RIP AudioGalaxy

So AudioGalaxy, the best of the music sharing sites, is gone. Or at least, emasculated into uselessness. The RIAA threatened AudioGalaxy into changing its copyright protections from an opt-out to an opt-in. Formerly, copyright holders advised Audiogalaxy of their ownership of a specific piece, and this was blocked from file sharing. This system was actually working increasingly well in the last few months and basically anything at all recent or chart-oriented was blocked (at least, under normal spellings). But older stuff, rarer stuff, indie stuff, concert bootlegs and all the wonderfully obscure DJ sets were usually not blocked. Now with this opt-in system, a copyright holder has to explicitly grant AudioGalaxy the “right” to enable its users to share it.

The main problem with this is that all the stuff that’s specifically public domain — or older stuff where the copyright owner is dead or nonexistent or has just plain forgot they own the stuff — is not being shared. And the RIAA goes on disbursing any revenues it receives to the conglomerates and large copyright holders. It’s business as usual.

I reckon I downloaded around 30GB of stuff from AudioGalaxy. Now a lot of that is copyrighted stuff, sure, but most of it, the bulk of the megabytage, is scores of DJ sets from the Love Parade, or North of England clubs, or bizarre mash-up mixes that were pressed onto maybe 500 vinyls so obscure they won’t ever get re-released. This sucks.

Most of those gnutella clients suck majorly, being infected with spyware and incomplete files and juvenilia. And the protocol just plain sucks up bandwidth. I hear the eDonkey/ShareReactor combo works well so I’ll give that a try.