4 ms·

> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, a

> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. As I grow older, I've learned that I only care about this with music. I've lost access to number of tv shows and movies over time, but never really batted an eye after I've seen them. I enjoy rewatching clips that are mostly on youtube and rarely care for the whole movie.... I'm just one guy though. When I lost it with music, THEN i really cared. Caused me to seek physical media when I really like sometime, which sadly isn't always possible with all artists.

bandrami 3y ago
I find it particularly weird as a DJ that DJs under about 40 seem to have no problem with the idea of just streaming their entire setlist from a CDN, and in fact think I'm very weird and old fashioned for carrying around a thumb drive. (Wait til they see the actual vinyl crate I sometimes use...)
- ssl-3 3y ago
  I was heavily-involved with an off-grid, pop-up DJ event at a race a few weeks ago. We didn't have a plan. I mean: We hoped to make people (race fans, in a somewhat debaucherous campground/festival environment) happy, and we hoped that the music we brought with us would make them happy, but that was all of the planning we did on that end. I was able to keep our Internet connection standing up and working very well all week (without using Starlink, which it seems isn't quite easily-rentable yet), which was a big improvement over the previous year when our bandwidth dropped to around zero once the great heaping throngs of spectators broadly showed up for the main race. And that was a very good thing, because these flagrant drunks loved singing. Our actual-DJ-dude was able to download tracks to sing as-requested. And it was a lot of work, but it was fun for everyone and fit the vibe. I'm glad we had the network available to let this happen. We left the crates of vinyl at the DJ's place, since there wasn't room to transport it. And we were prepped for regular-ass DJing of just about any genre with the MP3s and FLACs we brought with us (via CDJs), but we did not anticipate that we would be doing karaoke (which is obviously a very different world from mixing jungle). But back to your point: We were able to explore karaoke because we had good Internet, and I'm glad we were able to get there, but we also had a plethora of other options that existed on physical media that we could actually-touch. I can't imagine showing up to a DJ gig without...any music at all, and just trusting that the greater network would behave itself for the duration and allow clean streaming to happen. That just seems like madness to me, since the Internet sometimes fails -- and it seems to prefer failing when there's an unusual influx of people in a locality. It is unfathomable to me that someone would rely on having a fat-enough network connection to keep people moving in a place where there is a large crowd. (But yet: People actually do that?)
  - bandrami 3y ago
    I have a residency at a nightclub and the rotating younger DJs who open literally just come in with their phone and hook up the controller to it and run spotify through some app that speaks Rekordbox (it's probably actually the Rekordbox app, come to think of it). Without even having checked what the signal in the club is like beforehand (luckily it's pretty good). I asked one if he had any tracks actually downloaded to his phone and he looked at me like I was a stegosaurus.
    - ssl-3 3y ago
      I've heard from DJ friends that there are plugins that let Spotify play on [say] two DDJs at once, perhaps through Rekordbox. Perhaps even on a pocket computer. (I an not an expert on DJ fare -- I just hang out with these guys and help make it happen.) And I'm sure that Spotify works usually, and I'm sure it's against the Spotify ToS, but I'm also sure that this level of reliance on end-to-end Internet connectivity is bound for inescapable failure. Eventually. (For our "little" pop-up off-grid DJ rig, which was not actually particularly small: I made sure we had redundancy for everything we felt we needed: Power, amps, sources, speakers, and the rest of the works -- except Internet. We assumed, going in, that the Internet would be useless and thus none of our actual-plans relied on it, and we also knew that we were pretty far from any civilization that could garner us replacement parts.)
      - bandrami 3y ago
        That sounds right; Serato has something similar. (I keep meaning to write something for Mixxx to be able to do that with Jamendo...) What's really jaw-dropping for me is the deezer-based live stem extraction, where you can press a button and just be playing the vocals or the drums. (This is, weirdly, fundamentally the same tech that makes those pictures, which still astounds me.) I still get annoyed with the "sync" button because it doesn't let me do a half-beat lead-in. I will probably always be a dinosaur in this field, which is fine. But I would at least try to pass on the hard-earned knowledge that you have to assume in a live performance any given system will fail at some point.

bandrami 3y ago

I find it particularly weird as a DJ that DJs under about 40 seem to have no problem with the idea of just streaming their entire setlist from a CDN, and in fact think I'm very weird and old fashioned for carrying around a thumb drive. (Wait til they see the actual vinyl crate I sometimes use...)

ssl-3 3y ago
I was heavily-involved with an off-grid, pop-up DJ event at a race a few weeks ago. We didn't have a plan. I mean: We hoped to make people (race fans, in a somewhat debaucherous campground/festival environment) happy, and we hoped that the music we brought with us would make them happy, but that was all of the planning we did on that end. I was able to keep our Internet connection standing up and working very well all week (without using Starlink, which it seems isn't quite easily-rentable yet), which was a big improvement over the previous year when our bandwidth dropped to around zero once the great heaping throngs of spectators broadly showed up for the main race. And that was a very good thing, because these flagrant drunks loved singing. Our actual-DJ-dude was able to download tracks to sing as-requested. And it was a lot of work, but it was fun for everyone and fit the vibe. I'm glad we had the network available to let this happen. We left the crates of vinyl at the DJ's place, since there wasn't room to transport it. And we were prepped for regular-ass DJing of just about any genre with the MP3s and FLACs we brought with us (via CDJs), but we did not anticipate that we would be doing karaoke (which is obviously a very different world from mixing jungle). But back to your point: We were able to explore karaoke because we had good Internet, and I'm glad we were able to get there, but we also had a plethora of other options that existed on physical media that we could actually-touch. I can't imagine showing up to a DJ gig without...any music at all, and just trusting that the greater network would behave itself for the duration and allow clean streaming to happen. That just seems like madness to me, since the Internet sometimes fails -- and it seems to prefer failing when there's an unusual influx of people in a locality. It is unfathomable to me that someone would rely on having a fat-enough network connection to keep people moving in a place where there is a large crowd. (But yet: People actually do that?)
- bandrami 3y ago
  I have a residency at a nightclub and the rotating younger DJs who open literally just come in with their phone and hook up the controller to it and run spotify through some app that speaks Rekordbox (it's probably actually the Rekordbox app, come to think of it). Without even having checked what the signal in the club is like beforehand (luckily it's pretty good). I asked one if he had any tracks actually downloaded to his phone and he looked at me like I was a stegosaurus.
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    I've heard from DJ friends that there are plugins that let Spotify play on [say] two DDJs at once, perhaps through Rekordbox. Perhaps even on a pocket computer. (I an not an expert on DJ fare -- I just hang out with these guys and help make it happen.) And I'm sure that Spotify works usually, and I'm sure it's against the Spotify ToS, but I'm also sure that this level of reliance on end-to-end Internet connectivity is bound for inescapable failure. Eventually. (For our "little" pop-up off-grid DJ rig, which was not actually particularly small: I made sure we had redundancy for everything we felt we needed: Power, amps, sources, speakers, and the rest of the works -- except Internet. We assumed, going in, that the Internet would be useless and thus none of our actual-plans relied on it, and we also knew that we were pretty far from any civilization that could garner us replacement parts.)
    - bandrami 3y ago
      That sounds right; Serato has something similar. (I keep meaning to write something for Mixxx to be able to do that with Jamendo...) What's really jaw-dropping for me is the deezer-based live stem extraction, where you can press a button and just be playing the vocals or the drums. (This is, weirdly, fundamentally the same tech that makes those pictures, which still astounds me.) I still get annoyed with the "sync" button because it doesn't let me do a half-beat lead-in. I will probably always be a dinosaur in this field, which is fine. But I would at least try to pass on the hard-earned knowledge that you have to assume in a live performance any given system will fail at some point.