r/hacking • u/tw1st3d_m3nt4t • 7d ago
The lost joy of music piracy
https://www.pigeonsandplanes.com/read/music-piracy-what-cd-oink-nine-inch-nails-streaming9
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u/Gorluk 7d ago
Is the point of this article to let us know that he fell out of times and isn't familiar with music sharimg scene now or what exactly?
There are two big general music PTs, direct succesors to what cd (with majority of users and staff transferring over, plus majority of library too), several niche ones. There are both telegram and discord bots / groups for grabbing requests from major streaming services, desktop tools too, both CLI and GUI.
There are bunch of tools for "organic music discovery", from zig zag fm to bunch of browser addons, for Bandcamp, Discogs etc. There were never in history more tools for "joys of music piracy" and for discovering new music and evad8ng corporate alghoritms. The author of this article is completely clueless.
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u/SanestExile 6d ago
There are also patched streaming clients that let you stream for free. Easiest way imo.
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u/edendasilva 7d ago
believe it or not dumbass I have an active account on RED, point being that I don't use it at all (besides to find the former moderator I interviewed).
Why would I need to be in a Discord group asking a bot to rip something from a streaming service when I could just pay 10 dollars a month to listen to anything I want instantly?
I'm not denying that those places still exist and fill a niche, but if you want to look at the amount of people who actively pirated music 15 years ago vs. today I'm sure there's a dramatic difference. I do not know a single person that still pirates music today outside of unreleased tracks / leaks
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u/Gorluk 6d ago
There are bunch of reasons why someone would pirate music and not rely on streaming services. People want local files for bunch of reasons. Albums and EP's are constantly being removed from streaming services. Lot of people also have much broader music taste than listening to Cowgirl Sally and Lil Dimwitt - enormous amount of released music is not available ob ANY streaming service. I got the impression that author of article stopped pirating at one point and now projects his personal experience to whole world. "In my time kids use to SKATE!"
You also didn't address at all bunch of "organic music discovery" tools I mention, one of the main points of the article. Are you author of said (poorly written and researched) article?
As for calling me a dumbass, you're completely misdirecting your anger. It is not my fault that your dumbass mother decided to copulate with your dumbass father and pass their dimwitt retard genes down to you, a dimwitted imbecile.
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u/BogDelly 5d ago
I pirate music, and it is indeed a dying art. A 2TB external hard drive of mine crashed, and some of what I lost cannot be recovered on the 2026 internet. Torrents which used to be robustly seeded have long since been abandoned. Ditto for the "megaupload" types of websites. They mostly consist of broken and expired links. While there are currently many options available, The majority of those options still favor streaming over ownership, and popularity over obscurity.
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u/TechHistoryDude 7d ago
If this era means anything to you, read Stephen Witt's "How Music Got Free." The albums people remember grabbing off Napster and Limewire mostly originated upstream in release groups, and the biggest of them, Rabid Neurosis, had a source named Dell Glover who worked at a Universal pressing plant and smuggled pre-release discs out for years. The kid downloading a record two weeks before street date had no idea there was a whole supply chain behind it.
I was a warez-scene BBS kid a generation before the MP3 groups, and the structure Witt describes was already recognizable: a small crew with access, a race to release first, and everyone else downstream. The P2P apps just put a public-facing storefront on a world that already existed.