5 ms·

I thought it was strange even when it was on the front page. Seems like a project that is 10 years too late. Nobody downloads music files anymore. Everyone str

by olah_1 6y ago

I thought it was strange even when it was on the front page. Seems like a project that is 10 years too late. Nobody downloads music files anymore. Everyone streams... If Bandcamp invested in making their app a legitimate alternative to Spotify, we could maybe go back to buying music, though.

monkin 6y ago
> Nobody downloads music files anymore. I know this may be shocking, but... a lot of people still does it.
- olah_1 6y ago
  Where do you live? I don't know a single person in America that does. Probably a sample size of (realistically) 400 people.
  - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
    Of course Spotify is popular and it may well be a demographics thing, but I wouldn't say that this describes a sample size of "nobody", or excludes everyone in America: > Fans have paid artists $619 million using Bandcamp, and $18.3 million in the last 30 days alone. And that is from Bandcamp alone. There are numerous other genre-specific sites that sell music, as well as Amazon, Google and others. I can't speak for everyone, but one of the challenges of this relatively open market is managing music bought from different stores. Who wants 5 apps to stream from all these places? Funkwhale is really designed with a more libre/open source/communal spirit, but happens to be excellent at doing this for individuals too.
  - pavel_lishin 6y ago
    Hi! You know one now. While I stream music from Google Play (or Google Youtube Music, or whatever they've pivoted to), I still have all the mp3s - and for good reason, because Google Music consistently tried to switch many of my tracks for the "censored" versions, which I'd have to re-upload. And Youtube Music isn't much better, and it's only a matter of time before their aggressive opinions on what's good for their consumers diverges from mine. I'm not willing to let a company dictate which music I can listen to based on licensing agreements with yet another company. I try to buy my music directly from the creator, and keep it safe and sound. Funkwhale will never be as large as Spotify, and that's fine. There is a niche for what they're offering.
    - input_sh 6y ago
      Yeah, I'm paying for Spotify Premium for music discovery, but each album/EP I discover gets downloaded to hardware I control without a second thought.
      - ivarv 6y ago
        What do you use to download the music?
        input_sh 6y ago
        It depends on the song, but for the genres I'm into it's mostly one of these three: Junodownload, Beatport, or Bandcamp. Torrent/soulseek if the song is region-locked, sold in lower quality, or if it takes me more than 5 min to find a legit link.
    - shrikant 6y ago
      I also used Google Music, endured the switch to YT Music, and now just gave up and use the source MP3s playing locally. I listen to a lot of Indian music (film soundtracks), and Google was annoyingly consistent in changing my songs to different language versions because their acoustic fingerprint training models are shit.
      - pavel_lishin 6y ago
        I listen to music on my phone a fair amount, so I can't just stream locally :/ But I'm looking to fix that in the coming year.
        Kaze404 6y ago
        You can with Funkwhale! It's what I did a couple years back and the experience was alright at best. I assume it's changed a lot since then.
        6y ago
  - kenny87 6y ago
    People that enjoy listening to music -- audiophiles, DJs, music producers, musicians, etc -- often search out and download their favorite tunes, .flac and .wav specifically, simply b/c these formats have higher fidelity to the master mix. Granted, not everyone cares about high-fidelity audio, and that's ok too.
  - tasty_freeze 6y ago
    I live in the US. I had probably 800 albums or so in 1986 when I started re-buying most of them as CDs. In the late 90s I spent weeks ripping them to 192kbps MP3s via lame. Since then I've bought many hundreds more CDs, though recently it is usually just buying mp3s directly from bandcamp or from amazon. On occasion I will buy the physical CD because it is cheaper than a digital-only mp3 option. I just checked and I have a bit over 20,000 songs. My family has a spotify account. In the past we used pandora. I have tried them both but I always immediately come back to playing albums from my own collection. I'm in my mid 50s, and I grew up listening to album-oriented rock (AOR), and not just a stream of pop hits. I still prefer to listen to albums start to end. When an album ends, I judge my mood and think what album fits it and put that one on. That is something spotify doesn't do for me.
fortyseven 6y ago
> Nobody You.
LockAndLol 6y ago
> Seems like a project that is 10 years too late. Nobody downloads music files anymore. Everyone streams... That's a sweeping generalization... I like owning my music and not being in danger of losing it at the whim of a company or a country. The only danger to me right now is my library and its redundancies crashing. If someone decides not to renew a contract, becomes too expensive for the service, moves to a country the service may not interact with, or decides to move to another service, I won't lose anything. If I choose to switch services, I won't lose half my library. I can get own music from obscure places or times services don't service or consider. I bet you most services don't have a lot of African music, no matter the decade. It doesn't even have to be obscure, there are great mixtapes from the 90s and 00s that just aren't on online services.
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
I guess we should clarify what we mean by "download". If you mean pirate music, then yeah, I guess I've largely stopped doing that (blogspot shares ain't what they used to be). If you simply mean BUY music and store it digitally, I've got a 1.5TB external HDD filled with MP3s and FLACs that argues otherwise. Amazon's AutoRip is a nice timesaver, but I still largely prefer to do my own ripping via Exact Audio Copy.
jamesgeck0 6y ago
The Fediverse core means that it's a project that likely could only have existed now, with the decentralized base protocol to build on and the automatic integration with hundreds of tiny social networks.
grawprog 6y ago
I've never used Spotify, I use bandcamp all the time. I've bought a bunch of music off there. It may not be as convenient, but I really like the idea of being able to pay artists directly and have them get most of it minus a small cut for Bandcamp. I also tend to find music I like better on there, though that comes down to personal taste I suppose.
- rvense 6y ago
  I spend a lot of money on music - a lot more per year than a Spotify subscription - and none of it goes to people like Kanye West. I really like that. I also like not paying Spotify. I resent them for giving people the idea that 10 bucks per month is all you should pay for having access to all the world's music. They're a bad company.
kixiQu 6y ago
isn't the point that even people who might prefer things about downloaded music want the convenience of being able to upload and stream?
Notorious_BLT 6y ago
Sure, on average MOST people stream but claiming "Nobody" downloads music files anymore is just flat wrong. Bandcamp clearly isn't interested in competing with Spotify as an app for streaming (and as a frequent buyer from BC, I don't want them to try), they are interested in being a low-friction marketplace for people who want to buy and sell music and download it in a variety of formats.
mackrevinack 6y ago
every time a song on any of my spotify playlists disappears and turns grey i add it to a playlist, and that playlist is growing very large as the years go on. (and that's not including songs that have always been missing from spotify's library) im very close to going back to using a local library again and i think it would actually work pretty good these days with software like syncthing and musicbrainz, docker, cheap and easy to set up VPS's etc etc... that weren't a thing when I started using spotify

by olah_1 6y ago

monkin 6y ago

> Nobody downloads music files anymore. I know this may be shocking, but... a lot of people still does it.

olah_1 6y ago
Where do you live? I don't know a single person in America that does. Probably a sample size of (realistically) 400 people.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  Of course Spotify is popular and it may well be a demographics thing, but I wouldn't say that this describes a sample size of "nobody", or excludes everyone in America: > Fans have paid artists $619 million using Bandcamp, and $18.3 million in the last 30 days alone. And that is from Bandcamp alone. There are numerous other genre-specific sites that sell music, as well as Amazon, Google and others. I can't speak for everyone, but one of the challenges of this relatively open market is managing music bought from different stores. Who wants 5 apps to stream from all these places? Funkwhale is really designed with a more libre/open source/communal spirit, but happens to be excellent at doing this for individuals too.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  Hi! You know one now. While I stream music from Google Play (or Google Youtube Music, or whatever they've pivoted to), I still have all the mp3s - and for good reason, because Google Music consistently tried to switch many of my tracks for the "censored" versions, which I'd have to re-upload. And Youtube Music isn't much better, and it's only a matter of time before their aggressive opinions on what's good for their consumers diverges from mine. I'm not willing to let a company dictate which music I can listen to based on licensing agreements with yet another company. I try to buy my music directly from the creator, and keep it safe and sound. Funkwhale will never be as large as Spotify, and that's fine. There is a niche for what they're offering.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm paying for Spotify Premium for music discovery, but each album/EP I discover gets downloaded to hardware I control without a second thought.
    - ivarv 6y ago
      What do you use to download the music?
      - input_sh 6y ago
        It depends on the song, but for the genres I'm into it's mostly one of these three: Junodownload, Beatport, or Bandcamp. Torrent/soulseek if the song is region-locked, sold in lower quality, or if it takes me more than 5 min to find a legit link.
  - shrikant 6y ago
    I also used Google Music, endured the switch to YT Music, and now just gave up and use the source MP3s playing locally. I listen to a lot of Indian music (film soundtracks), and Google was annoyingly consistent in changing my songs to different language versions because their acoustic fingerprint training models are shit.
    - pavel_lishin 6y ago
      I listen to music on my phone a fair amount, so I can't just stream locally :/ But I'm looking to fix that in the coming year.
      - Kaze404 6y ago
        You can with Funkwhale! It's what I did a couple years back and the experience was alright at best. I assume it's changed a lot since then.
        6y ago
- kenny87 6y ago
  People that enjoy listening to music -- audiophiles, DJs, music producers, musicians, etc -- often search out and download their favorite tunes, .flac and .wav specifically, simply b/c these formats have higher fidelity to the master mix. Granted, not everyone cares about high-fidelity audio, and that's ok too.
- tasty_freeze 6y ago
  I live in the US. I had probably 800 albums or so in 1986 when I started re-buying most of them as CDs. In the late 90s I spent weeks ripping them to 192kbps MP3s via lame. Since then I've bought many hundreds more CDs, though recently it is usually just buying mp3s directly from bandcamp or from amazon. On occasion I will buy the physical CD because it is cheaper than a digital-only mp3 option. I just checked and I have a bit over 20,000 songs. My family has a spotify account. In the past we used pandora. I have tried them both but I always immediately come back to playing albums from my own collection. I'm in my mid 50s, and I grew up listening to album-oriented rock (AOR), and not just a stream of pop hits. I still prefer to listen to albums start to end. When an album ends, I judge my mood and think what album fits it and put that one on. That is something spotify doesn't do for me.

fortyseven 6y ago

> Nobody You.

LockAndLol 6y ago

> Seems like a project that is 10 years too late. Nobody downloads music files anymore. Everyone streams... That's a sweeping generalization... I like owning my music and not being in danger of losing it at the whim of a company or a country. The only danger to me right now is my library and its redundancies crashing. If someone decides not to renew a contract, becomes too expensive for the service, moves to a country the service may not interact with, or decides to move to another service, I won't lose anything. If I choose to switch services, I won't lose half my library. I can get own music from obscure places or times services don't service or consider. I bet you most services don't have a lot of African music, no matter the decade. It doesn't even have to be obscure, there are great mixtapes from the 90s and 00s that just aren't on online services.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

I guess we should clarify what we mean by "download". If you mean pirate music, then yeah, I guess I've largely stopped doing that (blogspot shares ain't what they used to be). If you simply mean BUY music and store it digitally, I've got a 1.5TB external HDD filled with MP3s and FLACs that argues otherwise. Amazon's AutoRip is a nice timesaver, but I still largely prefer to do my own ripping via Exact Audio Copy.

jamesgeck0 6y ago

The Fediverse core means that it's a project that likely could only have existed now, with the decentralized base protocol to build on and the automatic integration with hundreds of tiny social networks.

grawprog 6y ago

I've never used Spotify, I use bandcamp all the time. I've bought a bunch of music off there. It may not be as convenient, but I really like the idea of being able to pay artists directly and have them get most of it minus a small cut for Bandcamp. I also tend to find music I like better on there, though that comes down to personal taste I suppose.

rvense 6y ago
I spend a lot of money on music - a lot more per year than a Spotify subscription - and none of it goes to people like Kanye West. I really like that. I also like not paying Spotify. I resent them for giving people the idea that 10 bucks per month is all you should pay for having access to all the world's music. They're a bad company.

kixiQu 6y ago

isn't the point that even people who might prefer things about downloaded music want the convenience of being able to upload and stream?

Notorious_BLT 6y ago

Sure, on average MOST people stream but claiming "Nobody" downloads music files anymore is just flat wrong. Bandcamp clearly isn't interested in competing with Spotify as an app for streaming (and as a frequent buyer from BC, I don't want them to try), they are interested in being a low-friction marketplace for people who want to buy and sell music and download it in a variety of formats.

mackrevinack 6y ago

every time a song on any of my spotify playlists disappears and turns grey i add it to a playlist, and that playlist is growing very large as the years go on. (and that's not including songs that have always been missing from spotify's library) im very close to going back to using a local library again and i think it would actually work pretty good these days with software like syncthing and musicbrainz, docker, cheap and easy to set up VPS's etc etc... that weren't a thing when I started using spotify