Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

I live in a small country with a weird language and with a lot of our local pop music...

The new music is fine, everything is on youtube.... for now! ... but the older songs are disappearing.

Years ago, we had a bunch of "mp3 sites" (websites where you could download pirated mp3s), that disappeared, a huge local torrent tracker, focusing also on local stuff, that lost most of the data in the OVH datacenter fire and slowly died, and some stuff was put on youtube 15 years ago, and then got copyright claimed 5 years ago, and was removed. The music groups don't exist anymore, so the CDs aren't publushed anymore, second hand shops are very rare and cater mostly to LPs and tourists, and the groups stopped existing before they could sign deals with the publisher for streaming services.

So yeah, it's not just "those semi-personal photos taken on a party and kept by maybe one or two people", but also pop-music that used to be on the radio all the time in late 80s, early 90s, and is just..gone!

I'm sure that there are data hoarders somewhere, that have mp3s of all those songs somewhere, but unless we get some p2p type of service like gnutella/ed2k/kazaa working again, I won't be able to find them anymore.

"I'm sure that there are data hoarders somewhere, that have mp3s of all those songs somewhere, but unless we get some p2p type of service like gnutella/ed2k/kazaa working again, I won't be able to find them anymore."

Such archives would need to be kept online though. If only archived (or hoarded), it's just data in a box that no-one can access.

Current internet is really poor at handling this long tail. Eg. a movie can be streamed & torrented, millions see it, many have it in personal archives, but 1 year later the torrent swarm has died out, and those personal archives of the downloaders aren't online. And then copyright holder pulls it from their streaming service.

Result: nowhere to be found. Even though popular not long ago.

Copies in personal archives don't count for much if others can't access that data.

For a long time, “So This is Paris” (1954 starring Tony Curtis) was my white whale, as I could not find a copy anywhere, legally or otherwise. I had seen a clip that somebody had posted on youtube, and wanted to see the full movie. The clip was taken down by a copyright claim, and still the movie was unavailable.

Eventually, after searching on and off for a few years, I found a copy on a Russian streaming site, but the movie has effectively been erased from availability.

When I was in university late 90s early 00s, my friends and i had all kinds of music and tv clips downloaded from p2p sharing, that I have since lost and can't find. Clips from shows, remixes of songs. Like you say, somebody must have them, but they're not findable anymore.

There was some cool, obscure music on the original? mp3.com, bands that never made it beyond that site. Never made it to OiNK or what.cd, etc. either

Mp3.com purposefully breaking the law to prove a point screwed over an untold number of indie artists. IMHO it was a shitty thing for them to do.

not sure it helps but - soulseek is pretty alive

I recently logged into Soulseek for the first time in about a decade, and I was unable to find lots of stuff that was commonly shared in the early millennium. It’s no secret that the generation most interested in audio filesharing is graying, and as many people raise families and have less and less time for obsessive music collecting, they fall away from the scene.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com