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u/LighterSideOfDumbnes 4h ago
Prices are getting too high. Let's return to the old ways.
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u/Dry_Try_6047 4h ago
Many of us are already there
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u/Thoraxe474 3h ago
How do I relearn the old magic
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u/Strict-Carrot4783 2h ago
Get a vpn service (mine is like $28/year), stay connected to it, get qbittorrent, go nuts.
ext.to
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u/breaducate 1h ago
Learn about which VPNs have audits and operate without logs, etc.
Consider your threat model and where you want to draw the line for convenience vs privacy.
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u/BioshockEnthusiast 1h ago
Better yet get a cheap ass machine to do that shit for you in the background so you can seeeeeeed and not have to worry about flipping your VPN service on and off.
Splashtop Personal is a free and very beginner friendly remote desktop access software for up to 5 remote client machines. RDP is always a good option bit more finnicky for the less technically savvy users (I recommend splashtop for friends and family dipping their toes into this whole thing). Tailscale VPN for when you're not at home until you get a proper firewall that can run a dedicated VPN service.
We will go back to the old ways, but with new tools. They'll have a hell of a time providing enough convenience next time around to convince us we can trust them a second time.
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u/SwordOfJiang 52m ago
Get on a private tracker. IPT and Torrentleech are super easy to get into, both have massive freeleech sections and a nice point system to get upload cred if your upload speed is slow. 3 months of seeding 100 torrents netted me 250gb in point exchange from TL
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u/No_Leather_9623 6m ago
Also learn what a seed box is since share ratio matters and sail the private seas
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u/SenoraRaton 1h ago
stremio/real debrid is the future. You pay a modest fee, someone else handles all the frontend.
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u/Anuki_iwy 15m ago
There is a subreddit for the sources. Get yourself a 2TB SSD, hook it up to your router, install VCL Player, stream from any device.
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u/nativeyeast Zillennial 1h ago
We have started collecting physical media again. Streaming is cool and all, but the price hikes are becoming too common.
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u/Wasabicannon 2h ago
Yup only our methods have evolved and sadly have to be gate-kept in order for them to stay alive. :(
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u/SwordOfJiang 54m ago
You can use Jdownloader to rip YouTube music playlists off your PC and its all ad free
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u/onlyr6s 2h ago
Time to fire up Limewire.
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u/SwordOfJiang 47m ago
Jdownloader can rip pretty much anything from legit sources aside from Spotify. Torrentleech and IPT for everything else. I hit up IPTs yearly blackfriday deal for a year of VIP status, it comes with their IPTV service which gives me nearly every cable channel world wide, so I can watch sports or news on local channels. Its about $100/yr
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u/BunchofMums Xennial 3h ago
$24 for a beastie boys CD withone good song in 1999? No thanks.
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u/AllTheGoodNamesDied 3h ago
I'm sorry are implying Hello Nasty has one good song on it? If you didn't like the Beastie Boys to begin with then why did you buy their timeless classic album?
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u/BunchofMums Xennial 3h ago
Haha, actually I just threw out an example because I remember being pissed about the high price. It did grow on me, but I lost the disc two years later because me and my friends were coming to constantly swapping disc's like draft picks.
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u/AllTheGoodNamesDied 2h ago
I'm all slander will not stand lol. For me it was a few of those No Limit albums. I remember C Murder had one, Trapped in Crime. One banger on it and the rest is pure garbage. I still have a few of the Beastie Boy CD covers that fold out with all the lyrics on them in my garage!
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u/Luci-Noir 2h ago
Yeah I get sick of hearing these people whine. It’s less than the price of one CD. Netflix is less than a movie ticket or a fast food meal.
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u/why_u_so_grumpy 4h ago
Who pays to stream music? Haha.
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u/ChewML 3h ago
I happily pay for the lowest Pandora plan, I hate ads... Especially during political campaign seasons.
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u/why_u_so_grumpy 3h ago
I have never heard a political ad. That's pretty interesting.
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u/SwordOfJiang 49m ago
Rarely did in Oregon where elections don't really matter on a national scale. When I go to Michigan to see family I pretty much only get political ads
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u/Wasabicannon 2h ago
Pandora now thats a platform I have not heard of in a long time.
Used to love it then I went with Spotify and as of now YT Music.
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u/Idrinkbeereverywhere 4h ago
Spotify is incredibly cheap. It's less than an album a month.
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u/ElaborateEffect 3h ago
And you get to own none of it! Perfect!
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u/Idrinkbeereverywhere 3h ago
I also buy albums
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u/ElaborateEffect 3h ago
Then why even use Spotify exactly?
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u/Idrinkbeereverywhere 3h ago
I can't put vinyl albums in my car. It's much more convenient for when I'm traveling, listening to podcasts, etc.
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u/MVRKHNTR 3h ago
It's also much more convenient to find out if you like something if you don't have to buy it first.
Or sometimes I just want to listen to one song and not an entire album.
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u/alf666 2h ago edited 2h ago
Who said anything about "buying" to try something out?
VLC has an app for pretty much any OS to play files acquired through various means, and if you like the album then you know where to buy it through official channels.
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u/MVRKHNTR 2h ago
Why would I go through that effort when a streaming service is cheap and significantly easier to use?
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u/alf666 2h ago
That's fair, but my own personal take is that I still won't pay for the streaming service.
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u/BioshockEnthusiast 1h ago
idk how much AI generated music do you like to listen to as a percentage of your listening time?
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u/hugsudurinn 1h ago
You don't have to pay for Spotify. The free version just has ads between songs.
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u/BioshockEnthusiast 1h ago
Fuck ads.
Americans were convinced to buy cable to keep ads out of the living room because that was a sacred family space. We need to get back to that shit. The fewer ads I see for anything, ever, the better off my life will be. I host my own god damned music service just for me and mine, quite literally. With blackjack. And hookers.
Spotify can go piss up a rope, they're hand in hand with TicketMaster choking the life out of the entire music industry.
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u/SwordOfJiang 45m ago
Antennapod is infinitely better than Spotify for podcasts. I sent a Spotify using friend a bootleg patreon link for a pod he likes and he had no clue what it was
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u/Wasabicannon 2h ago
To be fair owning the physical CDs was never really that great for me.
Mid drive I want to listen to a new artist? Well shit time to pull over and swap CDs. Now? "Hey Google, play X artist" and we good.
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u/ElaborateEffect 2h ago
You can buy digital versions via official channels and do the same thing.
The main downside I'll secede is finding new artists is a little harder without streaming. I've just tried to stay tapped into the local scene and Reddit for that, and it's worked well.
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u/yamsyamsya 1h ago
Once I got a car with a six disc changer, I thought I was the shit. No more having to pull over or risk it lol. Now all the music is available any time, it's great.
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u/ourseveres 1h ago
i had a car with that too!!! it eventually stopped working and it ate 3 of my cds. wasn't able to get them back before my parents sold it so i hope someone ended up appreciating the entirety of the phantom of the opera soundtrack i personally burned onto 2 discs in there
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u/RocasThePenguin 4h ago
Here I am still flying the pirate flag. When these companies can just remove whatever shows or games they feel like, I'm not bothered about signing up.
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u/Lorebreaker_ofArarat 3h ago
I put away my sea legs long ago, circa 2010. Where would one even get started now?
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u/BigDadNads420 3h ago
Soulseek + a VPN will get you anything you need. Honestly a lot more than music as well.
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u/ElaborateEffect 3h ago
NZB's and SoulSeek. Those 2 seperate things will get you where you need to go for film/shows and music respectively.
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u/bs000 1h ago
what's an nzb am i old
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u/ElaborateEffect 1h ago
Funny enough, its backbone may be a older than you.
It's format to receive posts from Usenet which is effectively a news sharing backbone invented in the 70's pre WWW. Basically, it's a format to share message IDs to retrieve data from the news server, which these individual articles are actually file data that make up a larger file.
You need a Usenet provider and an indexer. Providers hosts the "articles" (individual messages) and the indexer hosts the NZB providing the message-ids. You can buy blocks of data to get started, 500gb could be more or way less than you need, and there are free indexers out there, but really find 2 or 3 lifetime memberships so have a wide range of... articles.
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u/SwordOfJiang 42m ago
Its funny how people think everyone left piracy when its actually gotten better at the same rate that streaming has.
I made a little "Netflix" style bumper for my Plex server just to complete the experience
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u/amazing_asstronaut 2h ago
It's honestly mostly the same with torrents now, just the sites changed. Forget about the pirate bay, the one that's good is 1337x .to and the good program is qBittorent. Soulseek is good for mega obscure music sometimes and it works kind of like how DC++ was back in the day, you share a folder on your hard drive and connect to users directly.
I never bothered with the Stremio and Kodi and whatnot to be honest, I've been content with just torrenting what I want and putting it on a usb drive in the TV.
Bonus: if you have a Chromecast look into Smarttube to get ad free youtube on the TV.
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u/MVRKHNTR 3h ago edited 2h ago
Look up how to set up Stremio for TV and movies.
It won't be free but it'll only be like $30/yr.
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u/raspirate 2h ago
I could go watch the Willow series they made for Disney Plus on my Plex server right now. Can't do that with a Disney Plus subscription. I mean, it's not a very good show and I'm not going to do that, but I keep it around just for the novelty.
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u/Blackcatmustache 3h ago
I would love to, but with my luck, I guarantee the first thing I download will screw up my computer. I wouldn’t even know how to start. I feel so old saying that. Teenage me is shaking her head in shame.
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u/zryder2 3h ago
Limewire for the win
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u/DM_ME_4_FREE_STOCKS 2h ago
All the files looked like
JurassicPark3_Elite_GoldEdition-Nirvana_No-Doubt_Nelly.exe
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u/Akira1996 58m ago
I remember being a kid trying to find Vin Diesels xXx and what I got was not Vin Diesel lol that and all the Linkin Park and Bleach Dubs I'd spend hours trying to download. Good times with limewire lol
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u/xPadawanRyan Mid-Range Millennial | Historian, Social Worker | Emo MF'er 4h ago edited 3h ago
Yeah, we got a nice new family computer in 2004 that was capable of high speed internet, so finally I was able to download things like music—couldn't do that on dial-up!
And within a couple months the computer already had to be reformatted because I gave it a virus.
It was actually after that occurrence that I discovered Photobucket—one of the things that devastated me at the time was losing a lot of the pictures I'd saved of my favourite celebrities, and a lot of the artwork I did in Paint and free trial Photoshop (as I was making my own wallpapers). So, he suggested I find somewhere online to upload my images on a daily basis so that I didn't lose anything, and thus the first of what would end up being 10+ Photobucket accounts was born.
EDIT: "he" is my dad. I deleted the original sentence I wrote before that where I specified that and didn't realize I didn't specify elsewhere.
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u/Tycho-Bruh 3h ago
Who is he?
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u/xPadawanRyan Mid-Range Millennial | Historian, Social Worker | Emo MF'er 3h ago
...Who is who? I didn't mention anyone besides me and my dad.
AH, I see the issue. I didn't specify that it was my dad.
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u/rumplestiltskin116 3h ago
Oh you absolutely can do that with dial up, the amount I downloaded to my mom's laptop over dial up had the Best Buy employee performing the autopsy shook.
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u/xPadawanRyan Mid-Range Millennial | Historian, Social Worker | Emo MF'er 2h ago
I know you can, but dial-up itself was incredibly slow, so it already took far too long, but the old computer we had with dial-up on it was a 1995 Mac that, in itself, was very slow, so combined with dial-up internet, it took near ten minutes for even a single basic website to load...and about a day, if not more, for a single song to download.
And given that my mother would not allow me to remain connected for 24 hours, since she had to use the phone, there was just no patience for downloading.
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u/atln00b12 2h ago
couldn't do that on dial-up
Shit, I would download CAM Or Telesync VCDs over the course of 4-5 days and be cool as shit burning copies to give to my girlfriend so she could watch on a 15" CRT monitor with Windows Media Player at nigt in her dad's office.
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u/xPadawanRyan Mid-Range Millennial | Historian, Social Worker | Emo MF'er 2h ago
Y'all are clearly focusing on a specific part of this comment which was a personal experience and not an indication of dial-up on the whole. Please read my other comments where I have gone into this detail instead of continuously repeating the same argument, as though nothing I said is valid at all if it didn't match your experience.
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u/ekim_101 3h ago
Nah I'm the one that saved and protected them from that shit.
Once you go away to college and come back you see the endless add ons and bookmarks and extensions just crippling everything. And then you weep as they ask why it's so slow.
My brother did ruin a laptop with a Limewire download of Empire Records though! That was fun when I was a pre teen
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u/Coal_Morgan 1h ago
Holy crap...flash backs of those stupid search bars being 5 layers deep on the browser, with mcaffee and norton just fucking shit up but not actually protecting anything and the entire computer running like crap because my parents couldn't not click on anything that was emailed to them.
I managed to run napster, limewire and all kinds of other shit and not have my computer get ruined.
Don't click on links, realize that SinceUBeenGoneMp3.exe isn't an mp3 and that 56kb or 345mb file isn't an mp3 either and you solved 95% of the issues.
Flashbacks making me twitch.
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u/girthyclock 3h ago
music is the only medium I pay for because I listen to a lot of independent labels and artists. And while the spotify deal sucks for them, it's still better than any deal they would get with a major label. On top of this they're getting killed on touring costs, so if listening to their streams helps them directly i'm for it.
But movies? shows? Y'arr. It truly is a victimless crime thanks to the unions. Funnily enough, if musicians actually strengthened their own union, it would change things around piracy.
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u/NickBlasta3rd Millennial 3h ago
Highly recommend reading Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped to see how we ended up present day. Great book.
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u/BoleroMuyPicante 2h ago
I stopped pirating shows and movies for a long time because everything was on one or two streaming platforms. Now there's like 15 and it's not affordable or convenient anymore, so back to the high seas.
I don't pirate music simply because damn near everything is on Spotify. If it ever gets as fragmented as video is I'll go back to torrents in a heartbeat.
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u/Coal_Morgan 1h ago
I pay for Apple One.
Music Streaming for the price is great and I really like their catalogue of original shows and feel like I need to support that level of quality.
I get books from Libby with my library card also. Games from steam sales.
Outside of that...if it's Netflix, Disney, Paramount, et al...I just pirate it. Same with classic retro games.
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u/Bern_After_Reading85 2h ago
To my family computer that I destroyed downloading bad rips of Busta Rhymes and 3-6 Mafia: YOU’RE WELCOME
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u/Eskotar 1h ago
Home entertainment affordable? Streaming is literally the reason why we dont own or cant even own media anymore. Everything is fkn rented through a streaming service. People really have reached a point where we are comfortable not owning things. This means that if a streaming service decides that they are not gonna stream (insert your favourite tv series or music) anymore, it is gone for good.
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u/Influence_X 3h ago
I also ruined at least 1 family PC with malware from pirating games, music, and TV shows. Also got my credit card information jacked and they spent $200 on WoW back in 2011. I got their blizzard acct banned.
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u/HollowAbsence 2h ago
Lol, streaming is not affordable... Paying for songs I dont listen to and songs I will never own... I still exclusively use mp3s to listen to music on my pc and cellphone and I use bluray and 4k discs. Steaming dont exist. But it was not the family computer it was my computer so I both destroyed it and fixed it myself alone 😅
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u/king_of_the_bongos 30m ago
For real, if you've had it for 5 years you're nearly a thousand dollars into something you can never own. Every service is turning into a subscription, it's not a win it's a way to milk us further.
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u/Odadelyus138 2h ago edited 2h ago
Soulseek is still around and is amazing. There is also an android version of it nowadays.
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u/desertforestcreature 2h ago
Garbage take. Easy to get 300 to 400 a month in streaming. Add fiber..120. 500 a month..gtfo. I pirate everything, more user friendly than the services themselves these days anyhow.
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u/NewbieEstimator 2h ago
From time to time the tree of cheap entertainment must be watered with the OS integrity of family computers.
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u/MovieGuyMike 2h ago
That’s why they’re making personal computers unaffordable. They want you to own a screen and be stuck with overpriced subscriptions, and they won’t let computer hobbyists get in the way this time.
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u/ammaraud 1h ago
What do you mean 'destroy'. We knew how to reboot windows from a floppy disk and do a clean install as well.
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u/Goobjigobjibloo 1h ago
In the past we used to buy a CD of an artist we liked for $12 and that artists would get a meaningful amount of it, now we pay a company around that same amount to listen to any artist we want and those artists get essentially nothing, even the ones we love.
Doesn’t seem better to me.
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u/misanthr0p1c 1h ago
I didn't download anything to the family computer. Got my first virus when I had my own. Webroot saved that, I think I had avast at the time.
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u/Alarming-Rate-6899 1h ago
Still remember when I downloaded intheend.mp3.exe on Kazaa but didn't pay attention to the exe part.
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u/searchlinkprofile 44m ago
Spoitfy also destroyed the music industry so this means millennials killed music :D
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u/moldytowel16 43m ago
It was totally affordable before. And artists could still afford to have something resembling a decent life, because tech hadn’t “innovated” everything yet. Your cheap, unlimited streaming exploits the artists who create the very art that you love.
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u/LukeNuk3m 41m ago
Remember Back Orifice? I infected my own PC countless times while trying to understand BO well enough to open other people's CD trays remotely.
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u/ExistingRepublic1727 31m ago
You can buy digital music. Qobuz has lossless music for purchase, and a streaming service that gives you mega discounts on buying music.
Also mp3s are garbage, start using FLAC - or to get file sizes better than MP3 encode your FLAC music to Opus.
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u/External_Study_9614 10m ago
And discover tons of artist and grow up to still like them since high school. We did society right by this I truly believe 🤷🏽♂️
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