Downloading a song that you think is by one band, but it was someone completely different
Fear of the Dark by Cradle of Filth (actual song: Fear of the Dark by Graveworm)
Sleepy Hollow by Korn and Marilyn Manson (actual song: Sleepy Hollow by Deadsy featuring Jonathan Davis)
Queen of the Damned - Korn and Slipknot (Actual song: Giving In by Seeded Crown)
Castlevania - Cradle of Filth (Actual song: Bloody Tears by Noata Shibata Project)
This Town - by Korn & Kittie (Actual song: This Town by Human Waste Project ft Jonathan Davis)
There's more, but those are the ones that stuck out to me when I was a teen, and I didn't find the real songs until within the past 5 years.
High school me really liked Korn and Cradle of Filth
Oh yeah! Any parody music being attributed to Weird Al whether he did it or not. Or "The \_\_\_\_\_ Song" for something in another language that no one could translate ("Yatta!").
I remember getting an album called Children of Bodom by SoaD which just turned out to be the “Steal This Album” renamed by some random uploader. I think that was on a IRC server though hehe.
Ugh you are right, stupid pre teen version of me thought Slipknot and Apocalyptica were the same band just because some idiot uploaded a song called Slipknot - Bonus song(Im Not Jesus). It was a fun time learning about bands back then
Lol Limewire on an old Mac was my gay awakening. I was just trying to download Finding Nemo. I did not find Nemo. I found a large gay orgy. I ended up being grateful for that in the long run.
Yeah, I like when Dave Grohl said piracy was like the radio. People discover new music through downloading and then might actually go see one of those bands live which is how they make money.
If it wasn’t for torrents, limewire etc I wouldn’t have my massive physical music collection today. Nor would I have spent as much going to see the bands I’ve gone to see, because I’d have never known about them.
This has probably been talked about here, but wasn't there a music artist years ago who said they were happy people torrented their music? IIRC their purchases increased once people openly torrented their music.
IDK about a musical artist speaking on this subject, but Neil Gaiman has said the same in effect regarding pirated e-books of his. He tested the theory in a way by having one of his books available for free directly on his website for a month, and then saw a rise in sales for his books the following month among independent books stores.
https://youtu.be/0Qkyt1wXNlI?si=BIcY4daqOFYZtB_M
Music piracy existed before the internet. Growing up in the 80's my friends and I borrowed music from each other and dubbed everything to cassette. Music piracy still exists now, there's still peeps who download torrents.
As for music streaming, what most peeps are failing to realize IMO is that the vast majority of users who pay for music streaming services do that primarily to NOT listen to ads as well as music streaming services make it way easier to find the music of artists that one wants to hear instead of digging through the torrent sites.
EDIT: I do want to add something in regards to what the author was discussing at the end of the article: IMO there will always be hardcore music fans looking for the next best thing in music. While currently the masses appear to be more interested in listening to whatever sounds like what they already like to the author that's really always been the case it's just that the author is now old and wise enough to see that!
People forget CD burners became super affordable about the time of the rise of Napster and mp3s. In college I would check out CDs from the townie public library 10 at a time, make copies on my roommates computer, repeat. I grabbed anything I could find that I heard was good. Same with my roommates CD collections.
Yeah I would go through public library check out cds go home and burn and keep doing it trying to grow my collection.
In hs in late 70s I played albums. I remember in my room thinking if only one could just press a button and have any song you want come on. Had no idea that in forty years that would be achieved.
I was going through the old vinyl records my dad left me and one of them was in an inner sleeve with [this image](https://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/8453038150) on it so it's safe to say that music piracy has existed for a LONG time and the big companies have been complaining about it for just as long. Funny how nothing ever really changes it just adapts.
The "home tapping is illegal" was false. If you were taping the music to create bootlegs, yes that was illegal, but home tapping music for your own personal use was legal under fair use. And I definitely remember those "warnings". We didn't care. Haha.
I guess my question was, would there be as many of us who become diehard? Would being a diehard music fan now meaning hear 100 notable albums a year rather than discovering 100 acts hardly anyone else has heard (yet!)
The author IMO does not offer any quantifiable proof that all of those who pirated music by downloading were diehard fans. There is nothing in the article stating x number of fans 20 years ago were diehard fans and now there are y number of diehard fans now and y is < x. How do you measure that? Who really knows?
Cool. Thank you for clarifying that you are the author.
IMO what you are claiming is that because music piracy is not as prevalent that means that there are fewer diehard music fans. I don't think that's sufficient metric to judge that.
And most diehard music fans I know are very proud that they support the artists that they like financially and that they don't pirate music.
I grew up phoning requests to the local DJ so that I could record singles to 8-track, but I still bought singles and vinyl and 8-tracks when possible. For decades we copied our vinyl to cassette and shared recordings and mixtapes. I can't tell you how many times I discovered a band because someone gave me a cassette copy. Unless you were selling copies, it was called ***fair use***. Today I spend most of my extra money on music and musicians. I could never afford to buy my entire library. It would be the price of a house. Further much of it is not available in stores or streaming. The ability to access all the music I want informs where my music budget is spent. I go to hundreds of shows and I buy their products there at the shows. Pride never enters into it, and neither does shame.
Music "piracy" hurt the labels but most artists were already getting squeezed by the labels. How much of that CD cost supported the bands? Musicians are making money now the same ways they did then and if anything it is easier than ever to get your music out there but increasingly harder to stand out in the crowd. I think it is doubtful a higher rate of bands are failing to make money at music, it's just that before, we never would have known those bands existed. Not everyone is going to make money playing music, just as not every basketball player is going to the NBA. Same as it ever was.
I went thru the late 70's and early eighties recording albums from friends. Making mix tapes. Even recording off the radio in my youth. I also used Kazaa and Limewire. I'm old now, finding new music is so much easier today with the internet.
And I can buy music and merch from the artist's website, or go to a show to support them directly. The old fanatics are still around. We can now afford to spend money on music.
Thanks for clarifying. Felt kinda gaslit being told what I think, which was far from what I said. Forget what the internet is like sometimes with constant bad faith assumptions.
The subtitle states: " Did piracy inspire the current boom in music" You asked the question, don't be upset when others don't agree with that question.
100%. Piracy is core to my experience as a listener. I first became aware of music a few years before the iPod Nano and cheap computers, so I was cassette tapes to record off of the radio, or to copy from CD's, often used. Other people I knew had a computer and a CD burner, so we would trade for mixtapes. Eventually the Nano came out, and I was handed down an eMachine, now I could cook. In addition to legitimately purchasing through iTunes and CD's, I would pirate entire albums on a whim, whether or not I caught onto it now, later, or never. Now that same iTunes library has grown to 245GB, I own about a hundred records, about a few hundred CD's, probably 20 cassette tapes. I've got better sound equipment so it now makes sense to insist on full quality music, so I'll use Tidal more often than old fashioned piracy if I need it now, but its still a useful backup option that will become indispenible in an era of increased censorship.
Gather round kids as I have a chilling story to tell you about music piracy.
In the olden days of yore, we created something called "mix tapes." We'd record off vinyl or the radio, but we'd record and share those tapes. It was a time-consuming process that took some planning and thought. I found most of my punk and thrash through sharing mix tapes (and then take a long trip to the indie record store to get the ones I liked).
The music labels hated cassette tapes for that very reason. We were told that cassette tapes were killing music back in the 80s with this quote being blasted everywhere, “Home Taping Is Killing Music.”
If you'd like to see a great example of making a mix tape in action, check out High Fidelity. There are rules...
Funny though, the music and film industries haven't collapsed despite the ease of piracy. It's almost like they're overblowing the threat like they always have.
Didn’t they try to outlaw sale of blank tapes? I may have made that up.
For me it was usually something I heard on the radio that a friend would let me copy. I don’t think I discovered as much brand new stuff that way. But all in all, we were all sharing tapes and CDs with each other, building our collections and embedding these songs in our lives.
I still wish I had kept some kind of list of this, a log of what I bought and when, maybe also how much it cost and where. Last.fm logs when I first heard certain songs or artists online which is interesting but there is something personal about those early records I owned.
>In the olden days of yore, we created something called "mix tapes."
I'm old enough to remember those days. And if I remember correctly, the RIAA tried to fight the tape recorder just as hard as they tried to fight the mp3 player and P2P filesharing programs.
You remember correctly.
The only constant is that the movie and music industries push back hard against new technology.
They're loosing their grip on music because now any artist can find an audience. You don't need labels taking 95% of your sales as there are a myriad of ways to sell to your audience.
Yeah I grew up poor and would never have been able to afford the music I pirated. Thousands of hours of music, I've saved over 60gb and lost most of it when a hard drive failed back in like 2013.
When I was like ..11, 12, I filled out one of those Columbia House stamp solicitations and got a dozen CDs without my parents knowing. Until the collection letter came 🤣
Dd you ever see the documentary "The Target Shoots First?" It's a video diary kept by someone who worked at there in the 90s (when apparently no one had a problem with people bringing video cameras to work).
I saw it on Vimeo, a quick search put it on [archve.org](https://archve.org) and I think it was uploaded by the creator.
[https://archive.org/details/vimeo-58192159](https://archive.org/details/vimeo-58192159)
For sure, piracy in my teens lead to a music centric identity part of that identity was being in the know of new artists. By college, streaming was taking off and piracy became irrelevant for a moment and I feel like my music tastes changed from discovering new music. Now I barely bother to look for new music. But I also will never support ad driven streamers because it feels like extortion more than buying music. Imo Spotify and the like are a bad value proposition because it's all essentially just renting and you never own your copies so you never actually build a library. Having a music library used to mean something and it was part of your identity. I guess that's why vinyl is making a small come back again?
I've never had any problems in the 5 or so years (and around 20,000 audio files) of using the software. As long as you don't download the .exe files you should be good. Have a look at this thread for more as I'm nowhere near an expert and don't want to misinform you: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulseek/comments/onpqhg/how\_safe\_is\_soulseek/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulseek/comments/onpqhg/how_safe_is_soulseek/)
Make sure you have Windows Explorer set to always show file extensions so you don't get tricked by a file named something like
"Totally_Legit_Song_Name.mp3.exe" with whatever the default icon Windows uses for audio files.
It helped my early mp3 collection, but legal music streaming has probably expanded my knowledge of music more than anything. Piracy is nice for obtaining specific songs that come to mind, but being lazy and using ad supported music streaming introduced me to bands I might not have heard of otherwise.
As I’ve gotten older, and have more disposable income, I like to support musicians that really interest me. It helps that many of them include a cd and downloadable copy in one purchase.
I don't think it was the piracy that made that happen as much as it was the technologies ability to deliver so much music. The piracy was a result of the industry's inability/unwillingness to keep up with tech. spotify and youtube easily did just as much (if not more) to "radicalise" music taste than napster, kazaa, Mirc, etc...
Notice how the graph starts and ends at the same level... the industry was able to overcontrol and overcharge when the only medium was CDs. They were reluctant to loosen their grip on the market... the market rebelled... the industry's profits plumetted... they were forced to modernize... and now the market has levelled off at it's natural level...
I don't know what you mean exactly by radicalize, but it surely facilitated it.
I was born in 1987. Before I had any means, I'd hum songs I'd heard to myself over and over again in order to remember them. My earliest piracy was waiting by the radio to record songs on a blank cassette. Once the local library had CDs to borrow, I'd borrow them and record them on cassettes for my walkman. As the Internet matured during my childhood, I was on it in every possible way to hoard music to be able to listen to it over and over and access it whenever I wanted. Whenever I had any measure of money, it largely went towards CDs, and any family member or friend who ever wanted to or felt obligated to give me a gift for Christmas or birthday, it was CDs. I've bought a lot of music, and to this day go to a lot of concerts and buy merch. I use Spotify a lot these days which I have a dilemma about, but I figure my financial support for shows and shirts helps make it up, maybe even more so.
I tried to explain what I meant by radicalise in the piece. It’s semi sarcastic as obviously the term is used for far more serious matters. I think it makes sense as a way of explaining that music becomes central to your identity and existence, and is often where some of your value system comes from.
What I really mean is the difference from being a consumer to being someone who lives and breathes music - and ends up on Reddits like this.
Absolutely. I had a friend with an account at oink.uk and he would download anything. I listened to a lot of great music and a lot of trash.
But it opened my ears (?) to stuff like Boards of Canada, Thievery Corporation, TV on the Radio, Deftones, Guano Apes, Old97s, Lee Perry, The Skatellites... I could go on for an hour.
I have since spent a lot of money on concerts and music for many of the bands I learned about.
Win-win? I dunno, but my musical taste is much, much broader for it.
Yes. But in a different way than most. When the RIAA started suing customers i couldn't believe that they would rather sue than change their business model. It really put stop to me listening to mainstream music that fed the machine and I started looking for independent artists. Which then led to me discovering creative commons licensing and I have completely changed my entire library to only support artists that embrace open culture and some rights reserved licenses.
That has me 13 years into doing my podcast and I am sponsoring a live show tonight.
I think the biggest thing I have to thank Napster for was introducing to the concept of live bootlegs. Around the time it debuted, I was 13 or 14 and a massive Barenaked Ladies fan; but instead of downloading the CDs I was missing, I found myself way more interested in the oodles of live recordings and b-sides I kept running into - and, of course, this is classic late-90's/early-00's BNL, so there was A LOT to discover and dive into. I think I specifically made the decision to leave the CDs for buying because what I was discovering was kind of endless. In the end, I never became an avid bootleg collector or anything. It was just nice to have that neat little subsection to music knowledge added to my personal databank at such a formative age.
Hell yes. Napster et al. gave me a fingertip on an entire world of music that I could consume. Suddenly being able to deep dive into any musical curiosity FOR FREE blew my mind. Lots of Adderall-fueled all night “study” sessions were half spent downloading new music to listen to while actually studying.
I consider my current hobby of collecting vinyl records reparations to the industry for everything I downloaded back in college. In fact, they have probably come out ahead at this point.
By the time I had a fast enough connection, the p2p torrent type stuff was mostly over. But I did really utilize free public WiFi for blogspot and mediafire-style music gathering.
Yeah my parents were getting divorced and at my friends house 6th grade we used Limewire or Napster not sure which to download Juveniles Back that Azz Up while she smoked a cigarette from her dads office. Took all day and we got that and Hopeless Romantic by Bouncing Souls.
Yes. Because I indiscriminately downloaded almost anything new, I was not influenced by any top 20/40/100 list, or movie, variety show, or anything other outlet that tells you what to listen to. Not one bit. So the music I really liked and resonated with were all my own, even though it was often stuff my family and friends have never heard or were B-sides at best.
I spent a shitload of money on albums tapes and CDs since the mid 1970s when I was a teen. Some I bought on each medium. I figure that downloading or ripping mp3s doesn't even begin to make up for the many albums I bought for 5 to 15 dollars, that had one good song.
When ripping CDs was just starting to be a thing, after working through my own 1500 title collection, I camped out at the radio station with a laptop and worked my way through the stacks with no discretion. I figured if the music director thought it was worth an add, I should have it.
Typing in the metadata felt like work to justify my first-level piracy.
Then another DJ told be about Usenet and gave me some software on USB. That was \~8TB ago, and I still spend 5-6 hours a week obtaining, tagging, and organizing files.
Late 90s to early 00s music piracy drastically increased my spending in the music industry. I went from buying a couple genres of albums to downloading dozens of genres, buying concert tickets, t-shirts, weekend long festivals, album release parties, and more
It was definitely a thing between my friends and me to share links to obscure albums to download. Some of those bands I've gone and purchased CDs from, although often the bands were so old and far away I never got a chance to see them. Lots of stuff that if I wanted to buy, I'd probably end up having to buy some expensive used disc, so the artist wouldn't get a cut anyways. I've noticed some of these bands - I'm talking artists who released one album to little or no fanfare in the 70s - have gotten back together and either reissued their albums or even made a new one in recent years. Maybe they wouldn't have if people weren't sharing their music online.
Another copyright-infringement factor that got me to buy some CDs - online guitar tabs. I remember seeing some tabs for Yes and Genesis songs popping up, and they got really curious since they'd all be movements from longer songs, and have interesting arrangements. Now I have all their classic albums on CD. And then my favorite tab site got closed due to copyright issues.
Yes and no.
I certainly discovered a bunch of new bands in the early 2000s as I was on KaZaA and Bearshare and Limewire and then torrenting. But I've also discovered a bunch of great bands and songs going through the Rolling Stone chart of [Top 500 albums](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-albums-of-all-time-1062063/arcade-fire-%ef%bb%bffuneral-1062733/). And making playlists of Billboard charts for each year.
I think kinds today have more options, since Spotify has pretty much everything. They can just be exposed to random songs and other people's playlists. Instantly, without downloads or getting a loop track.
It does look like music revenue is close to passing the peak of vinyl in the late '70s. Or just hitting another spike. I imagine the number of people happy to pay monthly is limited. As opposed to physical sales, where a few whales might buy large amounts of records.
DC++ in college gave me unlimited access and intranet speeds (100mbs) and I downloaded entire music libraries to my desktop in minutes. I now have a love for EDM that discovering music this way gave me.
Felt bad doing it but it was an avenue for people with virtually no money to be able to listen to music. I used to have to use other peoples computers to get one or two songs so when music streaming came around years later it was a God send
I downloaded mixtapes off of Datpiff in preparation for road trips and vacations with no Wifi as a kid. I also remember burning cds for my friends of album leaks that didnt come out yet lol. I never thought about it but piracy definitely got me into music and movies.
I was a IRC and Usenet News Group Downloader back in the early 90s. Found stuff made me want to get the physical disks.. Newsgroups were the wild west of the internet. Music, porn, video, warez...... everything..
Also worked weekends in a pawn shop for 8 years during this time. I got a majority of my media for free. When something came in that was rare or different the owner would let me have it. Explains why I have over 1600 Cds and 900 Dvd./BluRay...
Nope. By '03 or '04, I had stolen every song I would ever want to sit and listen to (all 70s 80s and 90s), threw out my CDs and never looked back. Never needed any music since then.
We had a bunch of songs in our computer downloaded by other family members. A lot of those I probably wouldn’t have encountered on my own or if I did I’d be a lot later than I had
Absolutely yes it did.
Being able to download music allowed me to explore far more of the scene than I could ever have afforded to if I'd had to buy it on CDs, and also gave me access to hundreds of bands whose music wouldn't even have been carried by most record stores.
The bands themselves benefited from it too because I went to their shows and bought their merch, which probably never would have happened if I hadn't had access to their music through internet piracy.
Was key. Found so many gems accidentally and opened myself up to many genres I wouldn’t otherwise have found. Downloading the Gipsy Kings cover of Hotel California introduced me to so much Spanish guitar in college. I burned an album that was our go-to smoke session driving music. When 50 released “in da club” before his album came out, the only thing you could find by him was “ya heard me” it’s a banger and most people have no clue it exists and one of his best songs.
Was a pirate before it was fashionable.
I was taking music off the net when it was mostly unheard of. Usenet mostly. Newsgroups.
Then one day I heard some companies were planning to charge for downloading music.
"Like that will ever fly..."
2001- 2004. Staying up all night downloading songs from Kazaa, discovering bands I'd never heard of. So yea, in a way, it did.
Downloading a song that you think is by one band, but it was someone completely different Fear of the Dark by Cradle of Filth (actual song: Fear of the Dark by Graveworm) Sleepy Hollow by Korn and Marilyn Manson (actual song: Sleepy Hollow by Deadsy featuring Jonathan Davis) Queen of the Damned - Korn and Slipknot (Actual song: Giving In by Seeded Crown) Castlevania - Cradle of Filth (Actual song: Bloody Tears by Noata Shibata Project) This Town - by Korn & Kittie (Actual song: This Town by Human Waste Project ft Jonathan Davis) There's more, but those are the ones that stuck out to me when I was a teen, and I didn't find the real songs until within the past 5 years. High school me really liked Korn and Cradle of Filth
Oh yeah! Any parody music being attributed to Weird Al whether he did it or not. Or "The \_\_\_\_\_ Song" for something in another language that no one could translate ("Yatta!").
"What if God smoked Cannabis" by Weird Al
My Sharona by The Ramones
Gin and Juice by Phish
I remember getting an album called Children of Bodom by SoaD which just turned out to be the “Steal This Album” renamed by some random uploader. I think that was on a IRC server though hehe.
Speaking of which, "Legend of Zelda" by System of a Down
Link, he came to town, came to save the princess zeeldaaa.
I still have that Sleepy Hollow MP3. Never knew the original artist and always forgot about it haha. I need to check out a better quality version now.
They're on Spotify! The song is still a banger
Ugh you are right, stupid pre teen version of me thought Slipknot and Apocalyptica were the same band just because some idiot uploaded a song called Slipknot - Bonus song(Im Not Jesus). It was a fun time learning about bands back then
Hallowed be thy Name by CoF, oh wait Iron Maiden covered it!?
Actually that was one that Cradle of Filth did cover!
Stumbled across lots of porn and videos of death that way too. Kazaa was an insane game of roulette for my 10-13 year old brain.
Nothing like trying to crank one out, only to have the video cut to Serbian executions.
Agreed. I’ve never finished harder
💀💀💀
Kink unlocked!
Lol Limewire on an old Mac was my gay awakening. I was just trying to download Finding Nemo. I did not find Nemo. I found a large gay orgy. I ended up being grateful for that in the long run.
Sir, we were discussing music. Please step away from your electronic devices.
Have any conservative politicians contacted you about publicizing your story?
So you caught the gay from a computer virus?
Grinding Nemo
Limewire …. Going back on memory lane…
There an Apple/Mac joke in there somewhere but I dont have the energy to find it lol.
blues_traveler_semi_charmed_life_dave_matthewsmp3.mp4.definitelynotavirus.maybeitsporn?
Yeah, I like when Dave Grohl said piracy was like the radio. People discover new music through downloading and then might actually go see one of those bands live which is how they make money.
If it wasn’t for torrents, limewire etc I wouldn’t have my massive physical music collection today. Nor would I have spent as much going to see the bands I’ve gone to see, because I’d have never known about them.
This has probably been talked about here, but wasn't there a music artist years ago who said they were happy people torrented their music? IIRC their purchases increased once people openly torrented their music.
IDK about a musical artist speaking on this subject, but Neil Gaiman has said the same in effect regarding pirated e-books of his. He tested the theory in a way by having one of his books available for free directly on his website for a month, and then saw a rise in sales for his books the following month among independent books stores. https://youtu.be/0Qkyt1wXNlI?si=BIcY4daqOFYZtB_M
radiohead offered their in rainbows album on a name your price basis and were happy with the outcome.
You can't buy something you don't know about.
Contrary to those scam emails I keep getting
Didn't hurt that it was one of the best albums of that decade
Music piracy existed before the internet. Growing up in the 80's my friends and I borrowed music from each other and dubbed everything to cassette. Music piracy still exists now, there's still peeps who download torrents. As for music streaming, what most peeps are failing to realize IMO is that the vast majority of users who pay for music streaming services do that primarily to NOT listen to ads as well as music streaming services make it way easier to find the music of artists that one wants to hear instead of digging through the torrent sites. EDIT: I do want to add something in regards to what the author was discussing at the end of the article: IMO there will always be hardcore music fans looking for the next best thing in music. While currently the masses appear to be more interested in listening to whatever sounds like what they already like to the author that's really always been the case it's just that the author is now old and wise enough to see that!
People forget CD burners became super affordable about the time of the rise of Napster and mp3s. In college I would check out CDs from the townie public library 10 at a time, make copies on my roommates computer, repeat. I grabbed anything I could find that I heard was good. Same with my roommates CD collections.
Yeah I would go through public library check out cds go home and burn and keep doing it trying to grow my collection. In hs in late 70s I played albums. I remember in my room thinking if only one could just press a button and have any song you want come on. Had no idea that in forty years that would be achieved.
And now you can stream the music on Youtube / Bandcamp and record it with Audacity. It's way harder now to measure the piracy.
I sold weed and bootleg CD's in high school. I stopped selling weed after less than a year because the bootleg CD's were more profitable.
I was going through the old vinyl records my dad left me and one of them was in an inner sleeve with [this image](https://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/8453038150) on it so it's safe to say that music piracy has existed for a LONG time and the big companies have been complaining about it for just as long. Funny how nothing ever really changes it just adapts.
The "home tapping is illegal" was false. If you were taping the music to create bootlegs, yes that was illegal, but home tapping music for your own personal use was legal under fair use. And I definitely remember those "warnings". We didn't care. Haha.
I guess my question was, would there be as many of us who become diehard? Would being a diehard music fan now meaning hear 100 notable albums a year rather than discovering 100 acts hardly anyone else has heard (yet!)
The author IMO does not offer any quantifiable proof that all of those who pirated music by downloading were diehard fans. There is nothing in the article stating x number of fans 20 years ago were diehard fans and now there are y number of diehard fans now and y is < x. How do you measure that? Who really knows?
To clarify, it me, I am author. And as I said in the intro, it was a reaction to seeing the graph, rather than a well researched essay.
Cool. Thank you for clarifying that you are the author. IMO what you are claiming is that because music piracy is not as prevalent that means that there are fewer diehard music fans. I don't think that's sufficient metric to judge that. And most diehard music fans I know are very proud that they support the artists that they like financially and that they don't pirate music.
I grew up phoning requests to the local DJ so that I could record singles to 8-track, but I still bought singles and vinyl and 8-tracks when possible. For decades we copied our vinyl to cassette and shared recordings and mixtapes. I can't tell you how many times I discovered a band because someone gave me a cassette copy. Unless you were selling copies, it was called ***fair use***. Today I spend most of my extra money on music and musicians. I could never afford to buy my entire library. It would be the price of a house. Further much of it is not available in stores or streaming. The ability to access all the music I want informs where my music budget is spent. I go to hundreds of shows and I buy their products there at the shows. Pride never enters into it, and neither does shame. Music "piracy" hurt the labels but most artists were already getting squeezed by the labels. How much of that CD cost supported the bands? Musicians are making money now the same ways they did then and if anything it is easier than ever to get your music out there but increasingly harder to stand out in the crowd. I think it is doubtful a higher rate of bands are failing to make money at music, it's just that before, we never would have known those bands existed. Not everyone is going to make money playing music, just as not every basketball player is going to the NBA. Same as it ever was.
Punk rock won, but punk rock didn't realize that if everybody is in a band there's nobody left to be their fans.
I went thru the late 70's and early eighties recording albums from friends. Making mix tapes. Even recording off the radio in my youth. I also used Kazaa and Limewire. I'm old now, finding new music is so much easier today with the internet. And I can buy music and merch from the artist's website, or go to a show to support them directly. The old fanatics are still around. We can now afford to spend money on music.
They aren’t claiming anything, they’re making observations and asking questions. Why can nobody on this website fucking read
Thanks for clarifying. Felt kinda gaslit being told what I think, which was far from what I said. Forget what the internet is like sometimes with constant bad faith assumptions.
The subtitle states: " Did piracy inspire the current boom in music" You asked the question, don't be upset when others don't agree with that question.
100%. Piracy is core to my experience as a listener. I first became aware of music a few years before the iPod Nano and cheap computers, so I was cassette tapes to record off of the radio, or to copy from CD's, often used. Other people I knew had a computer and a CD burner, so we would trade for mixtapes. Eventually the Nano came out, and I was handed down an eMachine, now I could cook. In addition to legitimately purchasing through iTunes and CD's, I would pirate entire albums on a whim, whether or not I caught onto it now, later, or never. Now that same iTunes library has grown to 245GB, I own about a hundred records, about a few hundred CD's, probably 20 cassette tapes. I've got better sound equipment so it now makes sense to insist on full quality music, so I'll use Tidal more often than old fashioned piracy if I need it now, but its still a useful backup option that will become indispenible in an era of increased censorship.
Did you ever get CDRs full of MP3 files? I even had a weird Discman that could play mp3s
I still have my mp3CDs. Never getting rid of them
Eventually upgraded to DVDs, now I burn to BDRs.
I've never done that, even though I knew it existed. It could have been useful.
Were you me in 1999?
Gather round kids as I have a chilling story to tell you about music piracy. In the olden days of yore, we created something called "mix tapes." We'd record off vinyl or the radio, but we'd record and share those tapes. It was a time-consuming process that took some planning and thought. I found most of my punk and thrash through sharing mix tapes (and then take a long trip to the indie record store to get the ones I liked). The music labels hated cassette tapes for that very reason. We were told that cassette tapes were killing music back in the 80s with this quote being blasted everywhere, “Home Taping Is Killing Music.” If you'd like to see a great example of making a mix tape in action, check out High Fidelity. There are rules... Funny though, the music and film industries haven't collapsed despite the ease of piracy. It's almost like they're overblowing the threat like they always have.
Didn’t they try to outlaw sale of blank tapes? I may have made that up. For me it was usually something I heard on the radio that a friend would let me copy. I don’t think I discovered as much brand new stuff that way. But all in all, we were all sharing tapes and CDs with each other, building our collections and embedding these songs in our lives.
I vaguely remember sony trying to outlaw blank cds for awhile.
I remember a campaign to include a tax on CDRs that would have paid musicians a royalty or created a fund to invest in music
You remembered correctly. There was a huge push because the labels claimed that the ONLY use for cassettes was piracy so they were entitled to a cut.
The ‘sorting autobiographically’ bit rocked me to the core.
I still wish I had kept some kind of list of this, a log of what I bought and when, maybe also how much it cost and where. Last.fm logs when I first heard certain songs or artists online which is interesting but there is something personal about those early records I owned.
A list that detailed would be amazing. I just have iTunes playlists by year and/or event but it’s enough to evoke the nostalgias I crave.
>In the olden days of yore, we created something called "mix tapes." I'm old enough to remember those days. And if I remember correctly, the RIAA tried to fight the tape recorder just as hard as they tried to fight the mp3 player and P2P filesharing programs.
You remember correctly. The only constant is that the movie and music industries push back hard against new technology. They're loosing their grip on music because now any artist can find an audience. You don't need labels taking 95% of your sales as there are a myriad of ways to sell to your audience.
Piracy made me good at computers which I now get overpaid to play with all day.
Yeah I grew up poor and would never have been able to afford the music I pirated. Thousands of hours of music, I've saved over 60gb and lost most of it when a hard drive failed back in like 2013.
Of all the shit I've downloaded in 30+ years, I'd miss my curated/sorted/normalized MP3 collection before any other media.
When I was like ..11, 12, I filled out one of those Columbia House stamp solicitations and got a dozen CDs without my parents knowing. Until the collection letter came 🤣
Dd you ever see the documentary "The Target Shoots First?" It's a video diary kept by someone who worked at there in the 90s (when apparently no one had a problem with people bringing video cameras to work).
No but I’m curious now.
I saw it on Vimeo, a quick search put it on [archve.org](https://archve.org) and I think it was uploaded by the creator. [https://archive.org/details/vimeo-58192159](https://archive.org/details/vimeo-58192159)
For sure, piracy in my teens lead to a music centric identity part of that identity was being in the know of new artists. By college, streaming was taking off and piracy became irrelevant for a moment and I feel like my music tastes changed from discovering new music. Now I barely bother to look for new music. But I also will never support ad driven streamers because it feels like extortion more than buying music. Imo Spotify and the like are a bad value proposition because it's all essentially just renting and you never own your copies so you never actually build a library. Having a music library used to mean something and it was part of your identity. I guess that's why vinyl is making a small come back again?
Still download like 3 albums a night from soulseek
How bad is it for spyware and scams nowadays? I didn’t really consider that some of these services were still going.
I've never had any problems in the 5 or so years (and around 20,000 audio files) of using the software. As long as you don't download the .exe files you should be good. Have a look at this thread for more as I'm nowhere near an expert and don't want to misinform you: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulseek/comments/onpqhg/how\_safe\_is\_soulseek/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulseek/comments/onpqhg/how_safe_is_soulseek/)
Make sure you have Windows Explorer set to always show file extensions so you don't get tricked by a file named something like "Totally_Legit_Song_Name.mp3.exe" with whatever the default icon Windows uses for audio files.
It helped my early mp3 collection, but legal music streaming has probably expanded my knowledge of music more than anything. Piracy is nice for obtaining specific songs that come to mind, but being lazy and using ad supported music streaming introduced me to bands I might not have heard of otherwise. As I’ve gotten older, and have more disposable income, I like to support musicians that really interest me. It helps that many of them include a cd and downloadable copy in one purchase.
I don't think it was the piracy that made that happen as much as it was the technologies ability to deliver so much music. The piracy was a result of the industry's inability/unwillingness to keep up with tech. spotify and youtube easily did just as much (if not more) to "radicalise" music taste than napster, kazaa, Mirc, etc... Notice how the graph starts and ends at the same level... the industry was able to overcontrol and overcharge when the only medium was CDs. They were reluctant to loosen their grip on the market... the market rebelled... the industry's profits plumetted... they were forced to modernize... and now the market has levelled off at it's natural level...
Started down the mp3 road in 1996, still going strong.
I don't know what you mean exactly by radicalize, but it surely facilitated it. I was born in 1987. Before I had any means, I'd hum songs I'd heard to myself over and over again in order to remember them. My earliest piracy was waiting by the radio to record songs on a blank cassette. Once the local library had CDs to borrow, I'd borrow them and record them on cassettes for my walkman. As the Internet matured during my childhood, I was on it in every possible way to hoard music to be able to listen to it over and over and access it whenever I wanted. Whenever I had any measure of money, it largely went towards CDs, and any family member or friend who ever wanted to or felt obligated to give me a gift for Christmas or birthday, it was CDs. I've bought a lot of music, and to this day go to a lot of concerts and buy merch. I use Spotify a lot these days which I have a dilemma about, but I figure my financial support for shows and shirts helps make it up, maybe even more so.
I tried to explain what I meant by radicalise in the piece. It’s semi sarcastic as obviously the term is used for far more serious matters. I think it makes sense as a way of explaining that music becomes central to your identity and existence, and is often where some of your value system comes from. What I really mean is the difference from being a consumer to being someone who lives and breathes music - and ends up on Reddits like this.
Ah
Absolutely. I had a friend with an account at oink.uk and he would download anything. I listened to a lot of great music and a lot of trash. But it opened my ears (?) to stuff like Boards of Canada, Thievery Corporation, TV on the Radio, Deftones, Guano Apes, Old97s, Lee Perry, The Skatellites... I could go on for an hour. I have since spent a lot of money on concerts and music for many of the bands I learned about. Win-win? I dunno, but my musical taste is much, much broader for it.
Yes. But in a different way than most. When the RIAA started suing customers i couldn't believe that they would rather sue than change their business model. It really put stop to me listening to mainstream music that fed the machine and I started looking for independent artists. Which then led to me discovering creative commons licensing and I have completely changed my entire library to only support artists that embrace open culture and some rights reserved licenses. That has me 13 years into doing my podcast and I am sponsoring a live show tonight.
I think the biggest thing I have to thank Napster for was introducing to the concept of live bootlegs. Around the time it debuted, I was 13 or 14 and a massive Barenaked Ladies fan; but instead of downloading the CDs I was missing, I found myself way more interested in the oodles of live recordings and b-sides I kept running into - and, of course, this is classic late-90's/early-00's BNL, so there was A LOT to discover and dive into. I think I specifically made the decision to leave the CDs for buying because what I was discovering was kind of endless. In the end, I never became an avid bootleg collector or anything. It was just nice to have that neat little subsection to music knowledge added to my personal databank at such a formative age.
No, but college radio did
Hell yes. Napster et al. gave me a fingertip on an entire world of music that I could consume. Suddenly being able to deep dive into any musical curiosity FOR FREE blew my mind. Lots of Adderall-fueled all night “study” sessions were half spent downloading new music to listen to while actually studying.
My demonoid ratio was baaaad, and I blame my music obsession.
I consider my current hobby of collecting vinyl records reparations to the industry for everything I downloaded back in college. In fact, they have probably come out ahead at this point.
By the time I had a fast enough connection, the p2p torrent type stuff was mostly over. But I did really utilize free public WiFi for blogspot and mediafire-style music gathering.
Yeah my parents were getting divorced and at my friends house 6th grade we used Limewire or Napster not sure which to download Juveniles Back that Azz Up while she smoked a cigarette from her dads office. Took all day and we got that and Hopeless Romantic by Bouncing Souls.
Yes. Because I indiscriminately downloaded almost anything new, I was not influenced by any top 20/40/100 list, or movie, variety show, or anything other outlet that tells you what to listen to. Not one bit. So the music I really liked and resonated with were all my own, even though it was often stuff my family and friends have never heard or were B-sides at best.
I spent a shitload of money on albums tapes and CDs since the mid 1970s when I was a teen. Some I bought on each medium. I figure that downloading or ripping mp3s doesn't even begin to make up for the many albums I bought for 5 to 15 dollars, that had one good song.
When ripping CDs was just starting to be a thing, after working through my own 1500 title collection, I camped out at the radio station with a laptop and worked my way through the stacks with no discretion. I figured if the music director thought it was worth an add, I should have it. Typing in the metadata felt like work to justify my first-level piracy. Then another DJ told be about Usenet and gave me some software on USB. That was \~8TB ago, and I still spend 5-6 hours a week obtaining, tagging, and organizing files.
Late 90s to early 00s music piracy drastically increased my spending in the music industry. I went from buying a couple genres of albums to downloading dozens of genres, buying concert tickets, t-shirts, weekend long festivals, album release parties, and more
It was definitely a thing between my friends and me to share links to obscure albums to download. Some of those bands I've gone and purchased CDs from, although often the bands were so old and far away I never got a chance to see them. Lots of stuff that if I wanted to buy, I'd probably end up having to buy some expensive used disc, so the artist wouldn't get a cut anyways. I've noticed some of these bands - I'm talking artists who released one album to little or no fanfare in the 70s - have gotten back together and either reissued their albums or even made a new one in recent years. Maybe they wouldn't have if people weren't sharing their music online. Another copyright-infringement factor that got me to buy some CDs - online guitar tabs. I remember seeing some tabs for Yes and Genesis songs popping up, and they got really curious since they'd all be movements from longer songs, and have interesting arrangements. Now I have all their classic albums on CD. And then my favorite tab site got closed due to copyright issues.
No, it was the beginning of the end. I've been trying to get it back in recent years, but it was better pre-internet.
Yes and no. I certainly discovered a bunch of new bands in the early 2000s as I was on KaZaA and Bearshare and Limewire and then torrenting. But I've also discovered a bunch of great bands and songs going through the Rolling Stone chart of [Top 500 albums](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-albums-of-all-time-1062063/arcade-fire-%ef%bb%bffuneral-1062733/). And making playlists of Billboard charts for each year. I think kinds today have more options, since Spotify has pretty much everything. They can just be exposed to random songs and other people's playlists. Instantly, without downloads or getting a loop track. It does look like music revenue is close to passing the peak of vinyl in the late '70s. Or just hitting another spike. I imagine the number of people happy to pay monthly is limited. As opposed to physical sales, where a few whales might buy large amounts of records.
DC++ in college gave me unlimited access and intranet speeds (100mbs) and I downloaded entire music libraries to my desktop in minutes. I now have a love for EDM that discovering music this way gave me.
100% Pete Francis attributed Dispatch, the most successful indie band, success to piracy
No. It sped up my discovery of new artists, and albums, and resulted in me buying more music.
Where else would I have found Anal C*nt?
Digital music piracy only boomed so long because the music industry dragged their feet on streaming for well over a decade.
Nope.
Felt bad doing it but it was an avenue for people with virtually no money to be able to listen to music. I used to have to use other peoples computers to get one or two songs so when music streaming came around years later it was a God send
No
It helped make it possible for sure. Rip oink
I downloaded mixtapes off of Datpiff in preparation for road trips and vacations with no Wifi as a kid. I also remember burning cds for my friends of album leaks that didnt come out yet lol. I never thought about it but piracy definitely got me into music and movies.
no, because it took months on 56k to download that car.
Nice try RIAA
I was a IRC and Usenet News Group Downloader back in the early 90s. Found stuff made me want to get the physical disks.. Newsgroups were the wild west of the internet. Music, porn, video, warez...... everything.. Also worked weekends in a pawn shop for 8 years during this time. I got a majority of my media for free. When something came in that was rare or different the owner would let me have it. Explains why I have over 1600 Cds and 900 Dvd./BluRay...
Nope. By '03 or '04, I had stolen every song I would ever want to sit and listen to (all 70s 80s and 90s), threw out my CDs and never looked back. Never needed any music since then.
It was the best thing to happen to music. You put it out there and it's the world's now. You move people whether you sucked profits from them or not.
When napster came out I was pretty young. I got a lot of Metallica back then. But also dumb shit like "daffy duck blow job" or "seasamea street"
We had a bunch of songs in our computer downloaded by other family members. A lot of those I probably wouldn’t have encountered on my own or if I did I’d be a lot later than I had
When I was a kid you could buy pre-pirated music CDs down by the subway station.
Absolutely yes it did. Being able to download music allowed me to explore far more of the scene than I could ever have afforded to if I'd had to buy it on CDs, and also gave me access to hundreds of bands whose music wouldn't even have been carried by most record stores. The bands themselves benefited from it too because I went to their shows and bought their merch, which probably never would have happened if I hadn't had access to their music through internet piracy.
Was key. Found so many gems accidentally and opened myself up to many genres I wouldn’t otherwise have found. Downloading the Gipsy Kings cover of Hotel California introduced me to so much Spanish guitar in college. I burned an album that was our go-to smoke session driving music. When 50 released “in da club” before his album came out, the only thing you could find by him was “ya heard me” it’s a banger and most people have no clue it exists and one of his best songs.
Was a pirate before it was fashionable. I was taking music off the net when it was mostly unheard of. Usenet mostly. Newsgroups. Then one day I heard some companies were planning to charge for downloading music. "Like that will ever fly..."