Posted by mcgin 20 hours ago
I miss the old bulletin board days of the mid 2000s to mid 2010s, before Facebook and other social media took over. I'm part of a vintage car building community (LocostUSA) that still uses forums, but is a very small, niche community. What others are still active?
Heh, I often went a step down and recorded internet radio using RadioSure. This little utility split each track into its own file which was pretty neat and handy to a younger me. Shoutout to Ryan Seacrests' AT40 for the weekly charts on the weekends, it kept my "collection" fresh ;-) Although, it was mostly 128-256kbps mp3 but it didn't matter to me, it was fun.
I spent tons of time on Napster and LimeWire roughly between late 1990s and 2005 when I graduated from college.
A few things stood out as related topics:
1. I attended UMass-Amherst - a school not unfamiliar with and perhaps even popular for jam band culture. There was, at one point, a tool distributed that allowed any particular user to search the entirety of the network of users that also used that tool. So, what quickly evolved was this huge searchable library of songs, videos, etc. covering the thousands of students that chose to put something there. I don't recall the balance of my use of other services compared to that specific network tool, but it was an amazing place to discover music and also quite fast compared to everything else.
2. I wasn't sure if this post was lamenting the loss of discovery or the loss of stable revenue streams for artists. Maybe both. I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too. When I want more variety and access to the farther reaches of the music world, I use hypem.com. It's still great, after all these years, and a quite small operation despite the presence of Apple/Spotify. Also love Soundcloud, and as someone who makes electronic music/DJs on the side - Beatport.
3. What.CD reminded me of what I now hear about re: Lobste.rs. I'm not a member, and it's unclear to me if I want that? But it has some similar characteristics - invite only, ICQ chat, active moderation. What I wonder is whether folks here (members of Lobsters) see that community as possessing the same magic/thrill/quality of What.CD?
I haven't read the article yet, but the most devastating loss was the catalog itself. It was the largest archive of music in history. Of course, discovery was enabled in part by that.
> I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too.
It's not even comparable. If your definition of discovery considers what you can find on Spotify, then you're talking about a completely different thing. That's not to say that Spotify and elsewhere don't have discoverability — they're just not filling the void.
> as someone who makes electronic music
Your stuff was probably on there :D
> What I wonder is whether folks here (members of Lobsters) see that community as possessing the same magic/thrill/quality of What.CD?
I'm missing the comparison here too. There are communities that possess that thrill (some of the best of which don't even offer invites), so I know what you mean by it. I just haven't seen or heard that about Lobster.
RIP
Concerning the "Joy" element:
Someone at my workplace started a Music League, with a select few music aficionados and hangers on joining, and it has been _the best_ team bonding exercise I've ever been involved with. We have covered a broad spectrum of topics that have challenged pretty much everyone at some point. Music League has a bunch of default Themes that range from boring to OK, so we've been coming up with our own suggestions, and over the course of about 12 months we've had some great ones - but it relies on the participants allowing themselves to be vulnerable when the occasion suits.
This has provided joy amongst all participants in, I think, a similar way to the sharing / discovery of the golden age of music piracy. We even setup our own Slack channel un-affiliated with our workplace because a couple of people have left the company, but wanted to stay in the League.
If I have time tonight, I'll list the Themes we've covered as a reply or edit of this comment.
Concerning the "Music Piracy" element:
I don't really pirate, unless it's some incredibly obscure thing that can only be found on slsk (are we allowed to even mention it's name?).
I use a streaming service, but I also buy the really good shit from Bandcamp, since most streaming services are pretty scummy with their royalties back to artists, and I want them to keep doing what they're doing cough AdP cough.
I also run my own instance of LMS[0] so my FLAC collection is always available to me wherever I am (which kinda feels like piracy, but the collection is almost all legit).
MusicBrainz[1] is also doing god's work.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard took their discography off Spotify for ideological reasons, and I support their decision to follow their morality in doing so, but it does put me in a conundrum due to the phenomenal size of their catalogue. I've bought some, but definitely not all. Just gonna have to grind through it, although they seem to put new music out faster than my monthly purchase quota.
[0]: https://github.com/epoupon/lms (cheers @epoupon, I'm pretty sure you're on HN)
FYI, they have their entire discography in bandcamp[0] for "name your price", including $0.