Paypal and Kafkaesque in the same sentence don't come as a surprise, but I am shocked that Soulseek is still a thing.

Soulseek is still really useful, especially after the crackdown on Megaupload/Mediafire/Rapidshare.

For niche and obscure music, it's always been superior to torrenting IMO.

You mean out-of-copyright music, or music being shared by the copyright holders, right?

I understand what you're saying but there are also lots of instances where you simply cannot find something for sale anywhere and sometimes I simply don't mind flouting copyright rules if it's the only way to locate a copy.

Trust me, I've purchased plenty of used CDs or other formats on eBay or Amazon and will gladly do so again rather than bother with the hunt on Soulseek or other sources of unlicensed downloads. But in the end, as "entitled" as it may make me, I'd rather resort to copyright infringement than never find a copy of that (song/album/etc) from the tape or CD I lost in college that's just not available anymore.

Soulseek is still the best (and often only) way of finding some music. Not everything is on private trackers.

You're right, it's the only place I found John Addison's soundtrack for the Movie Sleuth (1972, Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier).

Glad they mention Bitcoin in the article. Bitcoin, as long as it trends towards decentralization and not away from it [1], eliminates these problems in the long run.

[1]: https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=923.0

What's funny is in the article they are saying "many of the Bitcoin payment service providers, are bound by their agreements to Visa and MasterCard", in reality though you don't need a payment provider to send bitcoin to anyone and to top that off - the use case we're looking at here which is "donations" is perfectly fitted for bitcoin, you just provide your address on your site for ppl to send coin to and you're done.

Where bitcoin payment providers come into play is when a company is taking bitcoin as a method of payment for their goods and services which is not the case here.

dammit, first rule of soulseek is

haha, yes it was a bit of a underground thing.

From 2002 to 2006 I was listening mostly JRock only.

First we used Kazaa to get the music, since it wasn't sold in my country.

Later most people switched to Soulseek.

Was pretty nice... a bit like IRC. Only that the chat was rather bad.

Also the global search sucked, so you had to browse every person in the chat yourself.

But this made it also a bit more social, hehe.

My favorite was always Audiogalaxy but yeah, Soulseek really filled a niche before you could find a lot of stuff legally on Amazon or even eBay if it wasn't sold in stores.

PayPal still exists?

Haven't used Soulseek in years. Mac client... Love it.