alt Hacker NewsTrue but What.cd had a tremendous amount of notable music not available on Spotify though because it was also sourced from cds, bootlegs, vinyl, tape etc whereas Spotify only includes music explicitly licensed for streaming.
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Yes. RIP a ton of very rare material. What.cd has a special place in my heart.
Yeah, it was a great place. I have a paid Spotify account but finally got an ancient hard drive onto my network for all sorts of stuff Spotify doesn’t or can’t have (e.g., Coldcut: 70 Minutes of Madness).
Which also means almost always limited to the latest, almost always crappy (or blind to the original ambiance) remaster! One of the main reasons why I don't bother with streaming, really.
(And because they lack much obscure stuff and I don't like being dependent on the Internet and a renter's whims for something as essential as music, I guess)
This is true and a category of music that got hit notably hard was live recordings. What had a wide array of live recordings made by sound engineers straight from the mixer. This is something that you simply cannot find now unless you maybe know a guy.