To put this into perspective, What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. What had in the ballpark of a few million torrents when it got raided and shut down. Anna's rip of Spotify includes roughly 186 million unique records. Granted, the tail end is a mixed bag of bot music and whatnot, but the scale is staggering.
I think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown. It was the equivalent of vinyl crate digging without physical restrictions.
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.
> I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there
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.
> There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown.
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.
I’m still using the “successor” to what.cd and I usually discover artists through random lists, “related artists”, among other things on the platform.
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.
Would you share the name of that successor? I miss the old internet and would love to take a look.
It's Redacted.sh, a.k.a. RED. They have around three million torrents. But like What.CD, Redacted.sh is a private tracker, so you can't just jump in and see the content.
How does it compare to rutracker, especially for electrnic music? I've never used what.CD and rutracker seems to have lots of high quality music.
Thank you. I’m reading about them, cool project. I’ll try to join.
Another comment mentioned Redacted.sh as a successor. I haven't used it. I'm sure there's a subreddit around that can help. Looks like orpheus is another option if I'm reading correctly. You have to get an invite or pass an "interview" though, so be prepared to wait a while.
the compilation album is a great idea. thanks for that. your comments in here have been helpful. have fun listening.
Yeah, What.CD had a bunch of the local Brisbane post-rock bands from the 00s on there which was amazing to me. I at least have copies of a lot of their records!
email me please
True but What.cd had a tremendous amount of notable music not available on Spotify though because it was also sourced from cds, bootlegs, vinyl, tape etc whereas Spotify only includes music explicitly licensed for streaming.
This is true and a category of music that got hit notably hard was live recordings. What had a wide array of live recordings made by sound engineers straight from the mixer. This is something that you simply cannot find now unless you maybe know a guy.
That's why I use YouTube Music as my streamer as they allow damned near anyone to upload any old rare record and then figure out the royalties somehow.
FWIW archive.org has a lot of live music as well
Yes. RIP a ton of very rare material. What.cd has a special place in my heart.
Redacted.sh is a worthy successor, but the average person just doesn’t care about “which release is best” anymore. I use YT Music as a backup but Redacted is my main source of music these days.
Don't you consider it best to ... redact ... your post, as it's the only one mentioning it by name?
It's hardly a secret, you can go on r/trackers where people discuss private trackers for every media type
Some people just don't know when to shut the hell up.
At the end of the day it feels like the private trackers are such a nightmare to get invited to and maintain ratio at it’s just not worth the effort.
I want this torrent though. It would be fun to stand up a NAS for this.
The private trackers are just as much about the community as they are about the content they host. Of course there are trade offs because communities can be very insular.
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.
[dead]
Yeah, it was a great place. I have a paid Spotify account but finally got an ancient hard drive onto my network for all sorts of stuff Spotify doesn’t or can’t have (e.g., Coldcut: 70 Minutes of Madness).
Which also means almost always limited to the latest, almost always crappy (or blind to the original ambiance) remaster! One of the main reasons why I don't bother with streaming, really.
(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)
This, a thousand times this. I have gone back to collecting CDs because it's often the only remaining way (short of pircay) to get original masters of many artists. Even lossless download stores like Qobuz don't have them.
You can’t talk about what.cd without talking about its precursor OiNks Pink Palace. Even Trent Reznor was public about what an amazing place it was. Music aside, the community existing just for the shared love of music and not for any other kind of monetary or influencer gain is what set it apart. We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore
>We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore
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.)
> It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes.
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)
I mean, WCD has two healthy replacements, plus slsk
I love that SoulSeek still exists in some format. My path was Napster (made me get cable Internet and a cd burner) > AudioGalaxy (learned how to path things on routers so I could download music to home from work) > SoulSeek. Plus it had some useful chat and people who cared about sound quality and metadata.
Soulseek has to be the best kept secret on the internet. Even people my age who grew up with things like Napster, Limewire, and even soulseek, don’t know that it still exists.
Yeah, I was looking for some rare album I had in the past, and was shocked to realize that Soulseek is still active.
The amount of extremely obscure music on there is crazy, stuff that exists nowhere else in the internet except maybe google drive links.
> What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth.
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.
about the scale, the same album in the tracker had several submissions, for dedicated format and regional editions.
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.
That being sad, I have a lot of non-mainstream tracks in my playlists on YouTube Music that have YouTube comments along the line of “I wish this was available on Spotify :’(“. I bet the same goes for What.CD.
So there’s some way to go for a comprehensive music archive.
Wow, I have not thought about OiNK in ages... great memories! OiNK and WhatCD did something very special for the musical community
anna's rip has ~86m tracks, not ~186. ~186m is metadata, specifically ISRCs.
Redacted, their replacement has more records then they had now.
Well, what.cd counted any album as one torrent. While current spotify has also podcasts and AI slop.