NAPSTER Memories

Was reminded of this on a podcast recently and brought back memories of my first DSL line purely to download songs faster.

The thrill of watching the songs download was intoxicating.

I know it was technically illegal but what irked me was that the music industry had been promising mixed cassette tapes for over 15 yrs and yet they were clinging to the model of forcing us to buy albums/CDs to get the one song we wanted so I said "screw you."

After Napster, I think I went to BitTorrent or LimeWire.

Do you remember?

 

Napster was my dream come true, as were LimeWire and Gnutella. I can only imagine what it would have been like if we were cooking any faster than 28.8Kbps. And when Napster shut down, I went straight to HotBot searches and raw downloads.

It was a hobby of mine for a year or two. I had my colleagues/friends make a 20-song playlist, and I wouldn't give up until I had found every last song, no matter how obscure, and put them on a mix CD.

 

At a shop 20 years ago, Limewire was all the rage, when the Web was really coming into its own.

Downloaded so much music onto 50 or so CDs ... which I eventually lost.

 

One of the fun side effects of Spotify and Shazam is learning how much mislabeled shit there was on Napster. No, Phish has never covered "Gin and Juice," and there isn't a remix of The Muppets or Cantina theme by KMFDM.

 

I still use Napster. Yeah, ok, I have a subscription to what used to be Rhapsody back in the day, and they bought the rights to the name and changed the name of their service, but it's Napster.

I've used the interface for years and I'm comfortable with it and I can find what I want to hear, so I'm still with it.

 

This was the first thing I thought of. There was a cover of the Psychedelic Furs' "Pretty In Pink" by some band called Automatic 7 that was always listed as Social Distortion.

And no, Bob Dylan didn't do "Stuck in the Middle."

 

Thanks to Napster, Weird Al did about 100 more parodies that aren't available anywhere else.

 

First there was the dialup handshake. If you got in, excellent.
I didn't use Napster a whole lot because I moved on to Kazaa.
You'd dial up, download a dozen songs at bedtime, wake up the next morning and realize half of them had cut out.
Bastards.
If a few porn videos got downloaded along the way, who was I to complain.

 

Napster and Kazaa were both fucking awesome. I ripped so many CDs that I lost count and I still have some. And yes, this was still in the dial-up age.

A close cousin was ripping YouTube sound to MP3, which went away as well.

My most poignant experience is I stayed up all night at my mom's request ripping a CD for my grandmother's funeral. Like I said, it was dial-up and it was slow AF, which was why it was all night.

 

Wow, this thread really brings back good memories.

Kazaa was like Christmas every night for a while. I'd load up 20 or 30 songs before bed, and there they were in the morning. I quickly built up my own library of about 2,000 favorite songs back in the day when that was really something.

Finally moved on when the rumors came around about legal crackdowns and huge fines for every downloaded file. (Holy shit, will they track me down?) But what a treasure trove it was at the time, including all kinds of stuff I hadn't heard in years, right there in my own computer jukebox. The allure of "something for nothing" was a big rush, especially for music files. Those were the days, right!?!

I still have that song library on an old laptop and a couple of backup drives, though it's not needed anymore. Worth a little monthly fee now to have instant access to almost everything I want, but the days of Napster and Kazaa changed the world in a good way, and I felt only a little guilt for ripping all those files.

Sorry not sorry, Henley!

 

Man that mirrors what I did and thought.

 

Always thought Weird Al captured the whole era and phenomenon perfectly with "Don't Download This Song":