I am bereft D: · 11:54am Apr 9th, 2018
Every Monday morning for the past... at least four years, I would wake up, turn my computer on, and log on to Freegal Music, a website run through my library where you could download three songs a week, no DRM, completely free and legal. (Y'know, freegal.)
This morning, the website changed.
Now, change is not an inherently bad thing. I have to tell myself this every single time something changes around me. It happens a lot, and my usual reaction is panic.
This time? Panic justified. See, Freegal had a list of all the artists on their website. It wasn't a great list; I frequently discovered that artists would be just not listed, or listed when they didn't actually exist on the site. It had issues, in other words. But over the course of however many years, I went from "artists that start with numbers and punctuation and non-English characters" to "Ak*".
The new change took this list away. Now, if you want to browse, be it songs, artists, or genres, you can pick from 'new' or 'popular'. Nowhere in these will you find Russian techno or J-pop. Nowhere in these will you discover artists literally no one -- quite possibly including them -- has ever heard of.
Needless to say, the panic was warranted. :( I wrote them an email that I intended as angry but likely came off more whiny. Why is it that, whenever a web developer changes something, it's always to make it less functional and not more?
The more functionality a developer gives to users, the less they can control how people use the site. And they all want to do that, whether for ads and marketing or because they always thought the site was supposed to be for the secret brainwashing they've been putting in crappy electronica, but people keep downloading better music.
I think for most of them it's a balance between letting users control everything they want, and trying to herd Pinkies to the parts of the site that are its reason for existence.
4836671
Or on the more cynical side of things, the people who own the website asked the web designer to redesign it that way because they have no idea what the users actually need or what simply makes sense. The term we use for this in my field is "management."
...now I kinda sorta wish I'd known about this site years ago.
4836671
Ugh, so it's politics. D: Figures.
4836675
I honestly don't know how you'd use it now (at worst, I can go through my MP3 collection and legalize anything that isn't), but it might be worth seeing if your local library uses it.
Did they break a search function or purge their lists? If the first, it sounds like a security issue because they can't sanitize their input/output, the other perhaps legal or monetary.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."—Hanlon's razor
4836761
The original URL I had bookmarked no longer works, and no browse utility on the site leads to anything like it. :/ Maybe they took it out because it was overtaxing to maintain, or because it was never perfect? Who knows.
4836800
They realized you'd wandered into a place they were keeping for the exclusive use of Vladimir.
4841871
Joke's on them, I can read Hebrew now.