Additionally there was a lot of discourse about music and a lot of curated discovery mechanisms I sorely miss to this day. An algorithm is no replacement for the amount of time and care people put into the web of similar artists, playlists of recommendations and reviews. Despite it being piracy, music consumption through it felt more purposeful. It's introduced me to some of my all time favourite artists, which I've seen live and own records and merchandise of.
So there was a clever trick that smaller artists did on what.cd: put up a really generous upload credit bounty for your own music, in order to sell digital copies.
I knew a few bands in Toronto who did this as a way to make sales.
They'd put up a big bounty right after setting up a webpage offering the album for sale via Paypal, then spend a few days collecting orders (and they would get a lot of them - hundreds sometimes - because What.cd had a lot of users looking for ratio credits) and then eventually email a link to the album after a few days.
No idea what the scale of this trick/scam (call it whatever) was but anecdotally I heard about it enough.
Music licensing (in the US at least) is actually pretty nice for this (from the licensee perspective anyway). There are mechanical licenses which allow you to use music for many uses without contracting with the rightsholders and clearinghouses whose job is to determine where to send royalties. So you can use the music and send reporting and royalties to the clearing houses and you're done.
Of course, you may want to contract with the rightsholders if you don't like the terms of the mechanical license; maybe it costs too much, etc. If you're Spotify or similar and you have specific contracts for most of the music, and have to pay mechanical license rates for the tail, it might make sense to do so in order to boast of a larger catalog.
One interesting way of discovering artists is finding an artist that I already like on a compilation CD, and then seeing what else is on the CD.
They also had good incentive structures for keeping the bar high -- you could get kicked out for having a bad ratio, so the easiest way to pump your upload up was to fulfil obscure requests for FLACs you could purchase online but were extremely difficult to purchase (if you're lucky it's just an unknown artist on Bandcamp). I discovered a lot of obscure music this way, some that I'm still looking for to this day after it shut down.
Because I cared so much about being part of that private tracker, this is what also prompted me to rent a seedbox for the first time. I paid in Bitcoin out of paranoia (I lived in Germany where the fines for piracy are HEFTY, and they actually do come after you) back when Bitcoin wasn't really worth that much, and later found that that old wallet suddenly had a couple thousand in it instead of the spare change I couldn't move!
I want this torrent though. It would be fun to stand up a NAS for this.
I’ve noticed in the past 10 years or so private trackers have become less strict because the economics of ratios only works if either a) everyone is equally uploading new material and b) there are more and more signups. So now there is value in the amount of time you seed your content which lowers your “required” ratio.
It's a 0 sum game; for every account with a >1.0 ratio, that implies other people will be <1.0.
And when you compete with 10gb/s seedboxes that have scripts to automatically grab all the new torrent the second they get posted, it's extremely difficult to improve your ratio. Even for super popular torrents, you have a few minutes to seed as much as you can before upload speed goes to 0 forever. You can't slowly accumulate upload over time the same way you would with a torrent from a public tracker.
(And because they lack much obscure stuff and I don't like being dependent on the Internet and a renter's whims for something as essential as music, I guess)
They're still kind of around, but yeah, everything is very much on it's way out in the music scene, at least in terms of that late 90s early 00s culture. Or has been until recently. There is a renewed interest in self-hosting and "offline" style music collections.
It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes. When self-hosting music comes up this is always one of the top questions people have: How do you find new music?
The answer isn't that hard and really hasn't changed much. People just don't want to spend any time or effort doing it. Music stores still exist, they're amazing. Lots of 2nd hand stores carry vinyl and CDs now, which can give you great ideas for new music. There are self-hosted AI solutions and tools. Last.fm and Scrobbling are still very much around. My scrobble history is so insanely useful. There are music discords. Friends. Asking people what they're listening to in public. Live shows with unique openers(I once went to a Ben Kweller show with 4 opening bands, I still listen to 3 of them.)
Some local radio DJs frequently play songs I enjoy that have under 1K plays on youtube. No algo or platform is surfacing those. Local radio gets me both local and international music. A friend of mine prefers critically acclaimed stuff, so he streams radio shows from NTS and the like.
I think carefully curating music was something we did when music was a scarce commodity. Our collection was limited by how much we could afford to acquire. As such, acquiring the right stuff become a valued skill, not only for DJs, but for music enthusiasts just playing music at home.
Streaming killed all that. For 99.9% of the people out there, streaming has all they need and will ever need, at a fixed cost. It's absolutely abundance.
So the skill of curating music as a human activity went out the window as well, because there's no cost in playing the wrong track and deciding you didn't like it, before moving to the next item in your AI-generated playlist.
Put bluntly: How people discover music isn't important. At least not anymore.
(And I say this as a music enthusiast myself)
It was quality in technical quality of the audio in the files, but also in the organization and sourcing of the material, the QA-process of the encoding - down the the specific release the audio-file was from.
There was quantity, sure, but that was secondary to the quality. The quantity was just a side-effect of the place being known for quality, making it an attractive arena to participate in.
And it also had all the "weird"/non-standard things you don't find on mainstream streaming-services precisely because that is what independent curators are good at and often driven by.
This Anna's release... While in itself impressive in many ways does not compare to the things What.CD represented. It's almost the exact opposite:
- focus on most popular content - niche content (even by mainstream Spotify-standards) is not included
- quality is 160kbps ogg files, which is far from lossless, it's not tightly coupled to a release and even as so far the audio-grading goes, there's no transparent QA process for the content, nor is it available in audiophile fidelity.
This is definitely Apples vs Oranges.
So there’s some way to go for a comprehensive music archive.
while one can compare in terms of number of tracks, the quality used to be in another level altogether. from the article:
> The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s.
meanwhile the tracker had 16/24-bit flac rips of vinyl, with decent quality control where the track's metadata was verified for any artifacts. for the given quality, one could rip youtube music (maybe not as easily anymore) and achieve a larger scale in a similar quality level.
now if hypothetically tidal had all the music of the world and was accessible this way, then it would be a comparable resource. insane regardless.
i completely understand the archive's decision on applying their own compression.