True 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.
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.
That's why I use YouTube Music as my streamer as they allow damned near anyone to upload any old rare record and then figure out the royalties somehow.
Redacted.sh is a worthy successor, but the average person just doesn’t care about “which release is best” anymore. I use YT Music as a backup but Redacted is my main source of music these days.
The private trackers are just as much about the community as they are about the content they host. Of course there are trade offs because communities can be very insular.
I’ve noticed in the past 10 years or so private trackers have become less strict because the economics of ratios only works if either a) everyone is equally uploading new material and b) there are more and more signups. So now there is value in the amount of time you seed your content which lowers your “required” ratio.
Generally speaking, trackers that require a ratio above 1.0 and don't have freeleech/point system are designed so that you pay the website to fix your ratio and/or rent a seedbox from one of their partner.
It's a 0 sum game; for every account with a >1.0 ratio, that implies other people will be <1.0.
And when you compete with 10gb/s seedboxes that have scripts to automatically grab all the new torrent the second they get posted, it's extremely difficult to improve your ratio. Even for super popular torrents, you have a few minutes to seed as much as you can before upload speed goes to 0 forever. You can't slowly accumulate upload over time the same way you would with a torrent from a public tracker.
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, a thousand times this. I have gone back to collecting CDs because it's often the only remaining way (short of pircay) to get original masters of many artists. Even lossless download stores like Qobuz don't have them.
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).
