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Comment by xouse | Hacker News Reader

People have learned from what.cd. Lots of people have the same sense of inevitable doom you do so there's more people who have put thought and effort into being capable of rebuilding quickly if that happens again. Just varroa musica alone has created a giant decentralized metadata archive(and that's not even its main purpose just a neat side effect) that would make the restarting process much easier.

The downside is that the post what community is so much smaller. Spotify et al really put a huge damper on the music tracker community, and that makes it less resilient.

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> The downside is that the post what community is so much smaller.

People were saying the same thing in 2007 when OiNK shut down and What was starting up. The community is not smaller; it's more fragmented, and that's a good thing. Centralization is no better in our societal constructs than it is in our technological ones. I'll trade some immediacy and convenience for longevity any day.

I disagree, the community is both more fragmented and smaller, what had 144k users on its last day vs the 35k of its spiritual successor today. The few music trackers that have sprung up post what.cd after said spiritual successor are all pretty small. The niche genre trackers all have about the same user numbers since then so they cancel out. Then factor in that waffles has been down for some time now and the difference is pretty big.

I can only estimate because exact numbers are hard to find, but I'd say peak what era music tracker community total users was in the 350k region and we're probably somewhere around 100k now.

Does Spotify really cut that deep into the demographic of hardcore music tracker users? I'd presume those people are chasing rare and lost releases in high quality and Spotify and other streaming services aren't exactly touting rarities. Preserving underground music will always be a job for the fans, not streaming services.

Yes. Music trackers have always been a ton of effort, but in their prime trackers had the advantage of having basically a monopoly on music discovery. If you wanted to find out about citypop in 2011 what.cd was the place, now youtube will recommended it to you on a Joe Rogan video.

People didn't go to what.cd and jump through all those hoops to find rare music, they went to find good music, and now Spotify and YouTube do a good enough job of that with a lot less effort.

As a funny example of that I discovered Billie Eilish when Ocean Eyes first came out from a private tracker and now she's about as big as anyone. So it isn't just about discovering rare czech folk singers, but any music that you might like.

I think the hardcore demographic you mentioned is spot on and does exist, but they were always a minority and the evaporation of the less hardcore users explains why the scene is so much smaller now.

> Does Spotify really cut that deep into the demographic of hardcore music tracker users?

It does because private trackers use buffer as currency. The music trackers have had to adapt to use points systems now to encourage downloading activity. But even still, activity is way down from the what.cd days. It's just easier to stream the easily accessible stuff.

Also if you're not an uploader, building ratio to use the site is hard. Going from ten years of what.cd freeleech of buffer to nothing and facing the prospect of building it up again can be daunting.

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