I can vouch for OiNK and What.cd being magical places, unlikely to ever come back. There was also Waffles which was a little more like OiNK in spirit, but What had a much bigger selection and discovery was second to none.
The owner of OiNK did nothing wrong and was cleared in court, but the music industry was still able to hire thugs (the police) to raid his home in the early morning and ruin years of his life. He understandable went under the radar but I hope everything is ok now.
I still think about the users of those sites to this day. The internet just isn't what it was any more.
Hard to argue against it when you get memory holed by playlist entry removals by a cloud service. Much easier living having everything at `.config/mpd/playlists` with git history.
I can vouch for OiNK and What.cd being magical places, unlikely to ever come back. There was also Waffles which was a little more like OiNK in spirit, but What had a much bigger selection and discovery was second to none.
The owner of OiNK did nothing wrong and was cleared in court, but the music industry was still able to hire thugs (the police) to raid his home in the early morning and ruin years of his life. He understandable went under the radar but I hope everything is ok now.
I still think about the users of those sites to this day. The internet just isn't what it was any more.
Huh... I'm still waiting for Bandcamp and Soundcloud to close their streaming download hole. It has been a few years now.
Posting that here is one of the more promising ways of achieving that
It's not really about piracy in general, it's mostly about What.CD.
Equivalent of what.cd today is red***.sh.
But, TBH, most of the pirated music today is on YouTube anyway.
weird, I still love pirating music.
This. I do use Spotify, but this has nothing to do with my local music collection. Admittedly, mostly pirated.
Still very much alive! Just not as popular with the advent of $10/mo all-you-can-eat streaming services.
Hard to argue against it when you get memory holed by playlist entry removals by a cloud service. Much easier living having everything at `.config/mpd/playlists` with git history.
Did everyone forget about soulseek? It's still very much alive, been using it for years.
I still use it, easiest way to download music these days.