>It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there. There is still a need for music piracy
Ehhh..... I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites. Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days, so everything new gets released there, and by this point the catalog from the CD era is extensive. Music streaming has more music than What or Oink ever did. Streaming also has huge value add over piracy: it's really easy and convenient, it's better socially (shared playlists), and recommendations/discovery are waaaay better.
The vast majority of people do not "need" music piracy any more. If you want ten different versions of every REM album with slightly different mastering then sure, join RED. But it's a niche interest these days.
It's a huge contrast to movie piracy, which is thriving and which provides enormous advantages over any other way of watching movies at home, not just in cost and convenience but also in access and in quality.
> I'd wager that pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites
If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify.
Some examples: Melvins' Lysol is (famously) only available on Apple Music and for good measure I just looked right now at Spotify's page for Midori (https://open.spotify.com/artist/1Qjrx8NtccILLfR3wh1u3o) and it has neither their First EP nor Second LP (https://www.discogs.com/artist/777727-Midori-3); I didn't even choose or try multiple artists, I simply wondered "hmmm, is Midori on Spotify?".
Worthless.
>If you have simple tastes, easily accept holes in their catalog and don't care about being served butchered "remasters". People who actually care don't use Netflix/Spotify.
Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.
Sure, there exists music that is on RED that is not on Spotify. There also exists music that is on Spotify that is not on RED (some of which I even listen to!).
I said "pretty much anything" and "most people". I stand by this. Most people do not experience major holes in the Spotify catalog and are perfectly well satisfied by the breadth of the catalog. If you aren't, that's cool, but you're in a minority.
If this weren't the case, music piracy would be more popular. It's not. RED has more music now than What.CD did, but the community is smaller. It's telling that it doesn't even get a mention in the OP. A lot of people who join aren't even particularly interested in music piracy but just want to use it as a stepping stone to other communities.
I'm not saying that music piracy sucks or whatever. I'm just saying that most people don't feel much need for it and are well-served by Spotify--which, again, has some huge advantages over piracy that I gave previously. I think it is useful to be realistic about this because it's easy reading an article or thread like this to feel a kind of FOMO and I think it's valuable to push back against that.
I think you and OP are arguing different things. Netflix/Spotify are the McDonalds/Olive Garden of media. They are basic, uncomplicated, and flawed, yet they serve most people's tastes. People whose needs they don't serve well go somewhere else.
I'm not sure why people keep bringing up Netflix. Last I checked, they weren't a music streaming service.
There's a huge difference in Spotify for music vs Netflix for TV and movies. Netflix's catalog is absolutely tiny. Spotify's is not.
I also continue to disagree with the idea that Spotify's catalog is only for people with basic or mainstream tastes. This is far too reductive. Like I said above, the vast majority of newly released music is released onto Spotify. For many new or small artists, streaming is the only way their music is released. There is no "somewhere else" to go.
Personally, I listen to a lot of contemporary French indie pop, including a lot of pretty obscure stuff. This stuff is most available through streaming services. To the extent it is available via pirate channels, it's because someone bothered to take the time to rip it from a streaming service. There is nothing which music piracy offers in this domain, and there is a lot that it lacks (both in availability and in all the service factors that make streaming appealing, as I've said--convenience, sharing, discoverability). A further factor I haven't brought up yet is that it just feels shitty and pointless to pirate this kind of stuff when listening to it on Spotify at least provides some benefits to the artists themselves: royalties (tiny as they may be), increased play counts, exposure via recommendation algorithms.
A large fraction of what is uploaded to music piracy sites currently is sourced from music streaming platforms. Not all of it, certainly. A large fraction of the CD- and vinyl-sourced uploads are also available on music streaming platforms too though. As I've mentioned a few times previously, Spotify has a bigger catalog than RED does (even if you ignore all the 0 play AI slop spam that's been flooding Spotify lately).
I would say that the median user of private music torrent sites now is one of two things: either they are there because they want to join other communities for things beside music (TV, movies, video games, anime, porn, whatever), or they are someone who has been pirating music for a long time, probably Gen X, listens to mainly music from 30+ years ago, and has made music piracy a part of their identity and self-perception on some level (you can see a certain sense of smug superiority about it even in this HN thread).
All of this is to say that I think that the comparison to McDonalds or Olive Garden is just way, way off base. Spotify and Netflix do not belong in the same conversation either. Is there some stuff that's not available on music streaming platforms? Sure, it exists. If people find that streaming is not meeting their needs, of course they should look elsewhere. But the picture that is being painted in this thread is simply far off from reality.
While I must sadly agree with your usage of "most people", I still don't understand why you thought it changed anything to the original claim that there is still a need for music piracy (for the aforementioned people who care). And note that I didn't pick particularly obscure artists, we're talking 10~100k ratings/followers on RYM.
> Oh please, spare me the condescending bullshit.
Why would I?
> Streaming is how everyone consumes music these days
It's pretty dangerous to assume that what you do is what everyone else does too.
> so everything new gets released there
Previous comment was probably referring to older music.
If you take issue with the claim that everyone streams music these days than the only way I can understand your comment is by assuming we live in vastly different cultures.
Certainly in the US everyone uses streaming to listen to music. This random article claimed that 90% of American adults regularly stream music online, for example: https://cybernews.com/news/us-internet-users-music-streaming...
If you listen to non-western music the streaming library shrinks a lot.
here's a counter example: the opening to mirror's edge is not hosted on spotify (last time I checked, in my region at least), and it's an old favourite of mine (and I'm sure many people who played the game too)
Do you think the difference between film piracy and music piracy is inherent, due to the differences between film and music; or is there some alternative reality where we ended up with a one-stop shop for films, as well?
For the history of music piracy, I found" How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy" was a good book to read.
I would wager the effective piracy rate of stuff that on prime and Netflix a few years back was close to the effective music piracy rate. IMO the difference is that with Spotify, tidal, Apple, YouTube or Qobuz - you mostly get access to everything. With film, you can pay for Netflix, Disney, Hulu, peacock, HBO, and _still_ not be able to get access to major releases without paying more on top of the subs.
That's an interesting question. I'm not sure. We sort of had that one-stop shop experience with Netflix's DVD service, where you would pay a subscription fee and in exchange you would get to watch movies from a huge catalog. But this didn't translate to the streaming era.
P2P film piracy, at least for the quality-minded, has a few strong competitive advantages over film streaming. It doesn't have to deal with rights issues, for one, which can present huge roadblocks to film distribution. Films are also huge files and the interests of a streaming platform (low bitrate) are in tension with interests of quality. Even in comparison to physical media--the highest quality release of a film might be from a different market than yours, or there might be many competing releases over time. There might be different factors that are better in one release and other factors better in another release, where the pirated copy can combine all the best parts. It's actually somewhat remarkable how good film piracy has gotten these days for those who care.
I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip.
The library for the music streaming platforms is much bigger than for films, of course (about 250 million for Spotify), but there's also a much lower barrier of entry. So perhaps the higher work needed to produce a film necessitates more profit, to a degree that only the fragmented streaming platforms can fulfill. After all, netflix started making originals to counter studios launching their own streaming platforms to raise profit margins, and pulling their content off netflix.
> I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip.
They might not care but anyone who literally can't tell the difference of a good 4K source and a 1080p source on an appropriate display needs to go see an eye doctor. But that most people don't care about quality also isn't particularly shocking.
And as gp indicated, quality isn't just about the encode resolution and bitrate but also about the master itself. Unfortunately not all directors and companies behind great movies have the resepect for their creations that it deserves and the current release which might be the only release on streaming platforms might have significant flaws such as unwanted cuts/restorations, missing audio tracks, replaced sound effects, inaudible mixes, missing subtitles, bad upscales, excessive denoising, reframing from the original aspect ratio that cuts of content and/or shows parts of the originally captured film frames that were never meant to be seen, or various other "enhancements".
> due to the differences between film and music
Music being generally 3-10 minutes long while film is 1h30-3h makes a big difference here. A film is a bit more of a commitment than a playlist entry; you can just put music on the virtual sushi belt and grab what comes past, while sitting down for a film is more of a time commitment.
There are fewer music rights holders, so it is easier to get them together in a room and agree to, for example, a piece of Spotify in exchange for licensing the music. Thus, Spotify becomes like a defacto standard with reasonably all popular music. Just one subscription for what the average listener will want.
Right now, there are too many film distributors and services, let alone TV, plus a lot of exclusives that people want to watch. These video streaming services seem to be trending towards consolidation, but I think film distributors remain diverse.
If you have a pretty vanilla taste, sure.
> pretty much anything that most people want to listen to is on music streaming sites
If that were true, then vinyl sales wouldn't be growing.
First of all, vinyl is still relatively niche in absolute terms. Second of all, the popularity of vinyl, such as it is, has absolutely nothing to do with availability. It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia (as the technology itself is, of course, inferior from a technical sense of faithful reproduction) plus a desire for personal physical ownership of something.
I was a zealous collector of records when we made the switch to digital audio. And let me tell you, there was a significant artistry to the thing: a vinyl record was a standardized work of art. Every album cover was the result of careful design, photography, layout. The inner sleeve oftentimes contained more art, or if we were lucky, all the lyrics we wanted to sing along with. The record label itself, a masterpiece of design. All the smells and all the feels of merely collecting vinyl--even without playing it--are indescribable today.
When CDs came into the market, they were horribly clacky and just clad in layers of tacky plastic. The album art was shrunken, misshapen... and the objects themselves stank of polycarbonate, rather than delicious vinyl. Sure, they sounded great and they lasted a long time, and maintenance was dead simple. But so much artistry was lost. I was still collecting lots of CDs when purely digital distribution hit us, but by then, the smells and feels and experience of collecting vinyl were distant memories.
And that entire experience may be why people argue for the technical superiority of vinyl recordings, and analog tube amplifiers. Because it was all self-reinforcing, and it all fell apart once the clacky, tacky, plasticky CDs took over.
Yeah, that's all part of what I meant by "a kind of retro nostalgia". People enjoy the experience of buying vinyl and of putting on vinyl records. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, for what it's worth. I'm just claiming that this is what's driving vinyl's popularity right now, rather than because people are turning to it due to music availability issues (which is much more of a factor for DVDs/Blu-rays right now).
There's a shitload of valuable vinyl records that don't have any art at all or even any cover. Paper and cardboard doesn't last as long as the record itself.
No, the reasons for this are entirely technical.
de gustibus non est disputandum
Look, I am telling you about my own lived experience with collecting vinyl. You can speak for yourself, but I carefully stored all my items in archival sleeves, and the jacket, art, and inner sleeve were often just as important as the disc and the music encoded on it.
There was a real thrill and reward that came from collecting LP albums in particular, and that meant 12" discs, and I also had a particular specialty in finding 12" remixes and DJ versions of singles.
Yes, there were shaped discs, and colored vinyl, and white-labels and acetates that came with no art or plain sleeves, and I collected those with just as much alacrity, but it really was a pleasure to flip through my collection, or someone else's, and drink in that large-format album art.
Interestingly the higher-end physical movie releases have moved to metal cases and/or paper sleeves to hide the plastic. Perhaps that's also what digital music would have moved to if the physical market didn't get eaten by streaming. The artwork would still be smaller than vinyl but if you have broad tastes and limited space that may actually be a feature.
I'm just saying there is a market for vinyl records with no art or sleeves, but no market for sleeves and art with no record.
Clearly the art isn't the driver of this market niche.
> It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia
Incorrect. The reasons why vinyl specifically is still relevant (as opposed to any other "retro" audio format) are technical.
Vinyl avoids compression issues by design. (Compression both in the computer science sense and in the audio engineering sense.)
Give me a break. CDs aren't compressed and sound flawless if the mixing is good. it also isn't dependent on things like the quality or age of the disc. And sure, a bad player might sound a bit worse than a high quality one, but that mostly comes down to the DAC in it, whereas with vinyl depends on the player a lot more by virtue of being a mechanical format
The music is digital before it gets pressed on vinyl. They're not recording directly from microphone to vinyl.
You are correct that you can't lossily compress a vinyl, but you absolutely can master a vinyl for maximum loudness. It's harder to do, and some of the techniques are different, but it can be done, people did it, and this was actually where the loudness war started. And notably, unlike digital, vinyl does not impose a maximum loudness wall. If you find a way to make the groove wobble more than before, the player will absolutely produce a louder signal than before, whereas with digital you have a strict limit to your levels at +/-32768.
To make matters worse, people aren't doing separate masters for audiophile formats anymore, so vinyl is getting the ultra-compressed, low-dynamic-range master anyway. That is because the vast majority of people buying vinyl were doing so as merch, not so much as a way to buy better-mastered albums.
This is complete bullshit, sorry. Digital is more capable of faithfully reproducing sound than vinyl is. Vinyl does not have technical advantages when it comes to faithful sound reproduction. I mean, it literally degrades over time, for chrissake!
I don't know what kind of "compression issues" you're talking about but I strongly suspect you'd be well served by learning about the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.
> Digital is more capable of faithfully reproducing sound than vinyl is.
That's exactly the problem that makes digital unsuitable.
Theoretically digital can reproduce sound faithfully, but if the medium allows sound engineers to compress the hell out of music, then they will abuse the opportunity.
Vinyl is a very limited format and you can't really do any sort of "creative" audio optimization bullshit with it.
Compression in the audio waveform sense has nothing at all to do with the medium. You can absolutely press the same compressed masters on vinyl or release the uncompressed masters digitally. It's a matter of what the customer base is looking for. Digital music is made for the mass market where "louder" means standing out and thus more success while contemporary vinyl is made for the enthusiast who can afford high-end equipment and clean listening environments.
> You can absolutely press the same compressed masters on vinyl
Nah, there's physical limits of the needle-in-a-groove medium that prevent this.
> or release the uncompressed masters digitally.
Technically yes, but nobody is gonna do this and risk not "standing out".
> who can afford high-end equipment
The average vinyl record player nowadays costs less than $150. The market is absolutely flooded with low-end Chinese turntables.
When a modern person listens to vinyl records for the first time, the immediate reaction is "how the hell do I make this louder so it pops out more".
And the answer is that you can't, the medium just doesn't work like that.
Heck, almost everything is available for free on YouTube.
This is very far from truth unless you only listen freshs pop music. And even then it is easy to click a song only to receive "not available in your region".
no, I've found many an album on youtube that isn't anywhere else and was uploaded by a random guy 10 years ago
What? I find plenty of jazz and classical music on youtube. yt-dlp -x is your friend.
I find it amusing that youtube can be the source of my "pirated" music and get away with it. But the piratebay guys got their lives smashed to pieces.
But that I guess, is our civilization today. One set of rules for politicians and corporations, and one set for the slaves.