Napster was amazing, I’d argue that as well as changing the way music was distributed P2P was also a massive boon to any artist who wasn’t on a major label and didn’t get their music played on TV and the radio and didn’t have their music sold in big retail stores.
And fuck Metallica for whining about Napster. Oh no, the millionaire rockstars who are probably set for life just off the royalties from the Black Album alone might make slightly less money
Napster was so sick. The halcyon days before the RIAA caught on were amazing. The real shame is we only had 56k phone modem connections!
When people started receiving dmca notices in the mail we could hardly believe it. End of an era. That was Clinton by the way.
The Internet was so different back then, before corporatization. There was so much promise in the thing. Now it’s just another tool for business. Sad really.
The Internet was so different back then, before corporatization. There was so much promise in the thing. Now it’s just another tool for business.
it went from a truly weird, unique, mostly anti-commercial and grass roots place to literally just another dying mall
honestly it was a dogshit with shitty rips and mislabeled files, but the RIAA’s crackdown gave truly amazing BitTorrent sites where obsessive nerds got their chance to shine with their painstaking care to have quality rips, tagging, etc. and music fans could easily get rare and OOP albums
It was popular because MP3 sites kept getting taken down and it was much harder to shut down a P2P sharing service.
I agree that the mislabeled files sucked, but I probably wasn’t the only one who got some amusement out of seeing just how many at school thought System of a Down did a Zelda song.
Every reggae song is by Bob Marley.
System_of_a_Down_-_Zelda.mp3
I never did find out if anyone ever took credit for that General MIDI + text-to-speech rendition of “Enter Sandman.”
I remember OiNK and What.CD, got a lot of good music from there
I’ve heard a compelling counter argument that Napster was more a convenient scapegoat for the music industry than the actual root cause of its downfall. That the popularity of the CD format caused a mini-boom of sales in the late 80’s and 90’s as the convenience factor brought in new customers and existing music fans replaced their scratched up cassettes and vinyls with CD versions of those albums. Similar to the DVD boom of the late 90’s through late aughts.
But any boom has to come down at some point, the sales will return to earth. The decline just happened to coincide with file sharing and enough critical mass of high speed internet (so much of file sharing in the early days was kids tapping into their university’s high speed connection). So it gave the music industry an excuse to the public (and more importantly, investors) that, no, it’s not that those sales numbers were unsustainable, it’s those ne’r do well brats stealing our songs. If the authorities just cracked down on those criminals, sales would go back up.
That does seem plausible, because before Napster the industry boogeyman was sites hosting MP3s.
I still can’t believe how the copyright police culture won out in the end and everyone went from
Napster and laughing at YoU WoUlDn’T DoWnLoAd A CaR to 
”noooo you can’t pirate because that hurts the corporatinos!”Yeah there was this weird shift where the cyberpunk attitude of “all big tech/corporations should not be trusted” got displaced by “we can’t stand in the way of the corporatinos that will only hinder ProgressTM.”
Well except for Apple. Now don’t get me wrong, Apple deserves a lot of shit for their practices, but it became a blame dump wherein all the problems with the tech industry were Apple problems and everyone else was fine; Bill Gates is getting ice cream! Elon posts le epic memes! I think we’re getting a shift though, with Musk running Twitter into the ground and fewer people buying the tech innovation narrative and seeing that the new tech media boss is the same as the old media boss. Things like the fediverse, Blue Sky, Mastadon gaining traction, hell the rise of VPNs into the mainstream signal that people have figured out, oh wait I’m the product.
Bill Gates is getting ice cream!
That “le wholesome Bill Gates is standing in line for a borger!” picture was posted so many fucking times on
(so much of file sharing in the early days was kids tapping into their university’s high speed connection)
lol my musical taste was dramatically shaped by what was available on the local university network soulseek circa 2005
We’re too media brained. Avoided the struggle session last time on the importance of physical media but our inability to even begin countering climate change and ww3 shows we really cannot handle multiple things and maybe should even put off enjoying it things until we try everything we can to save complicated life on earth.
