Storing local copies of music to avoid the loss of art

It’s imperative that you store local copies of the music you enjoy. In one fork of this timeline, your favorite artist is deplatformed, or the platform itself is demapped and the music is gone. This rings especially true for underground artists; they might just delete all of their music in some kind of lucid frenzy, and there’s another way meaningful music gets de-mapped. Or maybe it just dies slowly on Soundcloud.. No one listens to a particular song, so the algorithm just never recomends it, and it dies by none of the afornmentioned causes.

For this reason, go download all of your favorite underground music.

Distributing those local copies to friends via text and email

Now that you’ve got all of these MP3s, it’s time to start sharing them with your friends. Post them on some message boards. Host them on your website. Spread it on Discord. Wherever you communicate, transmit this music. Let the MP3 speak for itself.

Is this unethical to the artist?

If you claim the music to be your own I suppose that’s unethical. But if the mp3 has accurate metadata, it’s very easy to figure out who the artist is and credit them. Perhaps if you had send a Soundcloud link instead, the artist would have made $.0001 cents. Who really cares.

What is Soundcloud even doing.

Soundcloud won’t let you download the MP3s because they want you to go browse their site, hear other artists, and boost their ad revenue. Is this a service worth having? They’re kind of just like a scummy middleman that takes a shit ton of time to load, and then tries to sell you shit. The mp3 you want to listen to? 1mb. The soundcloud page for that song? 9mb .lol. Treemap of the soundcloud page for tomcr00se's "die now"

So let’s cut Soundcloud out, and just host our own version. Send you friends a link: domain.com/{SongArtist}_{SongTitle}, and host the direct MP3 to your song there. Skip this middleman BS

Why we need local copies, not soundcloud

The only reason we’re able to read the great philosophers of ages past is because their work was printed , reprinted, quoted, analyzed, etc. If you’re an artist producing anything substantive, you ought to preserve your work in the same way. Encourage others to openly host your MP3 on their own website, linking back to your original copy of it.

If 20 people are all hosting the same MP3 online, it’s never going to be lost, even if Soundcloud fucks off finally. And furthermore, everyone can listen to those MP3s without being tracked, or being treated like an advertiser commodity. You can listen to the MP3 with liberty, and you won’t be persuaded to listen more than you meant to.

Soundcloud wants to give you more than you need. Youtube to an even greater extent.