When our American exchange student showed her iPod with 300 songs that she had _BOUGHT_ my friend almost fainted. We couldn't believe it. We all had 10 000+ songs pirated.
In ~2009 everyone in Sweden pirated music. Using The Pirate Bay was considered mainstream and the cool kids in my high school were using more sophisticated sites. We thought Spotify was interesting because of the streaming. It was also free back then as there were no ads yet. No one even knew what IP rights were.
I was burning CDs for cash in my American High School before iPods. Once mp3 players with enough storage came out we started using those then iPods.
This was early 2000s and almost all kids using computers were downloading mp3s from Napster and Limewire. Once torrents came out I think the bar was higher for downloading tunes but music streaming services started to come out. Even before that lots of folks could copy their CDs and upload them to iTunes.
In terms of the computer literacy hierarchy you had people who were ripping FLAC files of whole artist discographies, then you had people going on piratebay for mp3, then you had people using “freeyoutubedownloader” type websites to get crummy mp3 files from youtube, then way at the very bottom of the totem pole, you had people asking mom for the credit card to buy songs at 99cents a pop.
I didn't trust Pirate Bay for mp3s or albums because of the rumors of people getting csam, and even if I trusted it, I was downloading at school so I couldn't get away with installing a torrent software (although it was 2010-2011, and I was using opera 11 with built in torrenting software ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). The school would let us install other browsers and music players since they used an app blacklist not a whitelist. My friends and di would also use the PortableApps toolset to install unapproved apps like Quake 3 and networked chat software to our flashdrives and run them from there.
I used a Zune and synced all my music at school as a guest device, and there was no way for me to rip dicsographies to flac and had no hardware to play them.
The main way I got all my files back then, that you haven't listed here, was by googling the name of the album or song I wanted followed by either .zip or .mp3 and then the words mediafire, megaupload, or beemp3. "[album name].zip mediafire" this was when googles search bar features still worked and exposed most of the raw index (100s of result pages. Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle)
Only if I couldn't find it that way would I then resort to using "N°1 Free online Video Converter" onlinevideoconverter.com to rip a song from YouTube. That was usually reserved for meme songs like covers, the Ultimate showdown, Epic Rap Battles, and stuff like the Bedroom Intruder autotune and other Gregory Brothers viral hits.
My golden child older brother who was a way bigger intellectual (not technological) nerd than me was the one who begged for the credit card to buy songs once napster shut down. He wouldn't always buy from iTunes, sometimes he would "save money" by buying them for pennies on the dollar (like 20 rubles) from a Russian piracy site that purported to pay the artists, as though that gave him the moral high ground over my piracy, when it was obvious there was no way that was happening.
You had it easy. The internet was not able to handle video when we were doing this and audio streaming sites didn’t exist. You had Napster/Limewire, sketchy websites, and power users were still on usenet. The Scene was pretty popular and if you knew where to look you could find whatever.
Ripping from YouTube sounds awesome compared to people sharing their whole hard drive over Napster/Limewire/Kazam. There were military documents for c130, F22, you name it, there where whole businesses around finding military docs on file sharing programs and getting money by reporting them.
In ~2009 everyone in Sweden pirated music. Using The Pirate Bay was considered mainstream and the cool kids in my high school were using more sophisticated sites. We thought Spotify was interesting because of the streaming. It was also free back then as there were no ads yet. No one even knew what IP rights were.
reply