This is a spiritual sequel to my bulletin "The Bitrate Dilemma", where I talked about the weird quirks about file data in piracy, but I figured it would be an interesting blog post if I expanded on this idea.

The Bitrate Dilemma (Intro)

Music piracy is an interesting topic. Because if you are like me and used to get your music fresh off The Pirate Bay, there has probably been at least one time where you picked one off the vine and it ended up sounding compressed and like you're listening from a 2006 YouTube video even though that number clearly says 320kbps. Also, when you pull a 128kbps archive, suddenly it sounds crystal clear.

Yeah, welcome to the music piracy world. The one place where you can find about a thousand rips of the same album and you'll have no idea which ones are going to sound worse than expected or will sound exactly as advertised.

Though there is also a lot of interesting. If you aren't already aware, there's a whole bunch of unreleased music pushed out by many artists. Basically everybody has an unreleased album by now. Even I do, I've cancelled many projects and I had to end up reusing some of the material years later. But the thing is, sometimes these projects resurface. Sure, we have the infamous and well known, CONTROVERSIAL FIGURE, Kanye, but there's more than that, it's not just surface level. If you dig enough, you might find unreleased material from anybody.

Hollywood Undead is an example. They made songs during MySpace era that have resurfaced over a thousand times since they were a made. There's a million qualities and like three versions, sure, but it's still something fresh. You haven't heard it before. It almost feels new, and it makes you wonder if it will ever come out.

I could list a couple thousand more examples. There's lots of artists like this too, like Icon for Hire, Deuce, literally any 2000s bands... That's just what the internet was doing back then. Somebody would get their hands on this, and then when it's passed down, by the thousandth time, the quality sounds underwater and you have to wonder how it was even made in the first place. At least that's how I felt by the time I downloaded a Deuce demo and wondered why 320kbps sounded like it was being played to me through a tube.

At The Start

But we have to get on topic. Before we can talk about the modern, we have to go back in the old ages. The stone age of piracy, you can call it. Yeah, time to get our hands dirty.

This is a bunch of outdated advice you should probably not take seriously, but we're going to drop some names anyway, against the skilled pirates' wishes, because we have to go there.