I remember downloading a copy of King Missile’s Detachable Penis incorrectly credited to The Flaming Lips. Like … I must’ve known it wasn’t them, but it sat on my Flaming Lips playlist for years and I just assumed it was something from their earlier, weirder 80’s days.
I remember talking about this on a message board once before and like 3 other people chimed in with this exact same song, apparently it was a bit of a thing. Probably just one person’s mistake, but the internet felt a lot smaller back then and it’s not surprising it would’ve propagated like that.
Some of my favorite music today, is odd stuff I found on Napster. Got me into sea chanties
Ngl, once I had stable internet access, and the ability to burn discs, I went full pirate.
I methodically downloaded every album I could never afford, copies of the ones I bought, and then started discovering new artists (many of whom I eventually bought stuff of).
Once I got an iPod, I was happy as a pig in slops. What could be better than carrying ten times the music that would fit in my biggest realistically portable cd carrier? And it was pocket size!
Man this makes me nostalgic for the old internet… Is it the song you want or is it something very different? Or does it have some hidden virus? You won’t know until tomorrow because dial up takes forever!
I know I’m in the wrong place to say this but, I don’t even know how to do that anymore. Spotify spoiled me. Now it’s hot garbage. I should’ve never given up owning my media.
Go back to your roots. It all works still. Soulseek, edonkey, torrents, IRC stilll has xdcc, and of course lots of direct download.
There are more programs than ever before to help you host your own music easily.
Where does one source stuff safely these days? I say that like limewire and kazaa was safe 🤣 shit was the wild west.
Try Bandcamp as well for nonpiracy options. Buy and download FLAC albums from the artists themselves. No DRM
I do like paying a good artist for their hard work!
Bandcamp is great. I buy albums on Bandcamp when I can. Too many artists are not on there though, or only have older albums available.
I use qobuz for stuff that is not on bandcamp, big enough to be part of standard distribution, but also let’s you buy and download lossless.
Soulseek is the best place for music outside of private trackers imo
Thank you
What a great read. I was going to try the what.cd interview one day but never got there. Now I wish I had just to experience what it must have been.
We still have redacted
Right! I totally forgot it existed.
I went from Oinks to Waffles.fm and it lasted a while. We had a lot of What.cd peeps there too if I recall correctly.
Another one I miss is turntable.fm, was great to work with that in the background, and I definitely discovered new stuff from the human curators that were DJing there.
Oh damn! I forgot about waffles.fm. also a great one.
Have you looked at soulseek/slskd (docker soulseek client intended to be used with the *arr stack)?
I have those bookmarked to dig in to further, but my understanding is Soulseek is more of a modern day Napster/Kazaa/Morpheus/Limewire. As the other poster mentions, the community around What.CD was a huge part of what made it special.
Soulseek is great and I always recommend trying it, but it still can’t compete with what.CD. We really lost the library of alexandria there. Not just because of the content, but also the community that formed around it.
Now we have Orpheus and Redacted, which are still pretty good music trackers. But to this day they still haven’t reached what what.CD was.
We really lost the library of alexandria there. Not just because of the content, but also the community that formed around it.
Hasn’t Discogs replaced the database (and community) part, or I’m missing something?
Amazing article, just super cool. Somehow I never knew that site.
Thanks for that.
So good!! It is enjoyable. People just have No idea nowadays.
