The better comparison with Spotify is that it’s a mafia that you pay $11 / month for the rest of your life and they give you a bunch of free music but if you ever stop paying, they’ll bust into your house and take it all away.
Vs. spending $10 for an album you might not like but you can sell it, give it to a friend, or put it in storage for 10 years until you find it during a move and realize your tastes changed and now this album fucking rocks (happened to me with a few things).
Oh and Bandcamp ftw. You can listen to most albums free for a few times and when you buy it, you own it forever w/o DRM - plus if you buy a hardcopy, you get a digital one free. I used to use Napster like that - as a shit quality preview of an album I might end up buying later.
Bandcamp just got purchased by a shit head company and is laying off staff…I’ve got 1500+ albums on bandcamp it’s fucking great and about to be fucked.
Okay, but they give you DRM free downloads. If EPIC kills them, you still own every album as long as you download it. I’ll be sad if Bandcamp dies, but I can still play all music I got from it. That’s the way it should be.
Oh I am doing just that, it is going to be a pain in the ass, but I am going to download the full library in FLAC format. And it not Epic anymore is Songster or something like that.
You would rarely buy random cd’s or whatnot. You would hear one or 2 songs on the radio, or from a friend, or you already loved the artist. You’d loan it from the library, or spend 30 min listening to it in the store.
Then you would come home and set it on repeat for weeks. Even the tracks on the CD that were less good, you would appreciate.
I definitely preferred how much I cared for the music back then a lot more. Even pre-Napster.
I didn’t used internet in the 1990s. But I used it in the early 2000s and Kazaa was my music goldmine, even when I downloaded something I was looking for.
Reminds me of boxed software, too. You check the compatibility, the features that included one must-have new feature. Buy it and discover what vaporware is. It started me on the ethics of pirating, finding out if it actually works, and then, and only then, buying a real copy. I donate to developers on Linux, now.
I mean, it really only started to take off with eDonkey. napster was still very slow and so much malware disguised as mp3 files.
You didn’t even have to thing about storage solutions. Even if i had my ISDN Connection bundled ( no phone free for calla then ), the speed was max 128 Kbps.
Sorry, i suddenly remembered these details, from a long long time ago.
50% were laid off. This after Songtradr had commited to keep the Bandcamp experience the same.
The union was for nothing. Epic just sold, before any agreement wss made and again a few made a lot, while employees must endure whatever comes.
This fucking sucks big time.
The Internet as we knew it, is fading away and we just can hope that our privacy and an open internet are not only things we remember fondly, in a few years.
I just got to college in 2000 and had highspeed Napster. From there I found some sketch Russian site I could get music from for a few years in the early 2000s but there was also a huge used CD store in my college town with reasonable prices I used to frequent. Now days if I want to find a bunch of new music I dont know, Usenet for the win. But honestly most of the stuff I like is on bandcamp usually and I will go buy the bands I find on use net. My best discovery has been Brant Bjork (he played drums in Kyuss but makes chill ass rock) and PallBearer and Arkansas doom band that is pretty great. I have since purchased their catalogue on Vinyl, mostly on band camp because it is hard to find in stores.
In the 2000s i was always looking for music and found a Forum from Ukraine called FunkySouls that covered all new releases and was active until a few days after Russia invaded. There were some threads with excellent taste and i really miss those guys.
After i found that Moon Wiring Club was on Bandcamp, i took a look around and found a lot of good music. When i buy something, it’s usually from Bandcamp.
I saw Kyuss live a loong time ago, thanks for the tip. This made me think of Boris’ new EP “me when the when i”. They were always a tad too experimental for me to keep them on repeat. Their newest album though, is a very very smooth release - chill ass rock describes it perfectly.
I also stumbled on the label subsist on Bandcamp some time ago and have gotten almost all releases and eagerly waiting for new releases. Excellent raw electronics.
Oh, they weren’t mp3 files. Iirc it was stuff like darude-sandstorm-live-mp3.exe or eminem-without-me-mp3.exe.
It wasn’t Napster’s fault, ISDN at the time was what most people had. 1 internet + 1 phone line. You got online with max 68 Kbps. Bundling both lines got you 128 Kbps, then the phone line would be obviously busy giving you more speed, rendering the phone unusable.
Those were fun times in households with more than 1 member.
And that’s how I found death metal and grindcore… fucking 20 for a CD it better be full of insane and no lazy filler. At 200 BPM you literally cannot be lazy.
Conversely, you buy a CD from a band you’ve never heard of just because you like the album art or maybe even the title or the band name, and you find out it’s a god damn masterpiece from start to finish. This is how I discovered Audioslave almost 20 years ago and it’s the best $14 I ever spent. I still have the disc btw and it still plays perfectly.
Technically the one I bought on a whim back then was Out of Exile, which I would now consider the weakest of the three, but I liked it enough to seek out more.
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