alt Hacker NewsI think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown. It was the equivalent of vinyl crate digging without physical restrictions.
Additionally there was a lot of discourse about music and a lot of curated discovery mechanisms I sorely miss to this day. An algorithm is no replacement for the amount of time and care people put into the web of similar artists, playlists of recommendations and reviews. Despite it being piracy, music consumption through it felt more purposeful. It's introduced me to some of my all time favourite artists, which I've seen live and own records and merchandise of.
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> There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown.
Music licensing (in the US at least) is actually pretty nice for this (from the licensee perspective anyway). There are mechanical licenses which allow you to use music for many uses without contracting with the rightsholders and clearinghouses whose job is to determine where to send royalties. So you can use the music and send reporting and royalties to the clearing houses and you're done.
Of course, you may want to contract with the rightsholders if you don't like the terms of the mechanical license; maybe it costs too much, etc. If you're Spotify or similar and you have specific contracts for most of the music, and have to pay mechanical license rates for the tail, it might make sense to do so in order to boast of a larger catalog.
I’m still using the “successor” to what.cd and I usually discover artists through random lists, “related artists”, among other things on the platform.
One interesting way of discovering artists is finding an artist that I already like on a compilation CD, and then seeing what else is on the CD.
Yeah, What.CD had a bunch of the local Brisbane post-rock bands from the 00s on there which was amazing to me. I at least have copies of a lot of their records!
email me please
> I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there
So there was a clever trick that smaller artists did on what.cd: put up a really generous upload credit bounty for your own music, in order to sell digital copies.
I knew a few bands in Toronto who did this as a way to make sales.
They'd put up a big bounty right after setting up a webpage offering the album for sale via Paypal, then spend a few days collecting orders (and they would get a lot of them - hundreds sometimes - because What.cd had a lot of users looking for ratio credits) and then eventually email a link to the album after a few days.
No idea what the scale of this trick/scam (call it whatever) was but anecdotally I heard about it enough.