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Music Torrent Site What.CD Has Been Shut Down (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: What.cd, an invite-only music torrent website first launched in 2007, has been shut down after a raid by French authorities. The private tracker offered free (and often illegal) access to a massive, deeply thorough collection of music and was popular among audiophiles for its strict rules around quality and file formats. The site was created after the shutdown of another well-known torrent website, Oink, which operated between 2004 and 2007. Though its primary focus was music sharing, What.cd also permitted torrents of computer software, ebooks, and other content. Zataz Magazine is reporting 12 servers that powered What.cd's infrastructure were seized by French cybercrime authorities. What.cd hasn't been taken offline completely, but torrents are unavailable and the homepage now displays a message confirming its demise: "Due to some recent events, What.CD is shutting down. We are not likely to return any time soon in our current form. All site and user data has been destroyed. So long, and thanks for all the fish."
This wouldn't be an issue if they tried to improve the actual filesharing protocols for better sharing/privacy/distributeness instead of wasting resources on their little castle plus thuosands of seedbox idling while trying to get some ratio.
It's hard to take you seriously when your entire post is one extended hipster gripe. If audiophiles hadn't convinced the world that quality was expensive in the 80's, you could have avoided all of this crap. Instead, people stopped caring about good sound because of self indulgent wieners like Mr. 'I hear Compression Artifacts below 256k...' This is why Apple can sell shit wireless headphones and dump the jack. This is why crappy sample-heavy DJ's dominate the charts, and why everything sounds the same in popular music. If you cared THAT much, you would have replaced the physical collection, but streaming was easy, stealing was cheap, and you were lazy.
Anyone remotely serious about their music - and, equally, their willingness to pay for a decent service and support the artists they like - could do a lot worse than checking out Bandcamp.
Pay only for what you want, download FLACs (plus many other formats) and stream everything you've ever bought via their app if you'd rather not download any files. They're also far more artist-friendly than the likes of Spotify; I've got a fair amount of music on Spotify and have never seen a cent from them whereas Bandcamp give you a significant percentage of any sales.
Admittedly, Bandcamp doesn't have the breadth of music on there that some other options do - many artists need to do a better job of uploading their libraries, myself included - but right now it's by far the best option for both listeners and artists out there (though I'd absolutely be interested to hear of others). It's unquestionably a better alternative to any option that either gives zero support to the artist, provides a poor service to listeners, or both.