reboots, sequels, remasters, new formats, etc.

There was some study I saw, maybe even released by Spotify, that showed that a massive percentage (maybe a majority?) of streamed music was several decades old.

So they're raking in cash from rent seeking really. It would be healthier for music if what you said was true though.

This makes sense. People largely listen to whatever was new/popular in their childhood through 20s.

Some people are more musically adventurous than others or they sometimes latch onto a new genre or artist. But the reality is that most of us largely default to what we listened to in school or maybe the decade after. I know I listen to relatively little music created in the past 20 years and don't really care if a streaming service is missing XYZ newish artist.

I actually have quite a large, somewhat curated digital music library and, with a few hundred dollars and a few days of effort, I could probably patch any particular holes I have among songs/albums I especially enjoy, but mostly I use streaming including a lot of curated playlists.

Do any music trackers still exist?

Not looking to out any underground trackers, but am curious as someone who wasn't ever on what.cd and hasn't ever replaced long "hiatus" then gone waffles.

Does any active and/or extensive site survive?

redacted is supposed to be the new whatcd using a similar interview process and all.

To be fair i'm out of the piracy game when it comes to music though since spotify is more convenient to use

Microsoft (zune) and then Google (music) have me not even trusting the convenience of paid subscriptions anymore.

Even if you keep some music, you lose useful history, playlists, etc. on a whim.

Even with the new YouTube music, songs I own, and added to a playlist last week are suddenly grayed out without explanation or ability to see details. Only right click option is to remove.

It's hard not to recall Gabe Newell's "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem". Steam and Spotify offer a really good service, and a lot of people find it not worth it to pirate stuff.

'specially as a linux user. Dealing with Wine/Proton on my own vs just buying it on steam and have it justwork^tm is worth it almost everytime, especially when using cheap steamkey stores.

Yeah I guess Spotify is okay if you don't mind half of the back catalogue of your favorite artists either never being present on the platform, or just magically disappearing at some arbitrary time. It's hilarious, I canceled my Spotify service a year ago or something, and I hopped back on recently to check a playlist as I couldn't remember a song. So many tracks in my playlists are no longer available on the service. Had me feeling pretty good about my colossal archive of purchased mp3s/FLACs from Bandcamp.

Yep. Spotify had at one point completely eliminated my desire to torrent entire discographies, but my listening is starting to shift to Bandcamp and youtube-dl'd MP3s/M4As with Spotify getting increasingly worse both on the library front and on a technical level with its app.

Most certainly, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/tw4ji0/tracker_fa...

rutracker.org

been getting my Prog-Rock-Fusion fix from there, they have a lot of stuff

Shutting down a tracker doesn't delete the files people have.

The music wasn't lost. It just became harder to pirate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com