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The Age of Music Piracy Is Officially Over
- alextgordon 16y agoSadly, if piracy ever did go away, then all those great achievements would disappear with it. The only reason they exist is because piracy is providing competition to a market that has none.
- tjr 16y agoI doubt that's the only reason. The picketing nerds in hazmat suits were probably folks from the FSF, and they are opposed to DRM on principle, and I believe that would have been shouting the same principles whether if pirated music was available and DRM-free or not.
- pyre 16y agoPersonally, I think that piracy had more to do with the downfall of DRM than protesters in haz-mat suits. Do you really think that the RIAA would have cared about them? Do you really think that those protesters would have stopped teens and 20-somethings from buying music? Piracy becoming popular among that demographic did more to achieve this end than those protesters did.
- tjr 16y agoI can only speculate. FSF propaganda influenced me as a teenager. I too would reckon that piracy played a larger role; whatever smaller role things like protesters played may have been useful in articulating the problems that prompted piracy to occur.
- brc 16y ago>The reason: We won. And all you audiophiles and copyfighters, you know who fixed our problems? The record labels and online stores we loved to hate. I'm not sure I follow the logic here. I would argue that the rejection of DRM systems wasn't fixed by labels. They had to be brought kicking and screaming to that particular table. In this whole thing, what's funny to me is that the solution to the whole issue was known as soon as Napster got big - make all the songs available, and make them cheap, and most people will stop bothering with pirated music. I know I got bored with pirated music about a week after starting it. Personally, in the fullness of time, the record companies will come to love digital music. There's one less middleman taking a cut, no inventory to worry about, and new ideas, cross promotions and artists can be brought to market and tested faster than ever. The biggest losers appear to be the people who did album art, but maybe with the high quality screens of digital devices, they'll find new ways to show their talent. But digital music will always have it's roots in piracy, something that will end up as a trivia nugget in years to come, kind of like how people talk about how NASCAR got going because of bootleggers running moonshine. 'For 20 points, how did digital music become popular and displace the CD?'
- dasil003 16y agoIf you mean designers and illustrators who refuse to upgrade their skills for digital production, then yes, they will fade away into bitterness and obscurity.
- baddox 16y ago> It’s certainly better than most of the stuff out on BitTorrent. Firstly, "out on BitTorrent" doesn't make much sense. Secondly, it would seem the author is unaware of great enthusiast trackers like what and waffles.
- robryan 16y ago256 is pretty standard for torrenting music, sure you might not be able to really tell the difference but I think a lossless format like flac would go a long way to converting some people.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- uxp 16y agoMost "scene" releases are still at ~192 VBR (-V2 LAME). I think the second sentence of the quote is more apt. > (Actually, most ears are listening through crummy earbuds anyway, but whatever.)
- sgibat 16y agohm, in my extensive experience, v0 is the most popular bit-rate by a large margin. usually releases are offered in a number of bit-rates.
- uxp 16y agoI agree, but I was referring to the organized Warez Scene[1], not private bittorrent trackers which generally favor user-ripped content over "Scene" content. V0 is the most popular for private users, but the groups still stick to V2. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)#Audio_standards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)#Audio_standard...
- unfug 16y agoWith services like Rdio, Netflix, and Steam it's actually easier for me to get what I want legally now. Lots of people don't pirate because of the cost, it just used to be the easiest/fastest way to get music/movies/games.
- WalterGR 16y agoLots of people don't pirate because of the cost, it just used to be the easiest/fastest way to get music/movies/games. Rhapsody opened in 2001. If it took 9 years for music piracy to be "over", then I think there's something more at work than the "it's easier to pirate" defense.
- nkassis 16y agoI know it worked for me personally, since amazon mp3 is around, I have no needed to look elsewhere. I do however find it annoying to have to keep a VPN going in the US to download music from Amazon in Canada. The restriction is ridiculous because it provides no real safety because there is no alternative for users. They will pirate instead. It's just dumb politics. The Canadian version of the RIAA is even dumber than was originally though possible.
- WalterGR 16y agoI know it worked for me personally, since amazon mp3 is around, I have no needed to look elsewhere. Amazon MP3 opened to the public ~3 years ago. Did you pirate your music before? What requirement did it satisfy? Multi-platform-available DRM-free watermark-less high-bitrate MP3s?
- nkassis 16y agoThat's pretty much the reason(del free, no watermark and quality). I'be used amazon for at 2 years now and yes I used to pirate music. Started with.napster and use everything in between untilI discovered amazon mp3. I guess the fact that I've been employed for the past 5 years and had money to spend on music also helped change my habits. Hence why I'm against suing college student who become your customers after.
- gacek 16y ago"Online stores have cranked up the audio quality to a fat 256 Kbps. [...] It’s certainly better than most of the stuff out on BitTorrent." Oh really? Even wide open trackers have a lot of stuff encoded in 320/FLAC. And I guess no one bothers with anything less than that on sites that specialize in music. It's the age of movie piracy now, but music piracy is not dead.
- Zev 16y agoEven wide open trackers have a lot of stuff encoded in 320/FLAC. And for the most part, the people encoding these rips in FLAC admit that they can't tell the difference between 320kbps and V0, let alone FLAC and V0. In other words: 256kbps is good enough for the very large majority of the people out there. And a file encoded at 256kbps with AAC is higher quality than that encoded at 256kbps with MP3.
- daeken 16y agoThe real benefit to lossless encodings is that you don't experience a second generation of loss when you want to transcode. Going from, say, MP3 to AAC is pointless and causes considerably more loss than FLAC to AAC. But for most people, an MP3 or DRM-free AAC file is Good Enough (TM).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pearle 16y agoExactly -- for me it's all about transcoding and not locking myself into a lossy format. This is why I rip all of my CDs to flac and not AAC/MP3.
- StavrosK 16y agoI stop being able to tell the difference at 200ish kbps for mp3, 130ish for Ogg. Anything above that, I'm just deaf to.
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- lian 16y agoI find it strange that Wired gives Grooveshark a shout out for allowing people to "sample any song you want before you buy," since the "before you buy" is totally assumed. I love Grooveshark, but it's so good at giving you what you want for free that it seems a bit like piracy in the cloud. I think the reality is that piracy and legal obtainment coexist and are a bit more ambiguous now, rather than fighting for the total extermination of the other.
- marknutter 16y agoThe artists get 15 cents of every dollar? Fuck. That. I will continue not buying music until I'm able to pay the artists directly. Someone please tell me what the record labels have done to deserve 75% of the cut. The majority of the music I listen to I found on my own either by pirating music or finding it on my own on the web. We haven't "won" until these middle men are cut completely out of the loop. And to be honest, even then I probably wouldn't pay for music. I wlll pay for t-shirts, stickers, or concert tickets, but not songs these artists couldn't give away when they were first starting out. One of the most enduring examples of hypocrisy in this whole music pirating debacle will be Metallica raging against the very practice that made them popular in the first place - people dubbing tapes of their music for their friends. The only thing that makes music worth anything is popularity and the only way to make music popular is to give it away for free in the beginning. Given that there's an infinite supply, how does it make any sense that it can be worthless in one instant and $1 a pop in another? This insanity needs to stop, and I guarantee that it will some day. The easier it becomes to produce and promote music, games, movies, software, etc, the harder and harder it is going to be to justify charging anything for it.
- nowarninglabel 16y agoI bought my favorite artists CD "One Cello x 16: Natoma" by Zoe Keating without needing her to give away anything for free. She self-releases her albums, so I am happy to pay what she asks for them. Why should I not pay her for her hard work so she can continue to produce lovely sad cello music? Perhaps you are listening to artists who don't share your values?
- Yzupnick 16y ago>Someone please tell me what the record labels have done to deserve 75% 1)Make a really good quality recoding. I know it is possible to do it without a label, and I know that it has even been done, but the vast majority of non-label recordings are really bad. 2) Really good distribution system. I know, you didn't find your music from a record company. But, having a record companies resources behind you makes your chance of hitting it big orders of magnitude greater.
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- psawaya 16y agoHow can you call Grooveshark part of a stable new music ecosystem when UMG threatens them with "legal jihad"? See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660645 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660645 And how many thousands of dollars does it still cost to fill up, say, a 64GB iPod with iTunes music? It's still unreasonable to expect digital music customers to go entirely legit.
- StavrosK 16y agoIt's not the music customers who need to change, it's the law. Honestly, I see your argument about filling a 64 GB iPod, but it's a bit of a straw man. The average person doesn't even know that many songs, I have 300 GB of music at home and yet all the songs I want to hear fit in 10 GB.
- psawaya 16y agoI agree, the law does need to change. Sure, maybe you'll spend thousands of dollars to build your itunes collection over the years, but let's hope you backed your songs up. It may not seem likely that Apple will shut down the itunes store, but if they ever did, or changed their redownload policy, you'd sure be pissed to lose all of that music in a hard drive crash. Services like Grooveshark offer what users really deserve, which is as much music as they want for a flat monthly rate.
- StavrosK 16y agoI completely agree, I just paid $30 for a whole year of complete music freedom. Well, I had complete freedom before (for the little I torrented), but now it's more convenient as well. Grooveshark isn't quite there yet in terms of usefulness (it can't match the tidyness and quality of Spotify), but it's very useful indeed, especially with its mobile apps. For $30/yr, it's a no-brainer.
- jmtulloss 16y agoYou can easily fill up the largest iPhone out there (32gb?) for $5/mo on rdio. And it's completely legal (no threats of legal jihad). I do work for them, so I'm a bit biased, but there's a reason I left my old job to work on it. It really is the best music service out there, in my opinion.
- jrockway 16y agoIt’s certainly better than most of the stuff out on BitTorrent. This is a lie. I have never not gotten 320kbps or FLAC from BitTorrent. In fact, I've never even seen the option to get lower quality. With people happily sharing uncompressed Blue-Ray rips, the 300M for a FLAC album is nothing. I guess it depends where you hang out. I have never searched for music on TPB. (BTW, fun fact... there are standards for pirated content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene. If your torrent isn't good enough quality, you'll be made fun of or something.)
- flawawa2 16y agoYou are mixing up things. The audio scene standard is lame V2, which is transparent to the majority of humans (but quite low quality to audiophiles (those guys who like 320kbps bloat)). The more popular "private" torrent sites usually offer a variety of formats and bitrates. We can agree that the pirates usually provide better quality and more convenient formats than the industry though.
- jcapote 16y ago"At Grooveshark, you can sample any song you want before you buy." Inaccurate, grooveshark is a subscription based streaming service not a store.
- michaelelliot 16y agoAnother incorrect article by Wired.
- leviathant 16y agoIncredible. This is first rate trolling. Almost every point in this article is fallacious or inflammatory. I'd expect to read an article like this in Billboard, not Wired. Touting that bands (are supposed to) get a whole 20 cents to the dollar in the callout makes me wonder if this is some kind of overly dry satire.
- Groxx 16y ago>A few years ago, audiophiles dismissed iTunes’ 128-Kbps resolution as anemic, even though it supposedly passed rigid blind testing against full-bandwidth CD tracks of the same song. The sound is compressed, connoisseurs said. The high end is mangled. Good work, audiophiles: Online stores have cranked up the audio quality to a fat 256 Kbps. To most ears, it’s indistinguishable from a CD. (Actually, most ears are listening through crummy earbuds anyway, but whatever.) There is so much wrong with those sentences, I'm not sure where to start. 1) Who the hell did they test their 128kbps on? I can tell the difference, even with crummy earbuds. With my Grados, 192 is still distinguishable, and I'm far from skilled in audiophile terms. The rest of the article seems to miss a major point in this whole affair: how we got here. Thank you, pirates and audiophiles, for allowing me to buy high-quality, DRM-free music. Could you go after the video industry now, pretty please?
- chrisbolt 16y agoYou have Grados, that puts you in the top 1%.
- jonah 16y agoI can clearly tell the difference between most 128kbps MP3s and CDs on my stock (bose, ugh) car stereo.
- steve19 16y agoMy theory is that these blind tests are using a random sample of music, unfamiliar to the person being tested. It is not a random pop song that I care about sounding good, it is my favorite music that I have listened to 100 times. For these tracks, picking up distortions is easy and it really ruins the experience.
- tomjen3 16y agoThe only store which sells digital music in Denmark is apples, but then I have to use their software.
- 0ffworlder 16y agoThis Article is crazy. Has demonoid or the private trackers stopped hosting FLAC torrents? I am cheap, there is a snowballs chance in hell of getting caught, arrr. That goes for Ugs nx 6, autocad, adobe cs master collection, server 2008r2, vs2010, everything until a superior open source alternative is developed.
- smiler 16y agoInteresting. Looks like you do some kind of development that you expect to get paid for? But you are happy to use software that other software developers salaries are sustained by people buying the software. You are a terrible double standard.
- sp4rki 16y agoI recently purchased a subscription to Grooveshark because of a simple reason. The value I get for buying a song at 64 cents (or 2.99) is not in check with the use I might give said song. Before Napster I had to buy a cd because I might like a band and probably heard a few songs from them, but I'd have pay 15 bucks for a disk with a 10 to 20 songs which I might or might not like. Then came the Apple store and now I can actually choose the songs I want, but how am I to be certain about the quality and value of most of the songs, when I have probably only heard the most popular ones? With Grooveshark I pay a monthly/yearly fee and I can just try all the songs I want. If I really want to have a certain song on my iPod to take wherever I want and in a decent audiophile quality, I'll buy it. I think it's thievery to pay a dollar for a song and listen to it for a week and then get tired of it and never listen to it again. Multiply that for an album, and then multiply it for the couple of artists you might like. This is the way that Tv should work also. I get to pay for you to stream me shows, and if I actually like a show enough that I'm sure I'm going to want to either own a digital or physical copy of the product, I'll buy it. I have no problem buying a digital or physical song/album to support the creator of a product I really like, but a I have a huge issue with having to pay 10 bucks to get an album I'm not sure I want to own, or even listen to more than a couple of times.
- AndrewS 16y agoThe headline "The Age of Music Piracy Is Officially Over" really bothers me for some reason. It should be "The Age of Music Piracy Is Over According to Some Columnist".
- olalonde 16y agoAnother link bait headline from Wired. Recall "The Web Is Dead"? http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1