There was something about piracy in the times of Napster, emule and the like. It really made you feel like you knew some incantation to get access to the whole world's information.
In practical terms, I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times.
Perhaps it was just the jump from scarce physical media to digital abundance. Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate, rather than stumbling on information by accident. Perhaps it's just nostalgia... but I feel we've lost something on the way, that we should have kept for the next generation.
Really? Spotify and Netflix pale in comparison to what Napster was. For all the content you think you have access to, Napster gave us the ability to see what other people had stored on their drives, stuff that they wanted to share rather than whatever media Spotify has a license for. That opened a world of discovery unmatched by any streaming service, or all of them put together. Want a club track from an unknown Russian group that only existed for a few nights back in 1998? That was on Napster. Netflix cannot deliver classic Simpsons episodes.
No streaming site will ever have licenses for the bizarre remixes of video game themes, or the Sesame Street theme, that made their way around Napster.
More than the music, though, Napster had chat rooms where you could get legit recommendations of new music that far exceeded the recommendation engines of today.
I'm actually logged into an hl server as we speak! (Higher Intellect) .. Still some of my favorite internet memories. I still insist my fast typing speed is due to chatting for hours and hours every night on there :)
What.CD is another unparalleled archive that is now gone for good. Rips of old beat tapes from the 90s, obscure electronica releases, all kinds of stuff that it seems won’t ever be found anywhere else.
You know, the only reason I've never joined a music tracker was because until this thread I'd forgotten what it was like to have a pure, limitless, non-commercial library of everything audio.
Not that many years before the dawn of BitTorrent, I was making, mixing, and trading APEs and FLACs of self-recorded tapes (dubs, live, local) and record collections in niche communities and channels that no longer exist- bullied off the net because they didn't make money for someone else. I lost everything to hardware failure a few years later and left the scene, but I'd be thrilled to find anything from back then still circulating.
I wonder if we can go back to that and still compensate artists.
Have a music sharing service accessible via subscription. You can share anything you want including copyrighted music. If someone downloads copyrighted music from you, detected via audio fingerprinting, the service will pay the copyright holder from subscription fees - kind of like how streaming services do it now.
Granted this would require copyright holders to all buy-in but I guess we can just exclude the music of non-cooperating copyright holders from the network, again via fingerprinting, although this “restricted form” of the service will be of lesser value.
Now that I think about it, in a way, I feel YouTube has already taken up this role in the aforementioned restricted form since it publishes everything without seeking anyone’s permission and only removed stuff if there are complains.
Arguably without Napster the major music labels would never have accommodated the iTunes Store and then Spotify. We’d still be slinging physical media around as the only non-radio option. If you didn’t live through that time I think it’s hard to appreciate how necessary the disruption was for moving the industry forward.
"If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again" should hang on the wall of every media distribution company.
Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear life, streaming services own fragments, and some teams even have their own dedicated networks.
Eventually I think it will break, and somebody is going to have to take a haircut. Likely cable, with a slight shot to the sports leagues who have benefitted from cables desperation and entrenched customers. Consumers may finally getting a reasonable-ish price (maybe $20 a month instead of $65).
I believe Disney is in the best place to execute this: owning ESPN, ABC, Disney+, and enough of Hulu. They've made the largest investment into the NFL of any company, but rights are all scattered between Amazon, CBS, Fox, and NBC until 2033! I could see them acquiring either the rest of Fox and/or CBS (who hold down Sunday slots), maybe work out a deal for RedZone with the NFL, and pull in noon and afternoon audiences, which might be the tipping point that gets consumers on board.
F1's online presence under Liberty Media is a great example of how to do it right. Every race gets same-day highlights on YouTube within hours, along with tons of interview and analysis content. You can be an F1 fan and not spend a penny to watch the entire season. But the premium option to watch full events live is still there, along with merchandising, (quite good) licensed video games, etc. As a result, F1 is growing faster than ever before and is profitable for the first time in years.
I'm not sure about that. The Serie A (Italian football/soccer) also puts same-hour highlights on YouTube within hours, but people still use illegal streaming all the time.
You lose a lot by not following a sport in real time, especially if such sport is part of your social environment, and likewise you lose a lot if you just see highlights.
For an example of a perfect digital play, I think the America's Cup would be it: live streaming, analysis, interviews, replays, highlights.
It competes directly with tv streaming, but it can do that because it has a much smaller following.
Football’s drama plays out over the course of the entire match, with the evolution of play happening minute to minute and any small mistake turning into big moments. Highlights take away from that drama.
The nature of F1 lends itself to this highlight model, as you can get 90% of the experience of a race from the 10 minutes of highlights extracted from 1.5hours of racing.
> "If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again"
Is it as easy to steal as it used to be? I'm not even sure I know where to get torrents reliably atm. Last I knew pirate bay was always being disrupted.
And is it easy to rip stuff when the source is streamed? Like dvds, music, software is easy to copy and distribute when it was just a cd to copy and some authentication to work around.
Im totally out of the piracy loop, maybe im wrong and still as easy as getting on to pirate bay and find a decently reviewed torrent?
Yes. The quality is better and it can be easily automated with Sonarr, Radarr et al. Torrents are not the way to go imho, but Usenet is amazing (notably it isn’t necessarily free).
There is content that isn’t available in my region or the legal options are worse in some way (resolution, app UI etc).
I pay for several streaming services (mainly to keep my conscience clear) but watch their shows via pirated means as the experience is better.
As the provider options get broader, the piracy option also gets more attractive as it’s all in one place.
As the sibling comment pointed out, it is SO much easier than it was.
I hopped back into it about 3y ago. I’ve got a NAS running on my local network with sonarr to snatch new tv shows and radarr for new movies.
In practice, if I decide I want to watch a movie I can reliably pull down something high quality within 2-10m (depending on how esoteric it is) and then be watching it on our tv.
When paramount decided not to let lower decks season 1 outside the US, I went to pirate bay and got it. Also had to get some torrent software having not used one for years. Worked flawlessly.
The risk of companies that literally refuse to take money for their products is people will just get them elsewhere, but once you force people to open that door, you knock down a major barrier.
Sports packages should license more camera feeds. Make the normal cheap package like it is now. Add in a deluxe package where you have 4+ camera options to look at. Bars would eat it up. Everyone has a large TV in there home. Very few people have the space for 4 large TVs in livingroom.
Can we avoid the conflation of piracy and stealing? Stealing under the pre-internet definition has very different consequences from the duplication of copyable resources.
At the individual level, you're denying the copyright holder and the dependency chain of rent extractors the money from a purchase transaction they're legally entitled to, if you were willing to pay and jump through whatever hoops were in place as a potential customer. Game of thrones streaming issues showed people don't like hoops or shitty service.
If you're not a potential customer, and don't share the media, copyright holder et al have lost nothing. If you do share, they're out whatever percentage of people who you passed the data to that were potential customers.
If I own something via other distribution channels or physical media, I have no compunction against downloading, nor if I know I will never pay for it otherwise. I have on occasion tried out software I've pirated and paid for a real license after continued use, or purchased physical media despite having the album or movie from a torrent. I have to assume that I'm not an outlier, so it occurs to me that piracy may actually be a net positive influence on media companies revenue. The marketing of content is good in terms of exposure, software reviews and recommendation, and so forth.
It may actually be a social good, depending on the culture at the time, creating more free channels of distribution and communication about content products, and services that otherwise wouldn't exist or would be stifled.
It's not theft. At worst it's cheating at the game of commerce.
Especially this part. Spotify in particular is bad this way, with the artists getting a nearly invisibly small slice of the money. Youtube isn't much better. Reduce the friction that prevents me from giving my money directly to the artists to support their work and I'd be a much bigger paying consumer of online media.
> Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess.
I would watch way more baseball if it weren't for MLB.com. It's got some OK features, but overall the service is a garbage fire technically. They stuck with Flash until the bitter end. But even if they fixed the technical issues, the restrictions on access cripple the service.
Granted what I'm talking about is far below the level of the major music labels, but I still buy music on CD. Then I rip it to my network drive when I get home. The reason is that my family is into music that's way off the mainstream, and we've asked the musicians directly: "Which way of buying your music nets you the most actual money?" The answer is still buying their CD.
I'm a musician myself but have no interest in recording or selling music.
>The reason is that my family is into music that's way off the mainstream, and we've asked the musicians directly: "Which way of buying your music nets you the most actual money?" The answer is still buying their CD.
I guess this depends on the genre, area, etc. But whenever I've talked to (low to mid level) musicians, live performances are basically the only way they make money.
The sale of music is so ridiculously low for them, particularly considering the low percentage of profit they get, that it might as well be considered an ad for the live performance.
I'm certainly at that level myself. The music I play is done when it hits the walls of the venue. Or my living room. ;-) The main financial impact of recording for me is not having to spend any money on it.
There's a middle level out there. The genres I'm familiar with are things like folk, fiddling, some classical. Some of those people are good enough to travel a little bit, and have a supportive following. Sometimes a local organization will help arrange for a venue, and promote it. Those folks always have a briefcase full of CDs with them.
The content you readily have access to now is farfar more curated by others than you realize, largely because it's so easy to use.
It's a bit of legwork and both legally and ethically questionable, but a modern usenet|(radarr||sonarr)|nzbget|jellyfin pipeline makes the legal providers seem obscenely limited.
It doesn't matter who has negotiated what license with whom -- if I want to watch a bit of media, I can usually do so in high quality with a few clicks and a few minutes wait. (rarely more than 30 minutes for the 4k good stuff)
The tools around Usenet are amazing and easily blow any legal offering out of the water. I don't currently use it, but when I did years ago, it was fairly easy to setup a completely automated system to download any shows/movies I'm interested in at the right quality level and make them available to me within minutes of release. I still miss it and with the increase of competing services I've gravitated more towards piracy than I have since my Usenet days.
You got a brief, glorious whiff of what a world without artificial scarcity is like. We'll get another whiff when someone invents Star Trek style replicators, before they are also outlawed by the moneyed interests who benefit from lack of abundance.
that is exactly what parent said. information replication is free, but it has been siloed by the large coprorations because big tech trumps prosperity . Looks like star trek got their abundance utopia wrong.
I don't use Spotify just because whole genres are not there. And I'm not talking about some obscure music from 150 years ago. Even Jungle Tekno from the early to mid 90s can't be found. The only sources are some 50 years old random guy fondly remembering their MDMA-fueled glory days and uploading their records on YouTube, vinyl from Discogs, or private trackers.
I agree. Thinking about it, probably to do with discovery. In those days, the idea of just mindlessly flipping through content didn't really exist, except on TV or radio. So we had to ask for recs, google for top charts and new albums, etc to know what to find, specifically.
Today it's too easy. Why research, Spotify/Netflix and the like will dump more in your face than you could handle in a lifetime.
Added to that, there's not much concept of 'building a collection' anymore. It used to be a personal point of pride. I have 3000 songs! Today the model is to just stream everything on the fly.
The only music services that I find provides a similar experience to the discovery experience within Napster are Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Both encourage you to "snoop" at other users' collections, and provide an enormous range of independent and esoteric music.
> I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc)
I don't. I am tired of looking up a movie in some service I pay for and getting nothing. It doesn't matter what streaming company I choose, there's always something that just isn't there.
Music? If you stray from the mainstream path, you're on your own. Mercifully YouTube is still a respectable repository of music. There are often gaps in the playlists now but what can you do?
Back then we had instant access to everything humanity had ever created. The monopolists ruined it all and replaced it with their garbage services.
Modern forms of pirating still exist give you far more control over how you use the content. I’ll pirate something I’ve bought just so I can fix the subtitle syncing issues that for some reason plague streaming services.
It's because you were younger. It happens to everyone.
You think younger people now don't feel the same way you did? And that they won't wistfully be talking about the times that Youtube gave them all the content they could ever dream of?
I remember as a youth I was very excited to find an early cam of Matrix Revolutions on Kazaa, only to find it was some porno that wasn't even very good.
respectfully disagree. i remember also things before the internet of 2000, like TV, but not fondly at all. and in my mind somewhere around 2004 things strayed from the linear progress i had in mind for the future of the internet.
what has changed culturally is pseudonymity became real names, with all the baggage that comes with it, and that makes people more conservative. If you want an objective measure of that, look at the attitudes towards nudity. Nowadays, crypto is a space that brings back anonymity, and you can see all the chaos it brings with it. but chaos is mystery and people also love those
They prominently use SSO, encourage the use of their app, and embed dozens of trackers.
They're actively trying to develop social features and get people to embed their identities.
This creates stickiness, a moat, and aids monetization.
Look to Twitter. They're forcing phone number association and blocking valid accounts from logging in without one. This will happen to Reddit too eventually.
I've been pleased to see that YouTube Content ID usually just results in attribution (a good thing!) and monetisation (ads) - it's not totally illegal to upload someone else's song.
There are a couple of times when it has been totally deleted though (Universal Studios Japan deleting Monoeyes songs), so that's why I prefer not to use my personal Google account for sharing content - losing access to GMail as a result of sharing something on YouTube is not a risk I'd like to take.
I wish there were a way to bulk-upload music (from, say, the 1.3 TB MySpace Dragon Hoard), but personal accounts are limited to 50 songs per day.
what was that service in the post-Napster world, it was sort of exclusive, very well curated (so to speak), you needed an invite to join, even music industry insiders used it, described by Trent Reznor as the "world's greatest record store"... till it got shut down.
I think it used a pig as a mascot. Then there was an even more secret attempt to revive it
I think that's because not everyone had access, inclination or capability to access all that. Speeds were way lesser, bandwidth wasn't unlimited, most people were still on CDs and were more keen on converting them for the MP3 players.
Now that everyone can listen to all the music at any time using user-friendly apps, maybe it isn't as rare anymore.
Nowadays, everyone's on the internet, practically all the time, with everything standardized, be it interfaces, commerce or buzzwords/jargon.
From 'The Incredibles' -
>> If everyone is special, no one is.
“Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate”
It’s not just you. Spotify makes you think “here’s a song similar to the last one” but I’m sure that algorithm is skewed by this record label or that, or the cost per play is cheaper for this one, and it’s not “discovery” anymore but spoonfed
There was no algorithm to "guide" your search, there was no limitation, no manipulation. Just you get what you see, and what you get - is all there is. Everything from there, was experience-wise a downgrade.
far more doesnt mean far more wide range. With P2P you could browse a server for the popular, as well as a bunch of things you d never heard. And it wasnt just music, just about anything , specifically very obscure stuff. anarchist material was something often uploaded. It was like you could see the whole jungle. Google is instead a zoo.
(Incidentally, what is the current evolution of gnutella, or any P2P that allows to browse the remote server?)
When I was an undergraduate student at a conservative university back circa 2001 I had the Napster binary in my home directory because I was curious about how it worked and was doing some packet analysis in my spare time. About halfway into the semester I tried logging into my account on a lab computer to do an assignment only to get an access denied.
When I asked the lab assistant about it, he pulled up my info and then proceeded to lecture me on the spot about how bad I was for having that file. Note that I didn't have a single MP3 file on any school computers. "I see you have Napster. We scanned for Napster and disabled all the accounts that have it. Don't you know that stealing is wrong? You're totally in violation of school policy, are abusing our lab, and should be reported to the administration for disciplinary action. I guess I can re-enable your account if you promise to delete Napster right away."
This same school freaked out when I wrote a buffer overflow lab for a computer security class. "We will NEVER teach students how to undermine the security of computer software in THIS department!!"
This same lab assistant went on to accidentally delete everybody's home directory in the entire department with 3 weeks left in the semester (a failed attempt to write a script that correctly deletes core files from a cron job at 1:00 in the morning). And he also failed to make sure that backups were being done (they weren't).
I’ve fond memories of repeatedly escaping punishment for breaking into the school’s network, because it was too embarrassing to them to admit that a 14 year old had owned them.
Napster didn’t yet exist, so we were maintaining a huge (for the time) shared library of mp3s, VCDs, games, and all the rest - this proved extremely popular at boarding school, where they shut off the network and internet access at 8pm (or so they thought). We played cat and mouse for a while until we compromised the physical security of cabling, and started just splicing in, and at that point they realised they weren’t going to win.
We eventually reached a détente, where I ran a shadow network and piracy hub between 8pm and 6am, and didn’t interfere with their operations, and they didn’t interfere with mine. By the sixth form, I was helping them harden their network, with the understanding that after I left they’d allow my successor to continue to run our parasitic network - which they did, until it was voluntarily wound down in the face of obsolescence.
I vaguely recall there was some kind of chat built in to Napster and it was the era when people did sometimes turn off their computers and/or where in some countries they paid by the minute for internet. I recall getting a message from a German on the other side of the world that I was able to read and respond to because I just happen to speak German letting me know he was headed to bed but that he'd leave his computer on so I could finish grabbing my files. Those are the kind of quirky interactions I miss about the good old days. Likewise, the chats and email exchanges in the early 90s before this web thing came along. There were relatively few people on the internet, so the signal to noise was strong and it was easy to connect with experts.
Ah, yes, chatting on Napster :) It was just IRC with DC, while the GUI was mostly built around the DC.
I was sharing some music from the early times of classic heavy metal, the NWOBHM. A compilation album done by Lars Ulrich with the songs that had inspired him. One day I received a message from someone in England. He was very surprised to find a song from the band of his brother-in-law on napster. He had always thought it was a band that had amounted to nothing. A week later I chatted with the bass player or drummer (I forgot) where he talked about the band. They felt forced to either go commercial, like Def Leppard, or go thougher, like trash metal from the US. The band was divided and that is where it ended. I forgot the name of the band.
By the way I was using a console client for linux, nap.c. Does anyone remenber that? I ran it on my 486 pc on a console. Just like virtual tty's it had virtual screens built in with search, shares, chat, etcetera.
μTorrent had(has?) a chat feature as well. Quite sad that on public trackers like mininova it was basically the place where everyone would write SEED PLS and not much else.
And here you are on Hacker News, chatting with thousands of the smartest people in the world. This is the kind of quirky interaction you should be enjoying Right Now.
Reminds me of the time I saw a bookshelf in the bedroom of my brother's friend. Half were books I loved and half were books I'd never heard of. I got some new favorite authors out of that discovery :)
Napster is one of the two or three products that spawned a completely different world, entirely tossing established and antiquated rules on their head.
Of course, very directly, Spotify would not exist without Napster.
But a step further, it opened the eyes to end-users about their collective power, and the beauty of distributed distribution. It was the first proof that "regular" users would buy into such a thing. Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof.
I think p2p was so successful that the music industry had to change. They had to be more convenient or would lose all the control on media distribution. Users of modern streaming services owe a lot to p2p users of early.
>Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof.
You say that, but before Napster, there was Seti(?), a program that would search for extra-terrestrial life - by distributing the work load on top your personal laptop
SETI@home and Folding@home at least provided intrinsic value from their computations. It'd be nice if we could have a coin based on protein folding or climate simulations or something.
There's at least one coin that does that. It's a Nano clone (not sure if clone is the right word), called Banano.
You "mine" it by joining their folding@home team, and you get banano based on how many folding@home work units you complete. It's pre-mined though, so maybe that doesn't quite fit.
There was another cryptocurrency I remember which was mildly popular years ago called Primecoin, which attempted to find a certain type of prime numbers. It's interesting, but I'm not sure if it ever provided any actual usefulness from the work performed.
I don't see any reason that a cryptocurrency couldn't be tied to something like protein folding or climate simulations. People just don't choose to do so.
When bitcoin mining first became a thing, it felt like they'd found a way to make distributed computing (like the seti and protein folding projects) profitable.
McMaster University, 2001. Ontario, Canada.
The school took a novel approach to combat this. "Rez-x" was a file sharing system that was limited to the school's subnet. It didn't prevent you from using Napster, but by providing p2p access on the local (fast!) network, people just used it instead. So, rather than blocking the main pipe, they just gave a way more appealing local option (in a time where dialup was still somewhat common).
Back in the day I remember tweaking and repackaging a Gnutella client which was preset to restricted its traffic to the university LAN.
It didn't take off though: The first-mover advantage of "that one guy who runs a Direct Connect server which you can also chat on" was too strong. (I just disagreed with the centralization.)
I was working in IT at a large British university when Spotify launched, and we had to block certain ports because early versions of Spotify used a peer to peer swarm to reduce the load on their servers, and it was so popular with students that it was completely jamming up the network.
Circa 2002, Penn State limited each on-campus student connection to (my memory is fuzzy so don't hold me to exact numbers) 1.5GB combined upload and download per week. But, anything transferred within the Penn State network did not count towards the cap. This is where I should say that Penn State has 12+ campuses spread throughout the entire state of Pennsylvania so we could transfer stuff between Erie, PA and State College, PA for no penalty.
This lead to the rise of an internal Direct Connect network that allowed students to form our own internal file sharing network that was approximately functionally equivalent to Napster and the like.
This also lead to the complete and total network saturation of some parts the dorms where we clearly had clusters of students trying to get their download on. It's just really hard to try to understand how people will respond to available incentives; not just here but in all areas of life.
Fuck I remember this!!!! There was dc hub off campus in 2003 because they had shut them down internally. It was a genius solution. The hub was dc.kicks-ass.net! You connected to this url to get the file lists and then no penalties to transfer the data in between dorms!
I remember the first time I saw a file download faster than 80mbps was using i2hub. It was 4am and I remember thinking at the time "shit, I'm gonna get flagged" and sure enough my dorm internet was disconnected the next morning. Fun times.
Many long years ago now in a past life, I was a network security guy for a big research university. Overall, that was a pretty fun job: universities make for a target rich environment. The downside was we that we were responsible for handling DMCA complaints to the university (this was a relatively new law and p2p sharing was just starting to become mainstream).
We'd take the complaint, check the netflow logs to verify that the IP in question really was running file sharing software at the same time, turn off the Ethernet port, report them to the Dean of Students, turn them back on after the deans talked to them, etc., etc.
My boss at the time was sick of doing the RIAA's dirty work for them (back then the RIAA was way more vigorous about enforcement than the MPAA. I don't remember why). So he decided that we were going to make a web site to give step-by-step instructions with screenshots to show how to disable file uploading in every p2p client available. We didn't care what the kids were downloading because the DMCA complaints only came in from uploads.
Fast-forward a year or so and the site is pretty popular. We'd get asked by at least one or two other universities a week if they could copy our instructions locally for their students. Being a university, of course we would encourage it and only ask for attribution for the copyrighted text and images.
Every now and then, I'd Google around and see who was using our instructions, and one day I noticed a .com show up in the results, which was unusual. I don't remember what the name of the site was, but it was some site trying to convince people that copyright infringement is bad and the music industry really are the good guys, etc. I know for sure we didn't get any requests from anyone like that, so I did some digging.
The site didn't have a DMCA contact listed (as required), so it took some serious digging to find out who really owned the site. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, it was owned and operated by none other than the Recording Industry Association of America. They had stolen the entire site, text, screenshots and all, removed our copyright information, and rebranded the pages, claiming the work as their own.
I dug through my email to find the most recent takedown notice they had sent us, changed all the names to reflect the current situation and fired it off to the RIAA's General Counsel. About 10m later, I got a phone call from a very concerned attorney. I genuinely couldn't stop laughing as he was talking, so I referred the matter to our attorneys and thought no more of it.
It sucks to know that your career has peaked so early. It's all been downhill from there.
Facebook is now using Facebook News to publish positive uplifting articles about how Facebook is a force for good in the world! In other words, pure propaganda.
Yes piracy is bad and all but as a college student, Napster was such as life saver. You could literally download any song you wanted to listen to. I also remember another application called Kazaa that was popular as well (circa 2000-2002ish)
I think audiogalaxy was the real pioneer in p2p. Audiogalaxy satellite, IIRC, ran an ftp server on your machine while at the same time indexed your files and sent the list to audiogalaxy, the web service. From there, anyone could search for mp3 and download from users currently on-line. It was the begining.
It soon became very clear the problems of centralization for this purpose, decentralized networks thrived. Most proprietary implementation eventually died. The open ones, emule and gnutella2, although a small shadow of what they were, are still alive.
In the meantime bittorrent evolved and the industry had to bow to streaming services.
But, if anyone still wants to "fell the napster taste", the closest I know today is soulseek. There's a good client, called nicotine+, that works very well last time I tried.
Audiogalaxy felt magical to use at the time. Being able to leave the Satellite running at home, queue up songs to download from school via the web site, and listen to them by the time you're back home, was... incredible. There was truly nothing like it back then.
It also had a much larger indie community than Napster. I discovered so much good music on Ag that I still listen today.
I remember Audiogalaxy, but cannot remember if it was before, after or basically concurrent with Napster..? Guess couldn’t have been before because Napster was the first right?
Almost the same time, Napster was slightly earlier, at least in adoption for me and my friends. Audiogalaxy was better but didn't catch on as much, that's when things really started fracturing.
I used napster in junior college and audiogalaxy at my 4-year, so at least for me, Napster was first, but there was some time when both were around and usable.
Audiogalaxy had a Linux server as well, IIRC. And it preferred transfers from nearby networks (assuming they were numbered contiguously anyway), which was nice for popular stuff so it wouldn't clog external connections in dorms. Also nice that it showed you all the different versions so you could get both versions when bands made a shame on you release.
I don't like the use of the term "piracy". Piracy is taking a vessel. Common crimes committed by pirates are homicide, kidnapping, rape... It is all very different from copying a file to someone.
Of course, "the industry" doesn't care equating one with another.
I don't like this sort of argument against using the term "piracy". Words change meaning over time, what you're saying is like saying that we shouldn't call people "nice" because it used to mean something different (formerly an insult, apparently). When I hear "piracy" having grown up with computers the first thing that comes to my mind is not pirates taking control or a vessel on the high seas, but rather what pops in to my head is the pirate bay and other sites I've known over the years.
Also this same guy managed to acquire the rights for Subspace from VIE. It was rebranded as Continuum. I started playing Subspace as a teenager on v1.34 and continued to enjoy it through college thanks in large part to Priit’s efforts. I still log in every year or so and many of the same folks still play. It wasn’t just saving a game, but a community.
UC Berkeley used packet shaping to make Napster slow as molasses if you were downloading from someone outside the UC network (or Stanford because we had a direct connection to them). So you basically kept retrying till you found someone who was on a UC network connection and then noted their username so you could hit them up again next time.
I have one memory of Napster. My senior year of HS, 2000-2001, one of my teachers told me I could skip an assignment in exchange for helping her install it on her (school-owned) computer. It would make a better story if the class was Ethics, but it was pretty close--World Religions.
I love the layers of irony here...The natural assumption to make here is it would be ironic for an ethics teacher to be using napster, but in fact the real irony (imo) is that it is in fact a very interesting ethical question when it comes to pirating. Not something I intend to discuss here but it is something interesting I think about semi-frequently.
I'm so happy to see so many people mention Hotline in here! Aahhh the good ol' days :) Indeed, when Napster came along, it wasn't too surprising to me .. that is, other than the true p2p nature of it, rather than server/client/tracker. That was indeed awesome. But there was also a bit less accountability so you got a lot of sketchy/crappy stuff, whereas hl servers (and users) had somewhat of a reputation to uphold (IMO).
I tried really hard to get into Hotline, I still remember the "welcome to Hotline" girl. Every hotline server I tried was either terrible or so full it was impossible to connect or use. Never had a good experience with it. Guess I wasn't in the loop enough.
Curious if any P2P networks existed before Hotline. I recall using it briefly before Napster burst onto the scene, and always considered it to be the pioneer.
Those were exciting times. I had dialup internet access back then. I spent a day hanging out with a friend who had a cable modem, downloading music all day long.
I was at college during this time. My roommate was downloading various Linux distributions and the campus IT department came to our room asking why we were using so much bandwidth and to please stop.
I don’t recall Napster.com being an issue but P2P sharing sites (limewire etc) was definitely huge. And even bigger, was people setting up local file shares to allow fellow classmates to download files off your desktop.
I think our entire campus ran off of a T3 line (45 Mbps) which was stupid fast back in the day to connect to public internet.
Off topic: what ever happened to “Internet2”. There was a ton of talk about this back around this time.
This was just a bit before my time, but I was in early HS. I still remember being curious and looking up what it would cost to have a single T3 line installed, and it was tens of thousands of dollars.
I recall circa 1999? Tape recording a live performance of Britney Spears, "Hit Me Baby One More Time" from the Mark & Lard BBC radio 1 show by the UK indie band Travis.
I later shared this on Napster after digitising from the phono in on my cyrix 333MHz PC.
I often wonder if that exact MP3 file still exists somewhere
Back in the early 2000s we were consulting to a lot of universities and other organisations seeking solutions for this. We were helping them deploy middle boxes such as those from Packetshaper, F5 and the like. And because universities had a "no censorship" expectation from academics and students, what the IT administrators liked was the ability to detect and shape the traffic that was considered hogging bandwidth needlessly. That way they weren't blocking Napster, LimeWire, and the like but just slowing it down so that miscreants went home and used their own ISP connection rather than the organisation.
Whippersnappers! I remember the post to the homepage of the emulation group Damaged Cybernetics, that said "We are investigating the use of MPEG Layer III compression for music piracy."
I witnessed the dawn of the MP3 as a piracy tool and hence a cultural phenomenon. Without that post, there would be no Apple Music, no iTunes, no iPod, no Napster, none of it.
One private study on a campus network found that the distribution of titles followed a power law. A handful of songs capturing most of the volume, and then hundreds of songs with only 1 or 2 shares.
It was perplexing to find a business model that could support independant artists.
Most of the music on Napster was 128 kbps. Apple TV+ streams video at 40 Mbps.
I have no idea what this means in terms of numbers, but the fact that streaming video is so common today and was virtually non-existent back then means the bandwidth consumption of the average household is probably a couple orders of magnitude greater now.
In practical terms, I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times.
Perhaps it was just the jump from scarce physical media to digital abundance. Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate, rather than stumbling on information by accident. Perhaps it's just nostalgia... but I feel we've lost something on the way, that we should have kept for the next generation.