Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”.

I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun.

Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an artist’s entire discography in one go. Or if you’re into automation, lidarr , sonarr , and radarr can pull in your favorite things as soon as they’re released.

What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. It blows my mind how different groups fight to offer the best version of a free thing. And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version.

According to the RIAA’s former CEO, Hilary Rosen, a few months after Napster’s release, the music industry shifted into full panic mode. In February 2000, all major label executives discussed the threat during an RIAA board meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.

“I will never forget this day. All of the heads of the labels, literally the titans of the music business, were in that room. I had somebody wheel in a PC and put some speakers up and I started doing a name that tune,” Rosen later recalled.

The major music bosses started to name tracks, including some that weren’t even released yet, and time and again Napster would come up with results. Needless to say, the board was terrified.

They're about to be more terrified. Suno and Udio are just the beginning of the complete unraveling of the need for studio capital.

It's going to happen to Hollywood too.

I remember how out of control the lawsuits got by the mid-2000s. A friend had to drop out of college and move back home over some multi-million dollar claim on behalf of the RIAA that his family "settled" for $40K. It wasn't even clear he was responsible (the lawsuit was based on IP), but he was scared and admitted to using "file sharing services", and that was that.

I'm still disappointed that laws against barratry didn't become more prevalent in the US as a result of "copyright trolling". Instead, exceptions have been slowly chiseled out of the DMCA to restore a sliver of the rights we used to have.

And now rock stars who were once as rich as, well, rock stars, are largely forced to get by on a pittance from either Spotify or YouTube. It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting rich. Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else.

But, hey, the quasi-communists who thought they were somehow liberating the music from the evil rich people ended up dragging all of the music industry down into poverty.

Napster helped motivate and justify all sorts of nasty DRM and legislation, which has adverse implications for more than just piracy.

And at the time of the MP3 frenzy, there were a relatively small number of people saying, "Wait, won't this mean a backlash of adversarial laws and technology that make things bad for everyone?"

But that was ignored by the masses of newly-arrived Internet users wanting to take stuff for free.

Best part of Napster was searching for that one song you were interested in, and then looking through all of that user's shared files. It was an amazing discovery mechanism which I missed dearly with all the subsequent P2P apps. Spotify now fills this void, but it's not quite the same.

torrent is really a great technology.

subversive and evergreen. genuinely useful and hard to kill.

Yet we still don't have a safe & resilient alternative for using Kademlia tables. Shame on us.

Paramount+ coming out with a two part documentary June 11 based on a book with the same name, How Music Got Free:

https://www.paramountpressexpress.com/paramount-plus/shows/h...

Napster was a little before my time, though I fondly remember torrenting when I was a kid and oddly enough, it was a small time scam that got me into it.

I remember when I was a kid (maybe 13 or 14) I really (and I mean really) wanted to play Grand Theft Auto. My dad picked up a copy of GTA San Andreas for me about a year prior but after seeing the violence and language he forced me to take it back, that put the taste into my mouth and I wanted more.

So I searched for "free video game downloads" and I remember I went to this site that claimed that for just $30, you could "download unlimited video games for free". I begged my parents to let me sign up and pay the $30 until they finally relented and bought it for me.

What it turned out to be was just a tutorial on how to use uTorrent (and they also had an "addon" for unlimited MP3's which taught you how to use Limewire).

I realized pretty quickly I got scammed and I think to date this is the only scam that I've ever fallen for. Kinda worked out though because I learned how to torrent and after a few years I had a basic gaming PC with a hard drive full of games that I had torrented (everything from Crysis to GTA games to every Call of Duty game).

I was also pretty deep into torrenting music right up until Spotify came to the USA (I still remember all the "workarounds" to get Spotify to work in the US before they officially released here, though I didn't try any myself)

Since then Spotify has remained my longest kept subscription and for all it's faults I think Spotify got the solution to music piracy right. With Spotify it was just more convenient to pay them every month then to bother pirating music and uploading it to my iPhone.

I rarely see it mentioned when discussing old file sharing programs, but I thought DC++ was the best. With the right hubs you could find anything you wanted, you could download parts of a file from multiple peers, you could browse a user's shared files to find new stuff, we had a server in our university network that RIAA/MPAA could find, there was a chat for each server, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B

Ah good time. Bring back memory. My involvement with that period was I wrote a p2p file sharing app using the Gnutella protocol, an alternative to the Napster. It was a fun time.

Napster may have started the file sharing revolution. But the exciting part for me was Gnutella and later Bittorrent, peer-to-peer technology in general, and the realization that we could use technology to liberate ourselves. Needless to say, I was young and naïve. That spirit is long dead, and the only remnants are crypto currencies and the community around them, which has tossed all lofty ideals in favor of blind greed.

Excerpts from chapter 5 of "Free as in Freedom" (freely available at https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/):

Although based on proprietary software, the Napster system draws inspiration from the long-held Stallman contention that once a work enters the digital realm-in other words, once making a copy is less a matter of duplicating sounds or duplicating atoms and more a matter of duplicating information-the natural human impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict. Rather than impose additional restrictions, Napster execs have decided to take advantage of the impulse. Giving music listeners a central place to trade music files, the company has gambled on its ability to steer the resulting user traffic toward other commercial opportunities.

The sudden success of the Napster model has put the fear in traditional record companies, with good reason. Just days before my Palo Alto meeting with Stallman, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel granted a request filed by the Recording Industry Association of America for an injunction against the file-sharing service. The injunction was subsequently suspended by the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early 2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law,5 a decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later proclaim proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online marketplace."

For hackers such as Stallman, the Napster business model is scary in different ways. The company's eagerness to appropriate time-worn hacker principles such as file sharing and communal information ownership, while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary software, sends a distressing mixed message. As a person who already has a hard enough time getting his own carefully articulated message into the media stream, Stallman is understandably reticent when it comes to speaking out about the company. Still, Stallman does admit to learning a thing or two from the social side of the Napster phenomenon.

"Before Napster, I thought it might be OK for people to privately redistribute works of entertainment," Stallman says. "The number of people who find Napster useful, however, tells me that the right to redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis, but to the public at large, is essential and therefore may not be taken away."

. . .

"It's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to another," says Stallman, contrasting songs with software programs. "The right approach is to look at each type of work and see what conclusion you get."

When it comes to copyrighted works, Stallman says he divides the world into three categories. The first category involves "functional" works-e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. The second category involves works that might best be described as "testimonial"-e.g., scientific papers and historical documents. Such works serve a purpose that would be undermined if subsequent readers or authors were free to modify the work at will. The final category involves works of personal expression-e.g., diaries, journals, and autobiographies. To modify such documents would be to alter a person's recollections or point of view-action Stallman considers ethically unjustifiable.

Of the three categories, the first should give users the unlimited right to make modified versions, while the second and third should regulate that right according to the will of the original author. Regardless of category, however, the freedom to copy and redistribute noncommercially should remain unabridged at all times, Stallman insists. If that means giving Internet users the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it. "It's clear that private occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police state can stop that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it so useful."

When I ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive outlook, Stallman cuts me off.

"That's the wrong question," he says. "I mean now you've changed the subject entirely from one of ethics to one of interpreting laws. And those are two totally different questions in the same field. It's useless to jump from one to the other. How the courts would interpret the existing laws is mainly in a harsh way, because that's the way these laws have been bought by publishers."

The comment provides an insight into Stallman's political philosophy: just because the legal system currently backs up businesses' ability to treat copyright as the software equivalent of land title doesn't mean computer users have to play the game according to those rules. Freedom is an ethical issue, not a legal issue. "I'm looking beyond what the existing laws are to what they should be," Stallman says. "I'm not trying to draft legislation. I'm thinking about what should the law do? I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."

Buying music (singles or albums) was super expensive in 1999. It was unfair for listeners as well as artists.

Napster suddenly made it 'free'. I remember thinking, if CD's were not so ridiculously expensive and i could pick the songs on it, i would just buy them instead of spending money on data traffic time/bandwidth.

Today, we pay much less and the artists are still paid, while we can choose exactly what to listen to.

Napster was a big part of it, credit where credit is due, but faster networks were the critical ingredient. I was in college at the time and it blew up on campus, but for my friends still in high school on DSL or even still POTS it was far less useful.

so it's the year 2000, right. you got home from school, you're at 6th grade. saw your sweetheart and got fired up all day. summer's around the corner, it's been a pretty good day. a friend at school told you about napster, you download it and install it. you are amazed. you login to icq and wait for her to come online. in the meanwhile you search for some metallica and limp bizkit. it's insane! everything you search is there. you just have to be patient. you download nothing else matters, start playing it. she logs in and says hi, already missed you. and nothing else matters..

I still remember how hard it was to find an mp3 on the Internet before Napster. It was awesome. And Winamp, which was quite possibly the greatest desktop music app ever IMO, truly complimented Napster.

Something I found fascinating about Napster at the time is that it was fiercely difficult to use... but it didn't matter, because what it gave people (access to ANY music) was so desirable that they would learn how to use it.

Back around in World of Warcraft around 2009ish, there was a rogue named Napster that someone invited to the guild I was in <Death and Taxes> as a casual/friend.

I never found out if he was actually the founder for real but I always wanted to add "geared up the founder of Napster in Sunwell" to my resume somehow.

Before Napster I remember the AOL warez scene where you could get a bot to send you 35 emails with the content broken up to download off AOLs servers.

Music sparked the revolution, not Napster. People freely sharing what they love. Sing it! <3

For the younger folks: Napster arose when CDs and radio were the dominant official commercial distribution platforms for music. CD ripping into MP3s and portable music players drove the need to share them, and the internet was new, but needed a more scalable way to exchange them. Back in the day, it was mostly IRC channels, but these were slow and cumbersome. So Napster, Gnutella, and Hotline took off. These gradually gave way to eDonkey2000/eMule, KaZaA, and Limewire. These also then gave way to BitTorrent and overlay p2p apps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

Everything is free now That's what they say Everything I ever done Gonna give it away Someone hit the big score They figured it out That we're gonna do it anyway Even if it doesn't pay

Everything Is Free Song by Gillian Welch

The day I discovered Napster is the day I unplugged. Wait forever for my favorite song as a kid to come on the radio or MTV? No thanks, the future was Napster.

I was putting a lot of effort into starting a career in the music business in the middle of the 90s. Thankfully I was not successful and „pivoted“ to IT in 1998.

Still remember the very last day Napster was alive. It was an absolute feeding frenzy as thousands and thousands of people were attempting to download everything they could before it all went away. Napster was, basically, a giant middle finger to the record companies and their control over what got released and their ability to put out albums containing one or two songs people wanted and then stuffed with what ever crap they could shovel into it.

The music business changed that day.

Tangent, sorry, but every time I hear a modern sound now I hear it as music and it’s beautiful. I still remember being able to listen to the HDD and feel it. I would place my hand on the case when it was struggling and I felt like a horse whisperer. I may have given it a few affirmative words of encouragement.

Outkast - Hey Ya.mp3

That was awesome. You would think of an song and right there you could download it, even more obscure stuff. Information right at your fingertips or something like that.

Man do I feel old now. I remember using that in college when it was brand new. These were in the days when Yahoo practically WAS the internet and Google was a scrappy upstart.

I remember trading mp3s on AOL before it. I remember how much effort it took to download an mp3 over a 56k modem. Every time my brother picked up the phone I had to start over. The first one I succesfully downloaded, after trying for what must have been days but felt like months, was Gettin' Jiggy Wit It and of course it turned out our 386 computer couldn't even really play an mp3 without stuttering.

I remember moving in with two friends, a block from campus, and putting a $2,500 Gateway computer (bought from the Gateway store in the strip mall, of course) on a credit card because we were going to split it three ways. You can probably guess how that ended up. Even though that was equivalent to about $5k today it was a midrange computer at best and, of course, was replaced a little over a year later. But, we did get broadband and it could play Starcraft and online poker just fine. Worth it!

I remember after Napster exploded, it had gotten bogged down with new traffic and they started offering multiple servers, and someone wrote some third-party software that let you switch between them at will until you could find the song you wanted without too terribly much wait.

I remember my first mp3 player, a Diamond Rio 500. It used a USB cord that, of course, had the pins reversed, so you couldn't just use any USB cord. It held about one hour of music, 1.5 if you bought a very expensive 32mb flash card. It ran for a week on one aaa battery. It cost almost $300, which would be like $500 today. God did I love that thing.

I remember the RIAA and MPAA suing file sharers. I remember lots of tech bros saying what idiots they were for trying to use the legal system to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I remember one particularly astute, well-known tech guy saying at a YC dinner (must have been 2007 or 2008) in response to a sneering question about it that not everyone who chooses a career outside of tech is an idiot, the people who run the media companies might know more about media than you, certainly understand that selling physical media's days are numered, and that what they were doing was really a delaying tactic while they figured out how to monetize content in the digital age. (The answer, it turned out, was things like Netflix and Spotify, but those were still a few years away. Netflix's first original content wasn't until 2012!)

I remember after Napster got sued into oblivion there were so many others. The toothpaste was out of the tube on file sharing. Limewire. Edonkey. Bittorrent. For every one they killed two more appeared. Fragmentation wasn't even an issue since everyone ran (and thus seeded) several.

Good nostalgia for a Saturday,.

In memory of Napster, whenever I use the search function of a file sharing network I am looking at for the first time, I search for ‘I Disappear’ by Metallica.

Never forget waste and Gnutella. Justin Frankel told Shawn Fanning Napster would get shutdown back when it had 50 users. Gnutella was made not to use a central server that could be shutdown.

A guy I know used to get music from me because he knew I had quite a large collection. I asked him why he was going through me when he could just download it himself, and he said, "I can't turn it up on my stereo without it getting all staticky." He had a car stereo worth more than some people's homes. The key difference between my collection and the collections he was referring to that sounded so staticky was that mine was archival, constantly maintained quality, and his was Napster 56kbps-128. And that is why torrents inflicted a lot of damage to a previously somewhat high-quality only scene. From that point on, it was like wading through a Goodwill bargain bin. Thankfully, it has rebounded in the time since.

I think the biggest thing Napster did was get everyone onto a computer. I don’t know if folks here remember, but before Napster, desktop computers at home were largely the destination for folks who worked at home, nerdy kids or the occasional school research. AOL changed _some_ of that but not as profoundly as Napster did. Not everyone had a reason to socialize online but everyone loved free music.

I remember a friend of mine coming to _me_ telling me about Napster. He was definitely a lot more socially adept than me and I knew he didn’t hang out on computers much so it was quite the shock that he knew about this thing that, by all accounts, was quite nerdy.

I briefly worked there. Like three Scaramuccis.

Never forget their bug when they only transferred 99% of the MP3 you wanted. Good times.

Napster was awesome but Audiogalaxy was way better: it just worked and had a remote interface which was magical at the time.

I am still using Soulseek.

I remember having 384KB symmetrical DSL in mid 2000 from Northpoint Communications, who would go out of business a few months later. I basically had business class service to my apartment because that it all they could provide, so I didn't complain. Obviously one of the first things I tested was Napster on my Bondi Blue iMac B computer and man could you download music so fast and easily!

In the 2010's, tech companies got together and tried to remove files from the user space.

When I look at the personalities who made a name for themselves in corporate piracy.. err.. file sharing, I keep noticing some of the people who've contributed a lot to the current suckage in tech.