some chat on music threads is reminding me of just how much I/my friend group were torrenters back when (circa 2010) - just a thing that was expected/accepted from a whole bunch of people
think there’s a bunch of us like that here, thought it could be fun to share any memories of weird downloads, long waiting times, accidentally mislabled things you stumbled across
Ethical debates about the practise are NOT welcome cheers
Remember my mum throwing a really amateur looking letter at me telling me I’d have to pay the £300-odd fine because I’d illegally downloaded some Ministry of Sound compilation.
with some American shows it did feel like a necessity basically. There’s a bunch of my fav shows which didn’t come to UK channels until years later (if at all) and where the DVD releases either never materialised or cost ridiculous sums like £40 for one season of TV
i was fully into my TV-fanboy phase at the time, so was reading and listening to all these American critics praising these shows no one over here had ever heard of, so felt like a fun little club when i’d go seek them out, wait weeks for them to download, watch them and brag (
) to [people about these cool shows they’d never heard of … nerd dickhead
I never learned how to torrent and still don’t really know
laziness?
Partly laziness, partly an upstanding morality
Never really liked downloading full albums, but downloaded loads of individual tracks from Limewire/blogs/forums
I’m torrenting this thread right now
Would find dodgy streams to watch Seinfeld and stuff but could never be arsed learning how to torrent them
the first time i tried to download Merriweather Post Pavilion, every track was Never Gonna Give You Up trimmed to the right track length and labelled with the right track name. imagine my disappointment when i heard the real album
also once my dad asked me to download the new version of the warhammer 40000 rulebook, he’d found a torrent for it but didn’t know how to do it and all the weird ads at the side of the screen made him too nervous
it definitely got a bit muddled as it went on too, like plenty of people were releasing their demos or mixtapes for free - so one download to the next could be “immoral” vs. exactly what the artist wanted you to do
Getting a what.cd invite during its first week from some weirdo on a forum I didn’t know that well. The first album I downloaded was DFA 1979 I think. I didn’t engage much with the community there but it was great for learning about music I had no clue about.
Waking up in the middle of the night to get a head start on downloading new episodes of my stories from the private TV site I was on because my internet was slow and they could be ready to watch by morning.
14 years later getting a narcy email from my landlord to stop torrenting Brooklyn 99.
Unending guilt.
exactly what i wanted from this thread
When I was like 15 and using Napster I downloaded some songs off a user with the username JuliaGoolia, a reference to The Wedding Singer. Napster had the messaging function so we started chatting and it turned out she was a pretty cool Australian teenager. That was a nice thing about late 90s internet- with like MSN and ICQ you could have friends anywhere in the world.
Actually thinking about it does Napster even count as torrenting? Or is it p2p? Idk
Definitely not something that happens any more, officer
Used to Torrent Six Feet Under using dial-up in an old houseshare.
Stopped Torrenting after getting a letter from Virgin Media when I downloaded the Minions movie for my son.
My dad made a satellite company letter saying that they were considering cutting us off because us kids were watching too much TV. Took a long time before I figured out we were being played.
Only really used Limewire or Kazaa. Always a roulette as to whether the song you wanted was the one downloading. Remember once trying to get a song and the one I got was a Star Trek themed parody of Bohemian Rhapsody
Which UK quiz show did Metallica refuse to appear on?
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire because it’s hosted by Chris Torrent!
can’t remember when Netflix really took off, but yeah it was that period of shows on cable networks in America which just sounded entirely fake and impossible to get hold of over here - Starz for example
not sure without it I’d have ever found Rectify and Review with Forrest McNeil, literally two of my top 10 shows ever
