I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one bothered pirating it and sharing it.
Case in point it's super easy for me to find discogs of even unusual artists I grew up with on torrent sites. But if I search for artists mentioned a lot in the indie music press today I really struggle to find anything on the torrent sites.
I don't trust corporations to look after their own cultural artefacts. Karagarga is a beautiful example, passionate individuals will mash together video from one movie release, audio from another and subtitles from another to create a competent release of a film because no perfect copy exists. They'll do it purely for their love of the source material.
> I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one bothered pirating it and sharing it.
This is what happened to a lot of the songs by amateur musicians on mp3.com when it shut down in 2001, and that was all downloadable. I still have a few songs I downloaded from mp3.com that I have not seen hosted anywhere else. For streaming this has been an ongoing problem with SoundCloud for a long time. A lot of musicians delete their accounts or get blocked, move on with their life, and there is not a download option so all that is left are "check out this cool track" dead links.
This is ironic when you consider that a lot of mp3 blogs of the 2008-2011 era were about "rediscovering" amateur cassette and little known vinyl releases from the 1970s and 1980s.
