Man, I miss what.cd, not just for the content but for the obsessive users they had and the collections they made. Want all albums with a shoe as the cover? They have a collection for that. Want good music to start a journey into classical music in the 1800s? They have a collection for that. I mostly used it to discover great music, and the void that what.cd left has yet to be filled for me.
You can join one of the successor trackers. Though, I expect them to be taken down in turn when they become more well-known.
The centralized private tracker model has a fatal flaw in that it's too easy to take down and all the work/hours people put in in curating and creating metadata ultimately wasted.
There are alternative models where the metadata is distributed but so far nothing has really caught on.
Laughable to compare the obsessive curation of music on what.cd with any of those platforms, not to mention the fidelity and the vast range, far exceeding what’s available on the other platforms.
It's not so much because of the pirating that this service was successful, it's because of the dedicated userbase it held.
If something like what.cd integrated with something like Spotify- a legitimate way of accessing lots of music- say "here's a button to stream" somewhere on the site, it would probably be successful.
Mind you, one of the other reasons that these sorts of things with torrent or whatever backends get so popular is because there isn't a particular gatekeeper that can decide what can and can't be on the platform [1.] Destroying and damaging the effort of people who help your platform on their spare time tends to garner ill will.
I would pay for what.cd. In fact, I did pay. I think I donated about €200 at some point.
The entire experience of what.cd was just amazing, and services like Spotify are lacking a lot. The situation is better than a few years ago, but still very far from perfect.
Yes. But they are nowhere close to the ways you could discover with it.
Spotify's playlists doesn't even compare.
>Oh kay. More like you just liked stealing from creative professionals.
Ofc.
In fact, there are studies that show that piracy helps the industry. And I bet the biggest winners are the creators themselves, as they are the ones that profit the most from exposure. Musicians get more more from concerts than albuns sales.
There's a site that is basically oink 3. Don't forget that what itself was a successor of oink. Not sure if it's against the rules to name it. It seems much harder to get an invite to it than it was for the previous 2 though.
I tried to get an invite for one of them using the "IRC interview", and I was berated for not having "studied enough" because I didn't know the detail of some pedantic rule (I think it was about some detail on which format trumps which) and I explained something else in slightly different words.
The entire thing was super-pedantic and super-silly, and a massive turn-off for that community (I didn't try again). As far as I'm concerned there is no good alternative to what.cd.
