Can you please tell us older ones where the kids are getting their music these days?
When I was young I used torrents and filesharing between friends or local networks.
When I was young I used torrents and filesharing between friends or local networks.
I found a waterlogged phone on the beach. No amount of dry rice could resurrect it. But I located the owner and, via a micro SD card, returned a 100GB of family photos by EXIF GPS data that led me to their house. Happy repatriations. As a side effect I snarfed about 100GB of high quality MP3s. I'm still listening to bands I've never heard of before. On reflection I rather liked that. It shows my ego-driven so-called "tastes" are perhaps an over inflated sense of identity and that whether I'll like random music or not is only a little higher than chance.
Another time someone gave me a USB with a PDF to read, and the rest of the drive was chock full of their whole music collection. Now that thumb drives are so HUGE and I literally have boxes of them lying around I wonder whether to just preload them with a shit-ton of cool music and give them to people I like. Like old mix tapes... it's nothing to do with the cost/purchase... it's a whole new formula for discovery and restoring a social dimension to music.
A lot of folks would have their file-sharing settings wide open, so I could just click around the WLAN and look for mp3's. Found all sorts of interesting stuff, and if someone left a writable folder, I'd take-some-leave-some in kind.
Those days are long gone, so lately it's estate sales. Show up on the last day of the sale and pick up a whole milk-crate of CDs for $40, probably 150 pieces in there. Basically if I recognize and like a few artists in the collection, I figure this person's tastes overlapped enough with mine that I should give the rest of the collection a spin. Oh, wow.
Best part is, it's all physical media which can never DRM itself out of my collection again. (I've ranted previously about random tracks just "turning gray" on my Spotify playlists, presumably because of some licensing dispute or whatever, and how deeply offensive that is to the fans who curated these playlists and assign significance to the songs therein.) It's a bit of work to rip and encode, but it's not like the old days where a 60-minute album might take 90 minutes to rip and encode. CPUs are quick and USB CDROMs are cheap; I can do 5 albums in parallel in 10 minutes. Then stuff the milkcrate in the basement and forget about it.
I found a pretty good band while giving advice to a coworker on how to explain away inappropriate language at work if someone complained to HR.
The coworker was putting together a new workstation for someone, and said "I need a network card". The person at the next desk said that they had an extra and tried to hand it to the guy building the workstation.
He said "I don't want your sloppy seconds". Then he remembered the origins of the term "sloppy seconds" [1] and wondered if he's allowed to say that at work.
I overheard and told him, "Don't worry. If someone complains just say you were talking about the band. Every sexual term and phrase has a band named after it somewhere. Even if HR tries to check, you can just say it was a band you heard at a bar when you were in college".
Naturally I then Googled "sloppy seconds band" and sure enough, there is a band by that name and the first Google hit is a Wikipedia article about them [2].
The first two paragraphs of that article say:
> Sloppy Seconds is an American, Ramones-influenced punk band sometimes referred to as a junk rock band from Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, that started in 1984. They gained notoriety in the underground punk scene with gritty and controversial songs like "Come Back, Traci," "I Don't Want to be a Homosexual", "Jani is a Nazi", "I Want 'em Dead" and "So Fucked Up."
> The band's unusual and controversial lyrics encompass pornography, classic horror movies, classic television shows, comic books, alcohol, being fat, and getting drunk.
After that second paragraph I had to check if they were on Spotify and they were. I listened to a few of their albums the rest of the day and sure enough, there were songs on all those things mentioned in that second paragraph, some of them quite good.
ps: to any SoundCloud pm listening, I would have gladly paid for a purely linear timeline of my follows that remembers its position across devices, but no I had to build it myself.
I guess this is a matter of taste. Personally I find Bandcamp super usable. It's one of the gems of the internet if you ask me, up there with HN.
There's so much amazing independent music on BC and the revenue cut for artists is extremely fair. Money spent there is well spent.
> If I put 6 albums in my cart and check out, you make me enter my credit card info SIX TIMES. This is insane. You realize this is insane, don't you?
> You have used Amazon, right? Click once, receive candy. You need to be like that.
(Maybe they fixed it? Haven't bought multiple items at once in a while)
Also I would gladly pay for SoundCloud if most of the money actually went to the artists (if any SC pm is still listening).
[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/shouting-into-the-void-this... (you will have to copy and paste the link manually because he loves to block HN referrals for self-amusement)
The only friction is waiting a few second per track for them to prepare my 12 flac downloads, clicking through payment only takes a second or so.
My biggest frustration is not being able to download a zip file of all the tracks I just bought. Going one by one is tedious, especially because I tend to download both a FLAC for backup and 320 for everyday listening.
I am turning 33 next year, I have yet to have a year where my heart almost doesnt explode from joy and amazement at all the music people are make. Every year I feel luckier than last to be alive to hear the new things coming out. I really can't relate at all to most of this discussion.. It is very alien to me.