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I used to pay for their radio service, it was a bit like Pandora. I found it when they added it to Xbox 360 as an app.

I really liked their original profile pages that had sort of a MySpace style customization & vibe. You could have your favorite musicians and tracks analyzed through their API by these 3rd party services that would create very cool graphics & charts to show off to friends and visitors what you were into.

But, then I guess they ran out of money and were really trying to get scooped up by Spotify. They turned off their music player, disabled all the profile customization, alternative services quit having built in scrobbling to it.

I remember I had to download an app that would constantly have my microphone open and it would ID the song I was listening to via some kind of Shazam service and send it to last.fm. I never considered what a security risk that was because I was more interested in keeping my last.fm music tracked.

The best way to discover music nowadays is RateYourMusic. I go to an album I like, read a couple reviews to find like-minded people and check out their profiles. They often have lists with their favorite albums.

The album chart queries are also incredible. The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors so you can find exactly what you want.

my method is just internet/local radio stations ( there are many ) and browsing the lineups at venues near me

simple, very little time investment required and avoids most modern fuckery

Shout out to KEXP!

looks cool I'll check them out, FWIW lately for me it's mostly chirpradio.org and somafm

Audiotree has turned me on to several of my favorite bands as of late. Low hit rate (I probably only care for 5% of the music they feature at most) but those couple bands have been worth sifting through the rest.

> The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors

My problem with this is that it makes certain assumptions about the consistency of applying genres and about the very concept of genre which (imo) is more of a social construct than an empirical concept. It falls in the same category as religion-sect, language-dialect.

what.cd was the world's greatest music discovery mechanism. You could always ask for recommendations in the forums or in the comment thread of the albums pages. The community always delivered. I miss that type of camaraderie. I also spent more on music as a member of that community than since it has been disbanded.

What.cd was the Library of Alexandria for recorded music, the depth of what was collated and properly labelled there was far beyond anything that has ever existed on any other service, paid for or not. Every permutation of every release, endless live recordings, often multiple of the same event, absolutely incredible.

Private trackers as I understand it, are still a thing in the mid 2020s. Did a replacement that matches (or surpasses) What.cd not pop up in the meantime?

I'm just wondering how a strong community like that was struck a deathblow. It's not like all of its content disappeared.

It did, took only a few weeks iirc.

Orpheus and Redacted existed but it's kind of hard to beat the convenience of streaming for the low price in 2025.

Granted you can set up automated *arr systems with PLEXAMP to get a pretty seamless "personal Spotify" setup IME getting true usefulness out of trackers of What's quality always required spending real money - to obtain rare records/CDs on marketplaces - or at least large amounts of time if you went the "rent CDs from the library" route. I personally haven't ran into much RYM releases lacking on Apple Music and what is lacking I can find on Bandcamp or YouTube.

Orpheus and redacted (previously passtheheadphones) both appeared shortly after what.cd’s demise. I believe they both now have more total torrents than what.cd, however the depth is still not what what’s was 9 years on (I know this because some of my uploads from what are still missing, partially because I no longer have the source material). And, the “cultivation” (ensuring no duplicates, recommendations for releases, general community, etc) is nowhere near what’s.

I would say all other media (or at least, the media I care about - film, tv, books) has what.cd equivalents, sometimes multiple. I think Spotify and AM killed 95%+ of “true” private tracker interest for music, especially with lossless and surround releases being available. The diehard core are still there (names from 15 years ago are still active) but it’s really not the same.

OiNK before that, too. Once waffles and what disappeared then I was never 'able' to get on to one of the newer ones… the whole process is some real archaic thing. Used to have a great 'profile' on those others, but yeah.

My favorite manual discovery/social was Napster, for that moment that you could view other user’s entire shared music folder and use the chat function to talk to them about their tastes!

I was just talking about this in r/piracy but I remember there was a chat function on Kazaa where you could message people you were downloading music from and ask for recommendations. Simpler times...

Shameless plug: I'm building volt.fm for Spotify (3M users) which like last.fm lets you find people with similar taste.

You can even save their top songs as an auto-updating playlist. It's a great way to find new music that is not controlled by algorithms.

Here's my profile if anyone wants to have a look: https://volt.fm/soheilpro

I've signed in and see my profile – how do I find people with similar taste?

> I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres.

This has been until very recently the modus operandi of most recommendation engine algorithms. If an algorithm is essentially doing what you do, would you not like that?

In my experience Spotify's song/playlist recommendations are not great, but the album recommendations have a pretty high hit rate. I'm not sure why this would be.

Did they get a lot better recently? For years I rarely even looked at them because they were so banal and repetitive, but about six months ago they suddenly became something to stay on top of.

I started using spotify about 5 years ago, if you're a long time user I don't really know what it was like before then.

I found so much indie electronic music I loved to listen to back then, via last fm. I don’t listen to any of it any more. Or have any interest to

say more?

Fond memories of browsing my downloaders on soulseek

You can still do exactly this on bandcamp!

So, all I’m hearing is that, when we actually took the humans out of the loop and replaced them with algorithms, all the humanity disappeared?

”If take human out … why human there no more???”

It’s shocking this species is able to come up with such advanced technologies when the above is the existential question that plagues them in the macro.

Aren't these social features still active?