Forget spaceships; I just want my music (opens in new tab)

The beautifully written but not much known Rune Blades Of Celi ebooks no longer can be purchased, as the small publisher is just gone. Of course, the ones I purchased could no longer be downloaded. But want something bigger? Fine. The Wheel Of Time (is that large enough for you?) Complete Edition I bought for over a hundred dollars also can't be donwloaded any more. (And to be more on topic, one of my favorite artists have disappeared from Bandcamp and so did my purchases. And Bandcamp is better in this than others.)

You can download all these from torrent trackers.

Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?

The thing that really worries me and which no one seems to be talking about is the region locking of localisation for streaming content.

For context - we're a Polish family living in the UK(like 2 million other Polish people). We have a small child who loves Disney films, and because he is normally exposed to English(and speaks it fluently) I'd like him to at least watch cartoons in Polish. But Disney region locks most(not all, but majority) of Polish localisation to Poland only. When we visit Poland I can watch all Disney content in Polish on my UK account without any issue - but when we're in the UK these localisation options disappear. So Disney clearly has those options but chooses not to offer them.

So right now, at least we can still buy DVDs or have those shipped over. But it's clear that Disney wants to stop distribution of physical media - as they've already done in some regions.

What then for multilingual families? Just "suck it up" and don't have access to content in my language, because I don't happen to currently live in Poland?

Yup. Sound right.

The time spent re-ripping my CD collection to FLAC, my DVD collection to MKV, etc, has been well spent. I can rapidly enough transcode from that to "Whatever I happen to need for where I'm listening to it," and our vehicles have quite the range of local music and audiobook content for road trips that doesn't rely on streaming anything.

You can get CDs for (usually) very little on eBay, same for DVDs, and I don't have to worry about the pissing matches between a corporate conglomerate that views me as "a wallet with eyeballs" and another one that views me as "eyeballs with a wallet" getting in the way.

Meanwhile, vinyl sales continue to skyrocket, and more and more people are interested in records, growing collections, refurbishing old equipment (both to produce and play records), etc. I expect these are rather heavily correlated, because in 50 years from now, nobody is going to be able to play any of the streaming "content" that flows around. "This is my grandparents favorite Spotify playlist" won't be a thing, but you can certainly go cruising through old photo albums, old record collections, etc.

I remain optimistic that we're in the starting phases of a rejection of the online [handwaves at everything digital consumer tech], and it's going to be aided greatly by stuff exactly like this. Profits and corporate pissing matches over "actually doing something people want to pay money for."

Google and Disney both seem to be demonstrating that once people lose trust in you, it's basically impossible to get it back. Nobody trusts a new Google product will last more than a year or two, which leads to it getting killed off for lack of use, and Disney/Pixar seem to have forgotten that the purpose of the entertainment industry is to "entertain the people who might want to see your movie." Other studios are doing fine, so there's clearly a demand, but Disney has been dropping an impressive string of box office bombs lately, because a lot of people no longer trust them.

Music is very important to me. So important that I never dared to trust streaming services. Not only do they require an internet connection (something that is not always available), but if the service experiences downtime, license changes, etc., that music is not available.

If I'm going to spend my money on music, I'm going to spend it on music in a form that isn't reliant on the ongoing operation of some service somewhere. I want to add it to my collection so I can actually listen to it anytime and anywhere.

Anyone else here also still using LogitechMediaServer (and iPeng) to stream their own music?

Such an old system (written in Perl), but still runs great!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_Media_Server https://github.com/Logitech/slimserver https://hub.docker.com/r/lmscommunity/logitechmediaserver

At least so far, Bandcamp has not changed after the sale (neither sale). You can still buy music, and try it out for multiple album streams before buying (unless the artist or label disable it, which is rare), and download as FLAC.

Granted, not always useful if what you want is from major labels, but still, keep in mind that there are options.

I buy mp3s so I will always have them. People think I am a crank- maybe so.

The difference with media today is that the control often stays in the hands of another party, often not the rights holder. I can accept that knowing that everything I buy I am just renting.

The thing that scares me is how a third party can make something effectively impossible to discover. In this generation that's done for profit. But you can imagine where that will lead when what everyone sees is curated in a way they aren't aware of.

There's like not one but multiple microgenres of music you could likely cobble together just out of working musicians' songs complaining about the music industry. In the modern world, probably the by-the-numbers majority of working artists in every medium can effectively self-publish to some degree or another, so as the intermediaries have grown more and more demanding and both creator- and consumer-hostile, they have also become less of a necessary evil for our ability to engage with the works creative people are putting out into the world. Piracy is the most natural and reasonable way to use current technology to consume media, and the massively successful propaganda campaigns to instill a folk belief that it's somehow wrong or doing harm are incredible, given how much quality of life for both the producers and consumers of the actual content is lost in the name of marginal gains in profitability and massive gains in control by intermediary conglomerates that are increasingly unnecessary. It is only by a combination of this mythology and the ever-tighter industry collusion with an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state to make laws to terrorize people who just want their music that this parasitic shape the industry has taken is surviving

To me, the notion that a transferrable market-monopoly ownership of intellectual rights to a creative work was ever about helping creators is the kind of ridiculous farce that people like economists can get away with because we've been trained to believe that fancy experts saying counterintuitive things about "incentives" must know something we don't, but even if you believe intellectual property has value, it is not of value for massive corporations to sit on a chokepoint between human beings and their access to their own cultural touchstones

The Chinese system of central libraries is better than copyright.

Imagine having every book ever written, for free, all your life.

Imagine authors and inventors being compensated twice what they are usually paid in the USA, while the corporate lawyers panhandle.

I know the lawyers would end up as party higher-ups still screwing us, but I can dream.

I'm considering some kind of combination of autoloader feeding either Exact Audio Copy (which isn't set up for them) or dbpoweramp (which apparently is set up for them) to get metadata, then I guess I will have to pirate or rebuy discs when the AccurateRip indicates that there's some damage to the disc.

I've avoided iTunes and its descendants due to all of the horror stories about destroyed music libraries and music "helpfully" replaced in error. Similarly, I haven't signed up for any streaming music since I have an el-cheapo plan and these services sound like they tell you what to listen to.

I think having somewhat weird tastes in music and being particular about it has some overlap with having to seek technical solutions which are also not-mainsteam. I am reminded of Pictures for Sad Children, wherein a character's musical preference is "Whatever is on the radio, played a reasonable volume." and realize I am at the other end of that spectrum.

I'm curious as to when exactly these takes are generally going to move from

"Please let me have the thing I want and reasonably should have"

to an open

"Eff it, the tech is here, I'm just taking copies now and you should too."

(not that I ought to support that sort of thing, since I am a lawyer and we have promulgated standards of professional behavior I shall tell all of you that that second thing is bad, very bad.)

I started Crossies to solve this problem. My plan was to store physical media for people, and give them remote access. When I heard about Murfie shutting down 4 years ago, I couldn't let it happen and had to get involved.

I'm passionate about media ownership. When people question what I'm doing, wonder why anybody would want CDs, or tell me I should just give up, I think about all the transient services and missing media. I'm in this for the long haul, and I'm not going to give up. Media ownership means something, and I'm fighting to make it a reality.

The other day I was listening to recorded live music on Internet Archive. One of the bands sounded like a lot of fun, so I looked them up online. And what do you know, they're touring and coming to my relatively small town in January. Bought two tickets for 70 bucks from the local venue so we could enjoy some live music. Maybe buy some T-shirts or CDs.

So well done, giving your live music away for free. Made you some money, and made me feel like we were doing it right for a change.

In a very strange way it's almost a return to the pre-VHS days (for video) and pre-vinyl days (for music). You could enjoy the content streamed to you over the airwaves but that was it.

Glad to see this pop up, its been a weirdly big struggle for me as a new-ish parent.

For a while my ancient CD collection and healthy ecosystem of local used vinyl / CD stores had us in a nice routine in conjunction with youtube-dl and my posse of old Sony voice memo usb mp3 players.

Then youtube-dl wasn't a thing anymore (maybe it is again?)...

Then we had to get a new car (a Tacoma)...

No CD player, no aux cable.

I had really bad early experiences with apple music and Spotify not having stuff I wanted. Unclear artist support reputations also (Im no expert there). But it all had heavy Enshittification vibes early on IMHO.

Anyway somehow in my exhausted dad mental state I've concluded that buying albums on iTunes like a maniac is at least worth a try before augmenting my car to have an aux cable and / or peripheral CD player. I held off buying albums on iTunes literally until 2 months ago. Very strange but maybe working.

Anyway curious what other folks are doing as far as listening to music. This article was spot on but I needed a Solutions section...

It seems that we've entered the rent-seeking phase of corporate capitalism.

Why spend any extra time, money, or energy making new products or services when you can instead make more money doing nothing but using your outsized political and economic power to coerce and extort consumers instead.

At this point it's impossible to see how any new merger or acquisition isn't just another step in the wrong direction, handing over yet more power to a small few.

At what point is a company too large to effectively serve the public interest? How can we turn this process around and redistribute the economic power of these gigantic corporations?

I have access to 2 or 3 streaming services plus Spotify, which I haven't used in a long time because bittorrent content is always better and faster. Just get the files and play them wherever you want, however you want.

> Enshittification has reached new heights, as Sony just decided to yoink over a thousand seasons—that's right, seasons, not episodes—of Discovery shows from the PlayStation Store.

> But they're not just removing them from the store.

> They're removing them from people's libraries.

That's called fraud. Why in the world are we not prosecuting it?

Capitalism responds to demand. We have to stop paying for convenience and start demanding better. Save your money from Streaming, purchase used and physical only. Force the market to adapt to you.

Torrent and terabytes of data on hard disk ftw!

I still use whatever they call the service where my ripped CDs get uploaded to my Apple Music library. I have quite a few albums physically that their library lacks and it's been nice to be able to listen to them in my car.

Over the last 3 to 4 years though more and more of my music living in the cloud has gotten corrupted, to the point that something like 1 in 10 songs is unlistenable. The source material in my main library still plays fine, nothing wrong with it, but play it on any other device it pops and skips.

Doing some googling, I don't seem to be alone in this. It's honestly infuriating and has me potentially searching for some other service.

i've posted this reply, but i will copy paste it again here:

you know, my default stance is pirating is the way. i don't give a shit who "owns" the media. if it's in my harddisk, it should not go away unless I delete it or the system (fs / hw / what have you) is kill. good thing I don't enjoy entertainment like movies or music. but in the small chance I like it, I'd go to the store, get the disk, rip it or just torrent it.

but bro! that's immoral and you will suffer in hell!

nah bro, we're already in hell.

bro! them popos will catch your ass and put you in jail!

nah bro, if they don't know, it's not illegal.

> as Sony just decided to yoink over a thousand seasons—that's right, seasons, not episodes—of Discovery shows from the PlayStation Store

Didn't realize Sony owned Discovery, oh wait they don't. So it's actually Discovery who's licensing caused Sony to be legally obligated to remove the shows.

Sucks if you bought it but yeah just like the games in your Steam library you never actually owned it, you merely licensed it.

The true anarchism to the enshittification of the music services would be to just sing or whistle the songs.

- Download mp3

- Play on VLC.

Not complicated.