10 ms·

The Man Who Broke the Music Business

182 points by donohoe 12y ago

tempodox 12y ago
...if the MP3 was just as good, why bother with the CD... The thing is, MP3 _isn't_ “just as good”. A rendering in lossless compression from a CD still sounds different than a 320 kBPS MP3. Which is why I just can't get over the iTunesStore selling sound in 256 kBPS. Much too bad. Amazon does 320 kBPS, but it's still not good enough.
- pornel 12y ago
  iTunes is not selling music in the MP3 format, so the kbit comparison is invalid. Due to limitations of MP3 and advances in AAC it's quite likely that 256kbit AAC is higher quality than MP3 would be at 320kbit.
  - tempodox 12y ago
    That is an interesting observation. I didn't know this detail, thank you for mentioning it!
- zzalpha 12y ago
  Actually,for 99% of folks its absolutely "good enough", as confirmed by blind listening tests.
- harshreality 12y ago
  Have you ABX tested 320kbps mp3 against flac? If so, what track was it, and what audio equipment? If not, the difference you heard was the placebo effect of knowing it was flac.
  - lozf 12y ago
    Here are a couple of ABX logs that demonstrate an audible difference between 320 and FLAC * http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=70598 http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=70598 * http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=100256&st=0 http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=100256&... All lossy codecs have some problem samples and cranking up the bitrate isn't a guarantee of transparency. Newer codecs tend to do better than MP3, and at lower bitrates. The only point in lossy encoding is to save space, so it makes sense to do it as efficiently as possible, and considering that, 320 CBR is actually the worst of both worlds because it always wastes space, and is often overkill anyway. An AAC file from a good implementation of the encoder (e.g. Apples, or either from Fraunhofer including the Open Source FDK-AAC from Android) will usually (for most people, with most music) achieve transparency in the mid to high hundreds of kbps. The material listened to always makes a difference, therefore unqualified arguments about "can always tell" or "never can tell" are always flawed.
- golergka 12y ago
  Have you gone through a blind test? Because most musicians, DJs and producers I know that tried it, either couldn't tell a difference, or told it wrong, on a big enough sample. I'm not even mentioning people who are not music industry professionals.
  - adamtj 12y ago
    Don't forget that the early encoders were pretty bad. It seems conceivable that a old encoders might have produced 320 kbit mp3s that were distinguishable from CDs in blind tests. Perhaps tempodox gave up on mp3s before they got good?
- yason 12y ago
  For the majority of people, mp3s seem to be "just as good" enough. I remember some low-bitrate songs encoded with some very early encoder where you could hear a difference. Not necessarily "the" difference but "a" difference. After a couple of years the worst encoder anyone could find was better already and since 192kbps bitrates mp3s were 99.999% there. I'm sure that a trained ear can hear differences between 256kbps vs. 320kbps in a special studio with high-end audiocards, amplifiers and speakers but 99.999% of all people don't and they don't own the equipment either.
  - AndrewUnmuted 12y ago
    The conventional wisdom is just that - MP3s don't sound any different than their CD counterpart, but we all know that they don't have the same degree of fidelity to the original mastered audio files. While it is true that most cannot detect the differences between MP3 (and other lossy formats) and PCM (lossless) audio, this is beginning to change as consumers become used to a higher quality of sound delivery than before. The popularity of Beats headphones, for instance, meant that hip hop producers could no longer just push the limiter until the sub bass begins to sound farty - their fans were all equipped to hear the differences now. Vinyl playback, in the pre-CD days, had consumers interested in a whole different kind of audio fidelity. The noises in the record were largely ignored, and nobody tried to get past them. Now, all listeners notice the sound of a vinyl record immediately, and people either love it or hate it. The point I'm making here is that audio fidelity and quality are separate topics, but while fidelity is an objective measurement of audio, quality is a subjective one, and it shifts with the culture of the day. The problem with the MP3 and other lossy audio formats is that they are taken to be the same as their lossless origins. Consumers will catch up to the decay that MP3 codecs cause and feel the same way about them that a millennial feels about VHS tapes. It may take a few years, or even decades, to arrive there, though.
    - MPSimmons 12y ago
      Maybe. The competing standard for many, many years was analog FM, though. Most places now don't even have the 300kb/s digital radio. 192kb/s is definitely good enough for the vast majority of people. There are always going to be audiophiles and artists who make derivative works, but those aren't the people who are served by the widespread piracy of media.
- windsurfer 12y ago
  Most people can't even tell the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps. Try it yourself: http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/mp3-sound-quality-test-128-320/ http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/mp3-sound-quality-test-1...
  - louthy 12y ago
    I could tell the difference. I produce music, and I can usually tell the difference between low and high bit-rate MP3s. Certain sounds are handled poorly at lower bit-rates: especially high-frequency sounds - you tend to hear obvious artifacting which comes across as 'mushy'. The link above is clearly a biased example where there are barely any real high-end sounds, and therefore it would easily fool an untrained ear. I think if they had more than one example, across a range of music styles, then it would be a fairer test.
    - donohoe 12y ago
      Being totally sincere and serious here; but could you create such a test?
      - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
        I can hear the difference, I also produce music. It would be incredibly easy to produce a better test. The hard part is getting permission from copyright holders. Now - I'm sure a lot of people can't hear the difference because they don't know what to listen for. The issue isn't that the difference doesn't exist or that it's "not audible" in some objective sense. It's that they're not listening to the sound in the same way a producer or engineer listen to sound. Listening is an active process. It involves a lot of unconscious focussing on specific elements of the sound/music. You can argue whether or not this matters, but that's really an economic argument about distribution and storage costs, not an absolute argument about the physics of audio compression. Saying the difference isn't audible at all is like saying that you may as well quantise all rhythms right on the beat because most people can't tell by ear if beats are early or late.
- wnevets 12y ago
  Considering most people were listening to music on those god awful ipod/iphone earbuds, higher audio quality is wasted.
- intopieces 12y ago
  When given the "Pepsi Challenge," most college students prefered the sound of 128 MP3 to Lossless. It's all about what you cut your teeth on. [0] [0] Jonathan Sterne, "MP3: The Meaning of a Format", pg 166
  - Kapow 12y ago
    CBR 128 still gets that weird underwater warbling distortion on cymbals and other high-end sounds. You need to go at least 192 to make that inaudible. With today's bandwidth and storage capacity, there's no reason to use anything worse than -V2.
- darksim905 12y ago
  I wish this website had a downvote button of sorts as this is a ridiculous notion. You have VBR MP3s that rival vinyl. You have FLAC, you have Ogg. People say "lossless" is such a big deal with MP3s but your ear can't really discern anything (unless you're still a teenager) above 256kbps anyways. It largely depends on the speakers, monitors & how they are made that you're listening through. Do your research.
  - teh_klev 12y ago
    >I wish this website had a downvote button of sorts Have a read of the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
  - whyaduck 12y ago
    You seem to be confusing compression bit rate with audio frequency. Even if my ears can't hear frequencies above, say 15 kHz, that doesn't mean I can't hear compression artifacts in music compressed at any particular bit rate.
- grecy 12y ago
  Back in the time period being talked about, 96kbps was common, 128kbps was top of the line (no VBR), and absolutely you can hear the difference between that and uncompressed.
- beedogs 12y ago
  > Amazon does 320 kBPS, but it's still not good enough. Yeah, nah. I'd bet a paycheck or two that no one could tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a CD. And I'd win 99 times out of 100.
  - tempodox 12y ago
    Yes, there may be a lot of audio content where what you say is true. But there is also audio content where I can hear differences. You may find such content uninteresting or the differences negligible, but I don't.
ssharp 12y ago
It's hard to believe one person was able to successfully leak so much material. I got into album leaks in the early-mid 2000's. Even if I would end up buying the album anyway, that first listen of the leaked album was awesome.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  And all he got was 3 months.
bluedino 12y ago
I remember seeing people at flea markets selling bootleg compact discs. They'd rent a booth and have boxes and boxes of them in those fluorescent colored plastic holders, the ones you could buy in 500 packs at Sam's Club or Egghead. Some of them even printed out fake covers and labels on inkjet printers, heck they would be doing it in between customers. I couldn't figure out why the cops never came and shut them down. Same goes for the gas stations or convenience stores that sold obviously bootlegged movies for $3 on the check-out counter. Now I want to read an article on Adil R. Cassim, the guy behind that whole ring.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  My favorite movie pirate story was the LAPD captain (Hollywood division, no less) who was arrested for supplying stores with pirated DVDs. http://articles.latimes.com/2003/dec/10/local/me-dvd10 http://articles.latimes.com/2003/dec/10/local/me-dvd10
- jakejake 12y ago
  A group of my distant family were all into selling knock-off purses at flea markets. They all did it for years without any problems from the law. Suddenly about two years ago the police cracked down on everybody and they all had to stop due to being arrested & getting in trouble. I had heard it was due to some type of political pressure that had originated from the designers. I.e the correct local politicians palms had been greased. I'd imagine the bootleg movie selling would be similar. The police don't really care until someone above them puts out the order to deal with it.
- Nursie 12y ago
  In some parts of the world (Singapore, Malaysia are places I have seen) there are shops in malls that openly sell copies of stuff. In fact when I first bought a PS3 and went looking for games for it in Singapore I was frequently turned away with "Oh, you want originals? We don't do that here".
  - smackfu 12y ago
    Practically speaking, no one is going to buy something for $10 when they can get it for $1, especially if they have to work several hours to make $10.
justinpaulson 12y ago
This reminds me of using oth.net to browse ftps for tracks in late 1990s. I used to burn custom mixes for friends in high school back then before napster exploded and everyone had a burner. On a 28.8 or even 56k connection it was an amazingly tedious process to download tracks from ftps. It is pretty insane how you can download an entire discography today in the amount of time it took to download some single tracks back then. oth.net is still active today it looks like, crazy.
- pageld 12y ago
  I made some pretty good beer money running one of those FTP sites by making people download Bonzai buddy for a password. I feel a bit bad for advancing that purple ape, but at least I could increase my sysadmin skills on something that didn't matter.
  - pxlpshr 12y ago
    +1. I was running an FTP server on one of the few multi-honed T3 connections (late 90's) in our city. OTH sent me a ton of traffic, which also included RIAA scouts. I almost lost my job after they sent a C&D to our IT department; I was ~16 years old at the time and was forgiven.
    - jonah 12y ago
      Be glad that was 20 years ago. If you did it today, you'd have a felony...
- bluedino 12y ago
  It's all relative. I moved out of my parents house and left behind my old computer and 56k modem. I came back a few months later and found my brother had BearShare or something running with all these downloads trickling it at .5 kbps, and found that he had amassed hundreds of megabytes of MP3's.
- thirdsun 12y ago
  I remember those days - I used to download mixes, albums, tracks over ISDN, which was basically an all-night affair. Getting up in the morning in anticipation of listening to a new Global Underground compilation is something that just rarely happens these days. Not having everything readily available made me appreciate the smaller, but carefully selected collection I maintained. I still buy lots of music, since I prefer to own my collection and don't want to rely on a streaming service. However these days I find myself to be much quicker to hit the skip button and enjoying a new album is more often than not a short lived pleasure. The downside of modern conveniences I guess.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- joshstrange 12y ago
  I have no personal experience but from my observations I see it like this: Number one you are a part of something big, even small groups can have massive impacts from their leaks/releases. It's no fluke that the demographics for scene members often favors younger people, I know that for the internet in general, when I was younger, it was a magic place where age didn't matter, only merits. I would assume the scene is no different. It doesn't matter how much you make, and your race, religion, age are not important. You are judged by what you can DO not who you ARE. That alone is a VERY powerful motivator. Secondly I think the scene is very appealing to people who have a tech inclination plus a love/hobby for something else (Software, movies. music, etc). The scene allows them to interact with people who share the same interests and gives them access (through top sites or similar) to more content that they love. Lastly sharing. When I like/love something there is a part of me that wants to share it with everyone else. When that something is funny story then all is well and good but when it's a TV show/movie/album/etc it's a little harder to share. Sure you can share a link to Amazon/Netflix/etc but unless your friend already pays for access then you share isn't "free". It's free to you but not to the person you are sharing. Piracy makes it easier to share because you don't let those pesky laws get in the way. Even so sharing is not 100% free, you can tell someone about a piece of content but they still have to go find it, download it, and then they can watch it. Topsites are like your friends opening up all of their content so that you can sample it on your own or go grab something on their recommendation. There is still a little friction to the sharing (a direct link to watch would be ideal) but it's about as close as you can get. That's just my 2 cents. To answer directly to: What motivates someone to risk so much and invest so much time and money into participating in the scene today? I, for example, love messing around with web dev. Because of this I have tried out (and continue to pay for) a number of online hosting platforms (both dedicated, shared, and your AWS/DO/RS/Google clouds) either to try them out or because I am long-term hosting things on them. This ends up being a fair amount of money when all is said and done but it's my hobby, it's what I love and it benefits me at work. Now other than the "benefits me at work" bit I don't see how my hobby is any different from file sharers (legality aside). Even then I'm sure you can learn skills participating in a release group that can benefit you in your professional life (server management, release planning, etc).
bluedino 12y ago
This was a pretty good article, I'd love to read one (as similar as it might be) about warez crews.
- joshstrange 12y ago
  If you liked this I'd check out http://www.welcometothescene.com/ http://www.welcometothescene.com/ The first season is great, I never got into the second season. It's an interesting format for a show, most all text with just some music in the background but I quite enjoyed it.
- shitlord 12y ago
  I thought the ending was very beautiful, in a way.
joshstrange 12y ago
If The Scene interests you then you may want to check out http://www.welcometothescene.com/ http://www.welcometothescene.com/ It's an internet-TV show the follows a group (not a documentary, it's all staged) that releases movies. The first "season" was very good and I highly recommend it. The second has yet to really interest me. I watched a few episodes but it's different from the first.
aikah 12y ago
> After the trial, Glover began to regret his decision to testify and to plead guilty. He shouldn't have taken the deal, I guess he is the only one who went to prison, not even the guy he testified against went to jail.

182 points by donohoe 12y ago

...if the MP3 was just as good, why bother with the CD... The thing is, MP3 _isn't_ “just as good”. A rendering in lossless compression from a CD still sounds different than a 320 kBPS MP3. Which is why I just can't get over the iTunesStore selling sound in 256 kBPS. Much too bad. Amazon does 320 kBPS, but it's still not good enough.

pornel 12y ago
iTunes is not selling music in the MP3 format, so the kbit comparison is invalid. Due to limitations of MP3 and advances in AAC it's quite likely that 256kbit AAC is higher quality than MP3 would be at 320kbit.
- tempodox 12y ago
  That is an interesting observation. I didn't know this detail, thank you for mentioning it!
zzalpha 12y ago
Actually,for 99% of folks its absolutely "good enough", as confirmed by blind listening tests.
harshreality 12y ago
Have you ABX tested 320kbps mp3 against flac? If so, what track was it, and what audio equipment? If not, the difference you heard was the placebo effect of knowing it was flac.
- lozf 12y ago
  Here are a couple of ABX logs that demonstrate an audible difference between 320 and FLAC * http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=70598 http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=70598 * http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=100256&st=0 http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=100256&... All lossy codecs have some problem samples and cranking up the bitrate isn't a guarantee of transparency. Newer codecs tend to do better than MP3, and at lower bitrates. The only point in lossy encoding is to save space, so it makes sense to do it as efficiently as possible, and considering that, 320 CBR is actually the worst of both worlds because it always wastes space, and is often overkill anyway. An AAC file from a good implementation of the encoder (e.g. Apples, or either from Fraunhofer including the Open Source FDK-AAC from Android) will usually (for most people, with most music) achieve transparency in the mid to high hundreds of kbps. The material listened to always makes a difference, therefore unqualified arguments about "can always tell" or "never can tell" are always flawed.
golergka 12y ago
Have you gone through a blind test? Because most musicians, DJs and producers I know that tried it, either couldn't tell a difference, or told it wrong, on a big enough sample. I'm not even mentioning people who are not music industry professionals.
- adamtj 12y ago
  Don't forget that the early encoders were pretty bad. It seems conceivable that a old encoders might have produced 320 kbit mp3s that were distinguishable from CDs in blind tests. Perhaps tempodox gave up on mp3s before they got good?
yason 12y ago
For the majority of people, mp3s seem to be "just as good" enough. I remember some low-bitrate songs encoded with some very early encoder where you could hear a difference. Not necessarily "the" difference but "a" difference. After a couple of years the worst encoder anyone could find was better already and since 192kbps bitrates mp3s were 99.999% there. I'm sure that a trained ear can hear differences between 256kbps vs. 320kbps in a special studio with high-end audiocards, amplifiers and speakers but 99.999% of all people don't and they don't own the equipment either.
- AndrewUnmuted 12y ago
  The conventional wisdom is just that - MP3s don't sound any different than their CD counterpart, but we all know that they don't have the same degree of fidelity to the original mastered audio files. While it is true that most cannot detect the differences between MP3 (and other lossy formats) and PCM (lossless) audio, this is beginning to change as consumers become used to a higher quality of sound delivery than before. The popularity of Beats headphones, for instance, meant that hip hop producers could no longer just push the limiter until the sub bass begins to sound farty - their fans were all equipped to hear the differences now. Vinyl playback, in the pre-CD days, had consumers interested in a whole different kind of audio fidelity. The noises in the record were largely ignored, and nobody tried to get past them. Now, all listeners notice the sound of a vinyl record immediately, and people either love it or hate it. The point I'm making here is that audio fidelity and quality are separate topics, but while fidelity is an objective measurement of audio, quality is a subjective one, and it shifts with the culture of the day. The problem with the MP3 and other lossy audio formats is that they are taken to be the same as their lossless origins. Consumers will catch up to the decay that MP3 codecs cause and feel the same way about them that a millennial feels about VHS tapes. It may take a few years, or even decades, to arrive there, though.
  - MPSimmons 12y ago
    Maybe. The competing standard for many, many years was analog FM, though. Most places now don't even have the 300kb/s digital radio. 192kb/s is definitely good enough for the vast majority of people. There are always going to be audiophiles and artists who make derivative works, but those aren't the people who are served by the widespread piracy of media.
windsurfer 12y ago
Most people can't even tell the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps. Try it yourself: http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/mp3-sound-quality-test-128-320/ http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/mp3-sound-quality-test-1...
- louthy 12y ago
  I could tell the difference. I produce music, and I can usually tell the difference between low and high bit-rate MP3s. Certain sounds are handled poorly at lower bit-rates: especially high-frequency sounds - you tend to hear obvious artifacting which comes across as 'mushy'. The link above is clearly a biased example where there are barely any real high-end sounds, and therefore it would easily fool an untrained ear. I think if they had more than one example, across a range of music styles, then it would be a fairer test.
  - donohoe 12y ago
    Being totally sincere and serious here; but could you create such a test?
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      I can hear the difference, I also produce music. It would be incredibly easy to produce a better test. The hard part is getting permission from copyright holders. Now - I'm sure a lot of people can't hear the difference because they don't know what to listen for. The issue isn't that the difference doesn't exist or that it's "not audible" in some objective sense. It's that they're not listening to the sound in the same way a producer or engineer listen to sound. Listening is an active process. It involves a lot of unconscious focussing on specific elements of the sound/music. You can argue whether or not this matters, but that's really an economic argument about distribution and storage costs, not an absolute argument about the physics of audio compression. Saying the difference isn't audible at all is like saying that you may as well quantise all rhythms right on the beat because most people can't tell by ear if beats are early or late.
wnevets 12y ago
Considering most people were listening to music on those god awful ipod/iphone earbuds, higher audio quality is wasted.
intopieces 12y ago
When given the "Pepsi Challenge," most college students prefered the sound of 128 MP3 to Lossless. It's all about what you cut your teeth on. [0] [0] Jonathan Sterne, "MP3: The Meaning of a Format", pg 166
- Kapow 12y ago
  CBR 128 still gets that weird underwater warbling distortion on cymbals and other high-end sounds. You need to go at least 192 to make that inaudible. With today's bandwidth and storage capacity, there's no reason to use anything worse than -V2.
darksim905 12y ago
I wish this website had a downvote button of sorts as this is a ridiculous notion. You have VBR MP3s that rival vinyl. You have FLAC, you have Ogg. People say "lossless" is such a big deal with MP3s but your ear can't really discern anything (unless you're still a teenager) above 256kbps anyways. It largely depends on the speakers, monitors & how they are made that you're listening through. Do your research.
- teh_klev 12y ago
  >I wish this website had a downvote button of sorts Have a read of the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- whyaduck 12y ago
  You seem to be confusing compression bit rate with audio frequency. Even if my ears can't hear frequencies above, say 15 kHz, that doesn't mean I can't hear compression artifacts in music compressed at any particular bit rate.
grecy 12y ago
Back in the time period being talked about, 96kbps was common, 128kbps was top of the line (no VBR), and absolutely you can hear the difference between that and uncompressed.
beedogs 12y ago
> Amazon does 320 kBPS, but it's still not good enough. Yeah, nah. I'd bet a paycheck or two that no one could tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a CD. And I'd win 99 times out of 100.
- tempodox 12y ago
  Yes, there may be a lot of audio content where what you say is true. But there is also audio content where I can hear differences. You may find such content uninteresting or the differences negligible, but I don't.

ssharp 12y ago

It's hard to believe one person was able to successfully leak so much material. I got into album leaks in the early-mid 2000's. Even if I would end up buying the album anyway, that first listen of the leaked album was awesome.

mattmanser 12y ago
And all he got was 3 months.

bluedino 12y ago

I remember seeing people at flea markets selling bootleg compact discs. They'd rent a booth and have boxes and boxes of them in those fluorescent colored plastic holders, the ones you could buy in 500 packs at Sam's Club or Egghead. Some of them even printed out fake covers and labels on inkjet printers, heck they would be doing it in between customers. I couldn't figure out why the cops never came and shut them down. Same goes for the gas stations or convenience stores that sold obviously bootlegged movies for $3 on the check-out counter. Now I want to read an article on Adil R. Cassim, the guy behind that whole ring.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
My favorite movie pirate story was the LAPD captain (Hollywood division, no less) who was arrested for supplying stores with pirated DVDs. http://articles.latimes.com/2003/dec/10/local/me-dvd10 http://articles.latimes.com/2003/dec/10/local/me-dvd10
jakejake 12y ago
A group of my distant family were all into selling knock-off purses at flea markets. They all did it for years without any problems from the law. Suddenly about two years ago the police cracked down on everybody and they all had to stop due to being arrested & getting in trouble. I had heard it was due to some type of political pressure that had originated from the designers. I.e the correct local politicians palms had been greased. I'd imagine the bootleg movie selling would be similar. The police don't really care until someone above them puts out the order to deal with it.
Nursie 12y ago
In some parts of the world (Singapore, Malaysia are places I have seen) there are shops in malls that openly sell copies of stuff. In fact when I first bought a PS3 and went looking for games for it in Singapore I was frequently turned away with "Oh, you want originals? We don't do that here".
- smackfu 12y ago
  Practically speaking, no one is going to buy something for $10 when they can get it for $1, especially if they have to work several hours to make $10.

justinpaulson 12y ago

This reminds me of using oth.net to browse ftps for tracks in late 1990s. I used to burn custom mixes for friends in high school back then before napster exploded and everyone had a burner. On a 28.8 or even 56k connection it was an amazingly tedious process to download tracks from ftps. It is pretty insane how you can download an entire discography today in the amount of time it took to download some single tracks back then. oth.net is still active today it looks like, crazy.

pageld 12y ago
I made some pretty good beer money running one of those FTP sites by making people download Bonzai buddy for a password. I feel a bit bad for advancing that purple ape, but at least I could increase my sysadmin skills on something that didn't matter.
- pxlpshr 12y ago
  +1. I was running an FTP server on one of the few multi-honed T3 connections (late 90's) in our city. OTH sent me a ton of traffic, which also included RIAA scouts. I almost lost my job after they sent a C&D to our IT department; I was ~16 years old at the time and was forgiven.
  - jonah 12y ago
    Be glad that was 20 years ago. If you did it today, you'd have a felony...
bluedino 12y ago
It's all relative. I moved out of my parents house and left behind my old computer and 56k modem. I came back a few months later and found my brother had BearShare or something running with all these downloads trickling it at .5 kbps, and found that he had amassed hundreds of megabytes of MP3's.
thirdsun 12y ago
I remember those days - I used to download mixes, albums, tracks over ISDN, which was basically an all-night affair. Getting up in the morning in anticipation of listening to a new Global Underground compilation is something that just rarely happens these days. Not having everything readily available made me appreciate the smaller, but carefully selected collection I maintained. I still buy lots of music, since I prefer to own my collection and don't want to rely on a streaming service. However these days I find myself to be much quicker to hit the skip button and enjoying a new album is more often than not a short lived pleasure. The downside of modern conveniences I guess.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

joshstrange 12y ago
I have no personal experience but from my observations I see it like this: Number one you are a part of something big, even small groups can have massive impacts from their leaks/releases. It's no fluke that the demographics for scene members often favors younger people, I know that for the internet in general, when I was younger, it was a magic place where age didn't matter, only merits. I would assume the scene is no different. It doesn't matter how much you make, and your race, religion, age are not important. You are judged by what you can DO not who you ARE. That alone is a VERY powerful motivator. Secondly I think the scene is very appealing to people who have a tech inclination plus a love/hobby for something else (Software, movies. music, etc). The scene allows them to interact with people who share the same interests and gives them access (through top sites or similar) to more content that they love. Lastly sharing. When I like/love something there is a part of me that wants to share it with everyone else. When that something is funny story then all is well and good but when it's a TV show/movie/album/etc it's a little harder to share. Sure you can share a link to Amazon/Netflix/etc but unless your friend already pays for access then you share isn't "free". It's free to you but not to the person you are sharing. Piracy makes it easier to share because you don't let those pesky laws get in the way. Even so sharing is not 100% free, you can tell someone about a piece of content but they still have to go find it, download it, and then they can watch it. Topsites are like your friends opening up all of their content so that you can sample it on your own or go grab something on their recommendation. There is still a little friction to the sharing (a direct link to watch would be ideal) but it's about as close as you can get. That's just my 2 cents. To answer directly to: What motivates someone to risk so much and invest so much time and money into participating in the scene today? I, for example, love messing around with web dev. Because of this I have tried out (and continue to pay for) a number of online hosting platforms (both dedicated, shared, and your AWS/DO/RS/Google clouds) either to try them out or because I am long-term hosting things on them. This ends up being a fair amount of money when all is said and done but it's my hobby, it's what I love and it benefits me at work. Now other than the "benefits me at work" bit I don't see how my hobby is any different from file sharers (legality aside). Even then I'm sure you can learn skills participating in a release group that can benefit you in your professional life (server management, release planning, etc).

bluedino 12y ago

This was a pretty good article, I'd love to read one (as similar as it might be) about warez crews.

joshstrange 12y ago
If you liked this I'd check out http://www.welcometothescene.com/ http://www.welcometothescene.com/ The first season is great, I never got into the second season. It's an interesting format for a show, most all text with just some music in the background but I quite enjoyed it.
shitlord 12y ago
I thought the ending was very beautiful, in a way.

joshstrange 12y ago

If The Scene interests you then you may want to check out http://www.welcometothescene.com/ http://www.welcometothescene.com/ It's an internet-TV show the follows a group (not a documentary, it's all staged) that releases movies. The first "season" was very good and I highly recommend it. The second has yet to really interest me. I watched a few episodes but it's different from the first.

aikah 12y ago

> After the trial, Glover began to regret his decision to testify and to plead guilty. He shouldn't have taken the deal, I guess he is the only one who went to prison, not even the guy he testified against went to jail.