Are file-sharing services dead?

It's easy to google-find a mediafire/zshare/megaupload .rar leak of pretty much any new album in existence. But I can't find an simple MP3 of Juliana Hatfield Three's "My Sister," which for all intents and purposes was a huge hit.

I haven't used Acquisition or Soulseek in a little bit, so I cracked em open. I went on and was like a ghost town. Do people only listen to new albums anymore? What happened to all my friends circa 1999-2000 who would fill up their WinAmp (later iTunes) playlists with random BS one-hit wonder tracks?

yeah i'd say so - between torrents and now .rar blogs anyone w/ an ounce of savvy def moved away from limewire and soulseek and stuff

juliana hatfield three - my sister

it's usually pretty easy to google-find a mediafire/megaupload .rar of lots of old albums too - or blogs that have full discogs and shit

Been there, MP3 link is dead.

between torrents and now .rar blogs anyone w/ an ounce of savvy def moved away from limewire and soulseek and stuff

I mean that's otm, but I think I have more than an ounce of savvy and I don't feel like downloading the entirety of Become What You Are, unzipping it and picking the one track I want.

i have friends who download entire discographies of bands they never will listen to.

I have almost no savvy, this is a problem now.

I'll miss you, file-sharing services. You would have made listening to "My Sister" very easy at one point :(

yeah i feel you but \o_O/

i've bought like 30 indiv songs off of itunes in my life

you should download the single ep it's on

http://godlizza.blogspot.com/2009/02/juliana-hatfield-eps.html

File Not Found

i have this song shared on slsk

looks like it's on megaupload and rapidshare

I use slsk partially because I absolutely hate dealing w/ zips & rars.

And it's such a who-gives-a-shit album at this point that it's not even gonna be on megaupload or zshare.

i have to actually start torrenting if I want "My Sister." And torrenting is stupid because a) it slows my computer down and b) "building ratios" is an annoying sisyphean task unless I want to get busted for leaking promo CDs that labels send me.

er, a slsk search for "juliana hatfield my sister" produced about 50 results for me. the search function can be a little wiggy sometimes, but slsk is definitely not all tumbleweeds and crumbling storefronts -- not yet anyways.

partic if you're on the new server

that sharebee link to the my sister ep works if you click on megaupload or rapidshare

i have like four ssx results wtf

how do i get on the new slsk server?

click

refer to the slsk download page

xpost

on a mac u_u

i use "soulseex"

haw, I don't know what to tell you. "soulseex" gave me irl lols, so thanks for that!

i was gonna try and download 500 modern rock hits from 1993, but i guess i'll just have to listen to cymbals eat guitars or whatever boring shit the internet tells me to like. FML

do you donate the $5/month to slsk? huge improvement in search results when you do. or there was last time i donated anyway..

i've done that in the past, maybe i'll do it again. but when i donated, it was basically no queues, but same search results iirc

i keep hoping that 'blue lightning accent' by david welsh will turn up in my wish list results but it never does ;_;

If you can't access the new slsk platform, there's really no use in donating. Sucks the none of the Mac clients updated (or that's what I gather). It's definitely not what it once was ca. 2002-04, but it's still populated for sure.

between torrents and now .rar blogs anyone w/ an ounce of savvy def moved away from limewire and soulseek and stuff

torrents are great for popular albums, they are crap if you're looking for anything obscure (0 seeders whoo). blogs are good for albums, but i still find soulseek is best for newish electronic 12" stuff.

just got two pages of results for the hatfield thing on soulseek.

maybe i should reinstall soulseex

Dunno if it was mentioned, but with most bittorrent clients you can pick and choose which files you want to download. Not necessary to grab the whole album.

I still use slsk a lot (with the new server), and if I want to check out a new album then most of the time, it's the first place I go to. The weighting is about 2/3 slsk vs 1/3 torrents/.rar blogs/megaupload-sendspace-zshare-etc. searches, although the gap is definitely shrinking fast.

torrents are great for popular albums, they are crap if you're looking for anything obscure (0 seeders whoo). blogs are good for albums, but i still find soulseek is best for newish electronic 12" stuff.

I agree with all of this.

i still get pretty much everything i could ever want or need off soulseek, there's still apparently lots of people using it. also i find it a hair easier than using rapidshare. for a mac client google "ssx"

http://forums.slsknet.org/ipb/index.php?s=9ff849b53f3d88579897141ce7a892f6&showtopic=21280

instructions for changing server^^^

I've never had any problems finding what I want on SLSK, except for some really rare releases. The queues can sometimes be a problem obviously, but I think it's still easier to find stuff there than on torrent sites or blogs.

one hit wonder songs are just as easy to find pretty much with a upload server search engine (filestube, fileshunt, filespump)

i don't think i've ever had a problem finding anything, old or new, by using blogs. you just have to be patient. i do agree though that single songs end up being more difficult to find, either because their links expire sooner, or because more often than not, entire albums are being posted because speed and file size are no longer issues. also, my tastes aren't very obscure, so that might explain why i'm not having trouble finding things.

i stopped using kazaa/limewire (never used soulseek) a few years ago because i wasn't able to find a single song that i actually wanted, and any time i did, i'd be lucky if it were legitimate, or even a tolerable bitrate. file-sharing applications (as in, p2p) are ancient history simply because they no longer needed to fill the role as facilitators of downloading.

in that sense, i don't think file sharing services are dead, i just think that they've been decentralized (i'm including torrents in my definition of file-sharing services). before, we used to just turn to napster, our only source for music downloads. but now, we have the pirate bay, demonoid, and not to mention your favorite taste-making blog. while that makes it a lot harder for you and i to find the songs we want, it makes it less likely that we'll notice if, for example, the pirate bay shut down tomorrow.

I can't find a torrent for last night's Breaking Bad. ;_;

Tuomas otm. if you got Soulseek configured properly you can basically find everything.
well......
except for some obscure rap i burned for a friend. (Big Mike, B-Legit) (Soulseek had some of course, but torrents had full discographies)

Well, one site's dead at least:

The Washington Post

File-sharing site Megaupload.com has been shut down and workers have been indicted, according to @AP.

you were beat. check sopa thread