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The Music Man
HellSpam writes "MacNETv2 interviewed a man who is claiming the title of "King of the Pirates". The man has over 900,000 songs, a collection that rivals even the iTunes music store(!). From the article:"I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.""
If I could afford the hard drive space. Then it wouldn't be an issue, but they fill up fast. I suspect quite a few people around here have the same problem.
~S
From my estimation (and relatively limited library, it seems): 2400 songs = 10 GB
So 900,000 songs would come out to be approximately 3,750 GB... or 3.75 TB of music.
We're not worthy...we're not worthy...
Is he using iTunes to manage all his songs?
Well, it has been the practice of the RIAA only to go after the people sharing their music with others. Also from the article: "I don't think there has been a single song pirated from my collection."
So it appears he isn't King of the Pirates, but King of the Freeloaders. (Not that I condone either.)
900,000(songs) / 1000(songs/day) = 900 days > 10 months
note that he "started slowly", which i assume means less than 1000 songs / day
the math does not add up for me. anyone can fix the anomaly?
I've never really thought about it, but it's funny to think that "pirate" is being used for people that share what they have willingly with others. The pirates being sued are the ones giving it away, not the ones taking it.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
That works for popular / semi-popular music. I've had a hell of a time sorting my collection of pre-1950s music. ~12,000 songs from the late 1800s (wax cylindars) to the late 40s (big band.)
The problem is not collecting the music. The problem is that his music collection probably looks like this:
Frank Zappa - genre - Sheik Yerbouti - (no year)
BRITNEY SPERS - pop - Oops I did it Again - 1900
Benni Benassi - Satisfaction vs In Da Club - Dance - 2004
etc. It would peeve the hell out of me to see that crap, and I see it all the time, because it seems like people who don't take the time/money to buy music also really don't give two shits about good tagging (or good ripping, but that situation is getting better). So, I find myself doing lots of manual work to fix the meta information, add valid "year" data, add track and disc number data, check off "compilation" for those, fix genres and spelling, etc. Most of the time, if it looks like the song has crap ID3 tags, I don't even bother downloading it, it's not worth the extra work. This is really the extra value you get out of using something like the iTunes Music Store to buy songs (and I do).
Thus, it becomes a rather huge management problem to fix tags and remove duplicates. And the process of removing duplicates is not even very logical, often- If the same exact song is on two separate albums, do you keep both? Without listening to both songs to see if one is ripped better, do you tend to remove the older or newer duplicate? What if the songs are actually the same but one of the titles is completely wrong so you can't tell? Etc. I won't even go into the logic for picking genres... I say Depeche Mode is "Goth/New Wave" and Nine Inch Nails is "Industrial", but nobody else seems to think so, for example. Perhaps the whole idea of "genre" is an archaic holdover from physical music stores, but it can be a useful extra tidbit to help create smart playlists from (in iTunes) as well as help discover new music related to what you already know.
I will shamelessly plug two things here: http://www.musicbrainz.org/ to help you tag music correctly, and the Roku Soundbridge to listen to your collection wirelessly.
Ok, so this guy claims he only downloads and never, ever shares his music (and hence he's not a pirate). And yet he claims to get a lot of his music from torrents... Unless he's satisfied with very slow download speeds (and being a complete leech!) I think I'm seeing a flaw here.
Forget about leeching. I can't believe they didn't ask him how to reconcile his insistence that "I don't distribute the music, I only download it" with the fact that he uses torrents.
900000 songs at an average (pulled out of a hat) of 3m each would take a little over 5 continuous years to listen to, played back to back to back, assuming he didn't attempt to listen to them more than once. (He might, at that; you could listen to several songs at once if you were only trying to pick out those high-pitched squeals they insert, but you wouldn't be able to tell much about the quality of each song, I think.) If you assume about 12 hours out of every day is reserved for sleeping and misc. rather than music listening, he could listen to his entire collection in 10 years if he never repeated. To be frank, this is a little hard to believe, but it is within the realm of possibility.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
What he is trying to do is literally impossible. Furthermore he already has more music in his collection than he could ever listen to in his lifetime. I have been collecting vinyl for some 25 years, and come across his species before. They collect and collect and bag the records up in protective sleeves and lord over their super rare *SEALED* original pressing of "The Skullsnaps", or "24 Karat Black", which has never had a chip of diamond touch it to release the magic contained within. Compare this to the mindset of a deejay, who buys record upon record, and can't wait to play it in public so anyone within earshot can enjoy (or hate, some dj's have a cruel streak).... Just because you are an obsessive collector doesn't mean you can actually enjoy what you collect. Its like the plot from Toy Story 2, where they are collecting rare toys, when they really should be in the loving hands of a child.
I have several chicago blues indie records from the 1940's and 1950's that are one of a kinds
I am not too familiar with copyright law, but my father told me that when you become the owner of a recording that noone else has, you gain the rights to reproduce and sell said recording. There have been several precedents of this. Maybe you should copy your one of a kinds and get it out to some other collectors before something happens and they are lost to the world altogether.
music lover since 1969
Several external 250GB firewire drives are attached to the iMacs, and sitting in the corner are a stack of at least 6 other external drives, all 300GB, brand new, boxed, and just waiting to go online.
To house 9000 songs at average bitrates (as an earlier poster pointed out) he'd need a shade over 4TB of storage. That's 16 250GB drives, which to almost anyone is more than "several".
If this guy was real and as rich as he's made out to be, why wouldn't he have just bought an Xserve with an Xserve RAID?
Actually, it does make sense. A pirate is someone who deprives another of their wealth. I'd say a single music sharer is much more damaging to the recording industry profits than a single downloader. So, to call the sharers "pirates" is probably more appropriate.
He lives in AZ, just outside of Tucson. He use to come into our private MIRC and dc++ networks, always downloading but never giving anything up. He had about 2.9 Terrabytes last year. We eventually had to ban him since he never shared. Interesting that he made the news...
why wouldn't he have just bought an Xserve with an Xserve RAID
He is going to but its like drugs, the need just creeps up on you. First i's a bigger internal drive, then all your ide channels are full and you get an industrial strength DVD burner but you can't keep up and you need something NOW and the man shows you an external usb 300GB drive and you are in heaven. But the first one is never enough.
and the man is going to sell you 300GB external drives every day rather than one big Xserve rig. Being rich never =ed being smart.
I think John Peel (now sadly deceased, a couple of weeks ago) has had him beat long ago - and legitimately too. And not just top-40 stuff - John Peel was a great force in bringing many new artists into the public consiousness.
t ml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/alt/johnpeel/index.sh
John Peel had many BUILDINGS filled with CDs and vinyl records and other media.
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