
The Man Who Broke the Music Business - donohoe
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-man-who-broke-the-music-business
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joshstrange
If The Scene interests you then you may want to check out
[http://www.welcometothescene.com/](http://www.welcometothescene.com/)

It's an internet-TV show the follows a group (not a documentary, it's all
staged) that releases movies. The first "season" was very good and I highly
recommend it. The second has yet to really interest me. I watched a few
episodes but it's different from the first.

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justinpaulson
This reminds me of using oth.net to browse ftps for tracks in late 1990s. I
used to burn custom mixes for friends in high school back then before napster
exploded and everyone had a burner. On a 28.8 or even 56k connection it was an
amazingly tedious process to download tracks from ftps. It is pretty insane
how you can download an entire discography today in the amount of time it took
to download some single tracks back then. oth.net is still active today it
looks like, crazy.

~~~
pageld
I made some pretty good beer money running one of those FTP sites by making
people download Bonzai buddy for a password. I feel a bit bad for advancing
that purple ape, but at least I could increase my sysadmin skills on something
that didn't matter.

~~~
pxlpshr
+1. I was running an FTP server on one of the few multi-honed T3 connections
(late 90's) in our city. OTH sent me a ton of traffic, which also included
RIAA scouts. I almost lost my job after they sent a C&D to our IT department;
I was ~16 years old at the time and was forgiven.

~~~
jonah
Be glad that was 20 years ago. If you did it today, you'd have a felony...

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bluedino
I remember seeing people at flea markets selling bootleg compact discs. They'd
rent a booth and have boxes and boxes of them in those fluorescent colored
plastic holders, the ones you could buy in 500 packs at Sam's Club or Egghead.
Some of them even printed out fake covers and labels on inkjet printers, heck
they would be doing it in between customers.

I couldn't figure out why the cops never came and shut them down. Same goes
for the gas stations or convenience stores that sold obviously bootlegged
movies for $3 on the check-out counter.

Now I want to read an article on Adil R. Cassim, the guy behind that whole
ring.

~~~
Nursie
In some parts of the world (Singapore, Malaysia are places I have seen) there
are shops in malls that openly sell copies of stuff. In fact when I first
bought a PS3 and went looking for games for it in Singapore I was frequently
turned away with "Oh, you want originals? We don't do that here".

~~~
Gigablah
You probably won't find a lot of places like that in Singapore anymore.
They've really cleaned up over the past 10 years.

~~~
Nursie
Huh, OK. I guess it probably was about 9 years ago now. How time flies!

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bluedino
This was a pretty good article, I'd love to read one (as similar as it might
be) about warez crews.

~~~
joshstrange
If you liked this I'd check out
[http://www.welcometothescene.com/](http://www.welcometothescene.com/) The
first season is great, I never got into the second season. It's an interesting
format for a show, most all text with just some music in the background but I
quite enjoyed it.

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aikah
> After the trial, Glover began to regret his decision to testify and to plead
> guilty.

He shouldn't have taken the deal, I guess he is the only one who went to
prison, not even the guy he testified against went to jail.

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ssharp
It's hard to believe one person was able to successfully leak so much
material. I got into album leaks in the early-mid 2000's. Even if I would end
up buying the album anyway, that first listen of the leaked album was awesome.

~~~
mattmanser
And all he got was 3 months.

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tempodox
_...if the MP3 was just as good, why bother with the CD..._

The thing is, MP3 _isn't_ “just as good”. A rendering in lossless compression
from a CD still sounds different than a 320 kBPS MP3. Which is why I just
can't get over the iTunesStore selling sound in 256 kBPS. Much too bad. Amazon
does 320 kBPS, but it's still not good enough.

~~~
yason
For the majority of people, mp3s seem to be "just as good" enough.

I remember some low-bitrate songs encoded with some very early encoder where
you could hear a difference. Not necessarily "the" difference but "a"
difference. After a couple of years the worst encoder anyone could find was
better already and since 192kbps bitrates mp3s were 99.999% there.

I'm sure that a trained ear can hear differences between 256kbps vs. 320kbps
in a special studio with high-end audiocards, amplifiers and speakers but
99.999% of all people don't and they don't own the equipment either.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
The conventional wisdom is just that - MP3s don't sound any different than
their CD counterpart, but we all know that they don't have the same degree of
fidelity to the original mastered audio files. While it is true that most
cannot detect the differences between MP3 (and other lossy formats) and PCM
(lossless) audio, this is beginning to change as consumers become used to a
higher quality of sound delivery than before. The popularity of Beats
headphones, for instance, meant that hip hop producers could no longer just
push the limiter until the sub bass begins to sound farty - their fans were
all equipped to hear the differences now.

Vinyl playback, in the pre-CD days, had consumers interested in a whole
different kind of audio fidelity. The noises in the record were largely
ignored, and nobody tried to get past them. Now, all listeners notice the
sound of a vinyl record immediately, and people either love it or hate it.

The point I'm making here is that audio fidelity and quality are separate
topics, but while fidelity is an objective measurement of audio, quality is a
subjective one, and it shifts with the culture of the day. The problem with
the MP3 and other lossy audio formats is that they are taken to be the same as
their lossless origins. Consumers will catch up to the decay that MP3 codecs
cause and feel the same way about them that a millennial feels about VHS
tapes. It may take a few years, or even decades, to arrive there, though.

~~~
teh_klev
_> The popularity of Beats headphones, for instance, meant that hip hop
producers could no longer just push the limiter until the sub bass begins to
sound farty - their fans were all equipped to hear the differences now._

I think you're being overly charitable about how well Beats perform.

~~~
nsxwolf
They're better than earbuds. The iPod brought forth a decade where virtually
everyone's only headphone experience was earbuds.

~~~
drostie
That's probably the weakest compliment that I've heard for a set of headphones
ever. I have something like 7 pairs of earbuds and I pine for the bass that I
remember from my crummy Philips HS820 (foldable neckband) headphones.

For some reason the only place to get good earbuds is from someone who is
selling something else: Samsung's in-ear earbuds sold with Galaxy devices and
Apple's earbuds are both somewhere between OK and pretty good.

~~~
wishinghand
>For some reason the only place to get good earbuds is from someone who is
selling something else

Or you buy quality stand-alones from Shure, Sennheiser, Beyer Dynamic, or Sony
(and many more probably)? I always throw into my e-waste bin the Apple earbuds
since they're both really low quality. The Shure SE215s are so much better
than any bundled earbuds it's barely an opinion.

~~~
tempodox
I can confirm that the Beyerdynamic DX160 iE are indeed excellent for their
price.

