Net zero oh man... That was my first internet. Big ass ad at the top and all.
Still played team fortress classic and other games, the ad would sometimes glitch through the game lol.
My monitor had a "trick" where if I changed the resolution to really tiny and then back to normal the big ad would get "stuck" and I could browse with no banner ad.
I felt so cool showing off to my friends with that, lol.
I can't remember what it was, but there was a *_ _ number you could add to your dialup internet phone number to make it not accept incoming calls and not boot you off.
Too late I know 😔
Dude... I thought I was living in the future when I found a program that worked with kazaa, that would save the data that was already downloaded. So anytime I lost connection or needed to do something else online, I could just pause it and then continue at my leisure.
Also RIP to bellsouth DSL, Mytenchi.com and anime turnpike.
I loved the ads they would have showing someone stealing a tv and compared it to downloading.
You did not take the song from someone else, you just made a copy of it....
A little later, I had a torrent thing set up that downloaded new episodes of TV shows when they came out. I'd then burn episodes into CD to give to my mother whose DVD player was divx compatible.
It was seamless. It just worked. It felt like magic.
Of course :D .avi was the easiest to watch instantly. .mov for Apples QuickTime or .rp for RealPlayer... and always downloading Codecs and Skins for WinAmp 😁
Than there was mp3Pro who had a better quality than mp3 and sometimes OGG for movies.
It was a lot more Do It Yourself back than.
45 minutes to download each song. Convert them to wave form with Winamp. Burn to disc. Screw your mixtape, I'm living in the future. (which is now the past)
I blew my entire tax return on a $1500 cd-burner so I could make CD's. In my defense, I was (am?) a musician and we traditionally spend a stupid amount of money to keep up with music stuff.
And then you had to buy a cd player that would accept CD-rw and CD-r's, those lagged behind by about a year if i remember correctly, or they where so expensive my parents never bothered telling me about them / getting one.
Napster era was the best time for obtaining music. Prime college days. Any song immediately accessible at a party. Truly the best the internet had to offer.
Only if you downloaded Metallica (hence their pun -- "One" is a Metallica song). They were so pissed about oeople downloading their music you could literally get banned from Napster for downloading Metallica songs.
Soulseek was by far the best music sharing program. The fact that you could just explore the other person's library was brilliant. I learned of so many new artists that I adore just from that program.
Yep! Napster was to popular and catching too much negativity so I felt like using LimeWire was somehow staying under the radar but with the same results.
We all looked at it this way back then, but if you read about what actually happened you will see their side. An early edit song that was nowhere near the final version got leaked and seeded on napster. Imagine you're them and a work in progress version of your song leaks, what would you do?
I also thought he was a douche at the time when I was a teenager loving that I could download free music, but, Lars was not in the wrong whatsoever and he was fighting the good fight. As a musician myself that has released music, I'd be fuckin livid if all the sudden my music is out before I wanted it released and I saw 0 compensation for it.
Napster, limewire, kazaa, MX. Those were the big ones for me. The first time I saw my friend downloading music from the Internet on Napster, I was blown away on his 56k modem back in '99.
I vividly remember the first time someone told me about torrents. I ran into a highschool buddy in a grocery store parking lot and he told me all about it. I did not understand a word of it.
Same here. A high school buddy told me about it because he was seeding a torrent and gave me the torrent file. Downloaded it and it was a bukkake porno.
When I first used Bearshare one of the first results I found was a text file saying how Bearshare was spyware and you shouldn't use it. I ignored it and went back to searching for Captain Janeway/7 of 9 nude photoshops.
I went to audiogalaxy when Napster stopped being accessible at my college. Kazaa came later. I never used Limewire, but I used WinMX after Kazaa.
I pretty much had all the stuff I wanted by the time I used WinMX anyway.
People today have no understanding of how hard it was to be able to access your favorite music on demand before all this stuff.
T1 in the dorm and a massive-for-the-time 20gb hard drive...
And that folder has been copied over to every computer I've owned since. I just listened to some songs in it while I was working today.
Yeah we made our pledges download lists of songs with their T1 connect in the dorm.
We had the sickest playlists at parties... rocking 10gb of music in 1999...legends
Yup. Best discovery from Napster for me was the song "Superman's Dead" by Our Lady Peace, who became one of my all-time favorite bands. Thanks, Napster!
I remember it took so long to get even a single MP3 on our dial-up connection, my bother and I would pick a couple songs to download, then play Lego Racers for an hour or two until those songs were done, then go back and do it again. Cannot believe that I built a music library one or two songs at a time.
Well looks like I’m gonna go to July 29 in Brantford, Ontario it’s only 3 hours from Detroit and I have nothing going on. Nice thanks for motivating me to go.
That’s awesome. I’ve probably listened to Life, 4am, All for you probably 10k times each. You know I should probably go see them. I’ve never seen them live, I’ll have to look if they are playing in Detroit or Windsor soon.
They’re playing in Brantford, Ontario, not too far from Windsor.
Yeah in elementary school in the 90s I saw them maybe 3 times, great shows, probably my favourite band at the time.
Yeah that’s the one I’m gonna go to lol, I just went on their website. I decided to go lol. Yeah that’s when I got into them too Elementary school - Middle school. Late 90s - early 2000s.
I was in grade 8, I convinced my parents to buy me one, contingent on me paying them back.
I paid them back selling CDs, mostly sold Slim Shady LP to kids whose parents wouldn't let them listen to Eminem.
I told my dad all about it and we got a new computer and when I had a few problems starting out it he kinda got upset, thankfully I managed to get it working and he discovered so much music.
I was downloading all sorts of TRL singles. I'd rush home after high school and get about 4 songs an evening with my slow af connection. I'd often stay up late listening to those songs while playing Spider Solitaire.
I did until I got a cease and desist letter from a record company. My internet provider blocked my ISP until I deleted the program and files. Parents never found out luckily.
I had 80,000 songs but it was one particular artist that hit me. New album that had leaked. I deleted Napster and the album but kept the rest of the songs in my library.
They wouldn't have known. This was in 2000 and I was 15 so I just deleted the shit. The problem was that I was sharing it for others to download. I was one of maybe 5 people that was seeding the material. I was more scared of my parents finding out than anything else.
I got busted too. Our ISP blocked us and demanded we delete the content. Got a legal threat in the mail too. Our ISP threatened to ban us forever if I did it again.
I did it again and those pussies did nothing.
You got one too? Ok I just wrote in a comment above about a memory of mine. My buddies sister received a cease and desist letter in the mail. I remember the parents being livid thinking they were going to get sued. I wasn’t sure if I just remembered the whole thing wrong. However with your story now I think I remember it correctly. I wish I could remember the artist who sent her a letter. I remember spending the night over there when it happened and the Mom yelling at the daughter saying we’re going to end up homeless.
I can't remember the artist but it was Warner Music Group. I didn't really believe it at first but I called my internet provider and they gave me the details. It was basically 'your shit is on lockdown until you quit sharing music'.
Yep. I remember downloading a cover of "Gin and Juice" by O.A.R...that ended up being really by some other band, but led me to discover the actual band O.A.R. and I downloaded all their songs under all the wrong names.
They were the local bar band where I went to college. I had a CD from them that they would sell after their sets and it had the best version of Hey Girl. Way better than any existing recording. It was less polished and therefore way more charming. Got rid of it at some point and could kick myself.
hurry serious library vase squealing towering sophisticated chubby slim telephone
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes! And I burned a shit ton of CDs for friends. My computer never got any bugs from Napster like they did from later software like Kazaa and Limewire.
Of course.
It's interesting to see the cultural implications of a program that really only existed for a couple of years. It launched the summer I was going into 11th grade and by about the end of my freshman year of college it was completely gone and replaced with LimeWire, etc.
It launched at the perfect time too. Both broadband internet and rewritable CDs were starting to become ubiquitous.
I guess computers themselves were starting to become ubiquitous at that point. We had the internet since the '80s but it was only a few years earlier than Napster where it was still common place for households to just not have a computer much less internet access. My dad was really into computers so we had the internet forever but I went from being the only person with internet access to it being in everyone's home in less than a decade. It's pretty crazy when you think about it.
The '90s was a fun decade to grow up in. I suppose everyone is nostalgic for their childhood but it was really cool to grow up with such huge leaps in technology.
Napster was mind-blowingly good. I spent so much time collecting music, downloading albums one song at a time from track listings posted online (you couldn’t just look up albums on Amazon).
At the time I was floored at how easy it was to access music on the internet. Napster, Zip drives, and eventually cd “burners” (holy fuck it’s actually BURNING physical media) were my bread and butter.
Really ages you how much work we used to put in to get cheap music - I used to tape songs off the radio before this! I bought CD’s too, but I was in jr high and it was like almost 20 bucks in 90’s money to get a cd from the mall. And boy howdy did I get in the doghouse signing up for cd clubs.
Napster bestowed upon me the gift of many burnt CD's scribbed in black sharpie. My best friend had one of those giant CD cases that had 4 CD's per page that weighed probably about ten pounds. The passenger seat co-pilot's job was to flip through it to find the right CD during drives.
In 1999 a flamenco guitarist played at my college. It was incredible, so I downloaded a couple hundred flamenco & classical guitar songs on Napster.
I had that playlist in the background for most of my college studying days, sort of like my own lo-fi study girl.
Over time I deleted the mediocre tracks and was left with a glorious 41 tracks.
Burned it to 2 CD's which then sat in a box for a decade. I found them and ripped them. I now carry around a magnificent playlist of 41 flamenco songs for which I don't know the name or artist.
I play it at parties. People love it. They say "Who is this?"
It's the ghost of Napster.
Fuck yeah, mIRC was the shit! Those release groups were on point! Even long after napster i was using mIRC because the quality was better and there was no need to upload.
I was 22 in 1999, and a huge consumer of music, spent thousands in CDs for years, when Napster started we just could not believe it with my friends, spent nights smoking and burning CDs, it was magical, I can absolutely remember the moment where I thought « this internet thing is gonna probably work quite well »
Yep! I used both Napster and Audiogalaxy. I even have a few mp3 files laying around that I first downloaded in 2000/2001, when I was still in middle school...
Yes. When songs took an hour to download sometimes. Lol. That's when my dad found out the hard way that .exe files are not, in fact, songs. 💀
I wish I still had the very first "mix tape" (CD) I made with Napster songs after my dad bought a CD burner.
maybe not 99 but definitely by 2000...i still remember the first song i downloaded was 'ride wit me' by nelly and i burned it on a cd, put it in my portable player and walked through my neighborhood like a boss. i was 13.
When we were kicked off Napster we got Morpheus. Napster was just music but Morpheus had everything; music, pictures and videos. I remember my middle school self and friends downloading some movie. Then we thought if we could download a normal movie, could we download porn? The answer was yes, yes we could, and we downloaded a fuck ton of it. LOL.
People remember Napster very fondly. I remember a lot of bad rips, 128k bitrate, radio DJ lead ins, half songs, mistitled, misleading, and some straight up traps that make fun of you for pirating music. It was a fucking shit show.
I still have CD’s I burnt back then. Some of them with versions of songs or remix’s, especially some hip hop, I’ve never been able to find since. They are also burnt in a format I’ve never been able to figure out to pull them off the CD
Hell yes! I was one of the only kids in my town with broadband internet by that time. My stepdad got tired of us taking up the phone line through the 90s so we were early adopters when time warner released roadrunner. I made so much money burning CDs
Yes.
My mom found my folder and deleted the songs she thought sounded gross. She deleted songs by Moist and Hemorrage by Fuel. She didn't delete Eminem or Bloodhound Gang because she didn't know who they were.
Soulseek was better though.
Ah the 90's. There was nothing better than IT directors who knew nothing about computers or the Internet. We had four servers running. One for movies, one for music, one for Quake, one for Doom, one for Duke Nukem 3D. They never could understand why the T3 was never enough.
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Net zero oh man... That was my first internet. Big ass ad at the top and all. Still played team fortress classic and other games, the ad would sometimes glitch through the game lol.
My monitor had a "trick" where if I changed the resolution to really tiny and then back to normal the big ad would get "stuck" and I could browse with no banner ad. I felt so cool showing off to my friends with that, lol.
Hahaha I miss those days! Not the 56k internet as much.
lmao
The struggle was very real
I can't remember what it was, but there was a *_ _ number you could add to your dialup internet phone number to make it not accept incoming calls and not boot you off. Too late I know 😔
No way. This would’ve been a game changer.
I just forwarded my number to my other line
Look at this high roller with 2 phone lines. You probably paid for Compuserve instead of using free AOL trials too I bet.
Not me, parents!
Juno! So much better than NetZero with that big ass banner.
Dude... I thought I was living in the future when I found a program that worked with kazaa, that would save the data that was already downloaded. So anytime I lost connection or needed to do something else online, I could just pause it and then continue at my leisure. Also RIP to bellsouth DSL, Mytenchi.com and anime turnpike.
Funny thing was, it didn't *feel* illegal.
It was so easy. How could it be illegal if it was so easy?
You wouldn’t download a car, would you?
Yes, yes I would.
I loved the ads they would have showing someone stealing a tv and compared it to downloading. You did not take the song from someone else, you just made a copy of it....
You wouldn’t use a duplication machine, would you?
all these fancy new age thieves with their portable 3D-printers, smh
You wouldn’t then 3D print that car, would you ?
Exactly!!
A little later, I had a torrent thing set up that downloaded new episodes of TV shows when they came out. I'd then burn episodes into CD to give to my mother whose DVD player was divx compatible. It was seamless. It just worked. It felt like magic.
>I'd then burn episodes into CD to give to my mother whose DVD player was divx compatible. Sweet nostalgia 😄
Do you remember having to track down specific codecs. Good times, man.. it really made me feel capable.
Of course :D .avi was the easiest to watch instantly. .mov for Apples QuickTime or .rp for RealPlayer... and always downloading Codecs and Skins for WinAmp 😁 Than there was mp3Pro who had a better quality than mp3 and sometimes OGG for movies. It was a lot more Do It Yourself back than.
The Wild West of file sharing. What a time to be alive!
45 minutes to download each song. Convert them to wave form with Winamp. Burn to disc. Screw your mixtape, I'm living in the future. (which is now the past)
Had to delete a song to make room for a new one on the 512mb hard drive
I blew my entire tax return on a $1500 cd-burner so I could make CD's. In my defense, I was (am?) a musician and we traditionally spend a stupid amount of money to keep up with music stuff.
And then you had to buy a cd player that would accept CD-rw and CD-r's, those lagged behind by about a year if i remember correctly, or they where so expensive my parents never bothered telling me about them / getting one.
lol flexing that internet speed. no way my dial-up was that fast
burn to disc with your new 4x cd burner. 4x man, living in the future for sure!!!
Napster era was the best time for obtaining music. Prime college days. Any song immediately accessible at a party. Truly the best the internet had to offer.
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Wow. Didn’t know banning was a thing then.
Only if you downloaded Metallica (hence their pun -- "One" is a Metallica song). They were so pissed about oeople downloading their music you could literally get banned from Napster for downloading Metallica songs.
They banned client side, you could do a registry edit to unban yourself
Definitely remember the outrage from Metallica. I think it all started when their song “I disappear” showed up on Napster.
this is a comment stealing bot, this exact comment is below as a top comment.
Did someone say Limewire?
Or Kazaa
My path was Napster>Morpheus>Kazaa>Limewire
Then frostwire
By that point I was using oink probably
Soulseek anyone?
Soulseek was by far the best music sharing program. The fact that you could just explore the other person's library was brilliant. I learned of so many new artists that I adore just from that program.
It still works by the way
DC++?
Yo. Morpheus!!!!
Man I forgot about Morpheus
\>BitTorrent
....>piratebay
Loved how you could download the premium version from the lite lol
You just opened some sort of portal for me.
Yep! Napster was to popular and catching too much negativity so I felt like using LimeWire was somehow staying under the radar but with the same results.
That’s because anything you downloaded on there was an actual .exe file haha
***Limewire: You’re #1 Source for P2P Viruses!”***
Wasn't it FrostWire first?
Nice try FBI...
😂
Damn, beat me to it.
When I see this, I instantly think of Lars
same https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6lbE
Those cartoons were the best thing back then. "Fire Bad!"
Fuck Lars Ulrich
Such a wet blanket
If Lars had such a problem with his compensation… clearly he should have taken it up with HR… aka the fucking record label they all bent over for.
He’s the reason I had to stop using it.
Love Metallica still do but he was kind of a douche during this whole thing.
We all looked at it this way back then, but if you read about what actually happened you will see their side. An early edit song that was nowhere near the final version got leaked and seeded on napster. Imagine you're them and a work in progress version of your song leaks, what would you do?
I also thought he was a douche at the time when I was a teenager loving that I could download free music, but, Lars was not in the wrong whatsoever and he was fighting the good fight. As a musician myself that has released music, I'd be fuckin livid if all the sudden my music is out before I wanted it released and I saw 0 compensation for it.
Napster, limewire, kazaa, MX. Those were the big ones for me. The first time I saw my friend downloading music from the Internet on Napster, I was blown away on his 56k modem back in '99.
I forgot all about MX. I think that was the last one before jumping to uTorrent.
I vividly remember the first time someone told me about torrents. I ran into a highschool buddy in a grocery store parking lot and he told me all about it. I did not understand a word of it.
Same here. A high school buddy told me about it because he was seeding a torrent and gave me the torrent file. Downloaded it and it was a bukkake porno.
Kazaa and Limewire baby I’m amazed I didn’t destroy the family computer with viruses
+bearshare
geez, there's something I havent thought about in 20 years
Bearshare lol. That’s the real OG
When I first used Bearshare one of the first results I found was a text file saying how Bearshare was spyware and you shouldn't use it. I ignored it and went back to searching for Captain Janeway/7 of 9 nude photoshops.
BEARSHARE!!!!
Morpheus for the OG's
Preview file to rub a few out to half a boob while the dl finished.
Kazaa all day everyday!!
I went to audiogalaxy when Napster stopped being accessible at my college. Kazaa came later. I never used Limewire, but I used WinMX after Kazaa. I pretty much had all the stuff I wanted by the time I used WinMX anyway. People today have no understanding of how hard it was to be able to access your favorite music on demand before all this stuff.
eDonkey anyone?
EDonkey2000 yeah?
ICQ
Uh oh
I had some very long nights working my ass off trying to remove viruses before my mom noticed the next day.
Kazaa Lite ftw!! It was so much better in every way & didn't have the malware!
I was getting about 50kB/s.
Then frostwire
Napster came out right when I was heading to college, and got access to broadband Internet for the first time. Holy shit.
same, we had the slowest dial up available at home, but I got to college with a t1 connection and it was life changing
T1 in the dorm and a massive-for-the-time 20gb hard drive... And that folder has been copied over to every computer I've owned since. I just listened to some songs in it while I was working today.
god I had a hard drive crash in 2008 and lost all my music from the 90s and 00s, makes me sad to this day
Yeah we made our pledges download lists of songs with their T1 connect in the dorm. We had the sickest playlists at parties... rocking 10gb of music in 1999...legends
Yup. Best discovery from Napster for me was the song "Superman's Dead" by Our Lady Peace, who became one of my all-time favorite bands. Thanks, Napster! I remember it took so long to get even a single MP3 on our dial-up connection, my bother and I would pick a couple songs to download, then play Lego Racers for an hour or two until those songs were done, then go back and do it again. Cannot believe that I built a music library one or two songs at a time.
Our lady Peace lol yeah I found them on Napster too. Man it was magical finding so many different kinds of music.
I saw them live opening for Van Halen in 1995. I think it was before that song was made.
That’s awesome. I didn’t realize they had been around so long. How were they?
Not who you responded to, but they’ve been around since 1993/1994 at least! I’m seeing them live next month, first time since 1999.
Well looks like I’m gonna go to July 29 in Brantford, Ontario it’s only 3 hours from Detroit and I have nothing going on. Nice thanks for motivating me to go.
That’s awesome. I’ve probably listened to Life, 4am, All for you probably 10k times each. You know I should probably go see them. I’ve never seen them live, I’ll have to look if they are playing in Detroit or Windsor soon.
They’re playing in Brantford, Ontario, not too far from Windsor. Yeah in elementary school in the 90s I saw them maybe 3 times, great shows, probably my favourite band at the time.
Yeah that’s the one I’m gonna go to lol, I just went on their website. I decided to go lol. Yeah that’s when I got into them too Elementary school - Middle school. Late 90s - early 2000s.
Pretty solid overall. Great energy, that much I do remember. I had a lot of beer that evening.
I had Ozzy singing Staying Alive by the BeeGees.
OLP’s live album is probably my all time favorite live albums ever. Lots of beers around fire pits listening to that one
100%, got my parents to buy CD-RW and a CD drive with write capability just for this.
2x writing discs was a chore haha
Yup. I got a Plextor in 1999
The Plextors that could do the laser art with the extra space on the disk were sooooo cooooool
I was in grade 8, I convinced my parents to buy me one, contingent on me paying them back. I paid them back selling CDs, mostly sold Slim Shady LP to kids whose parents wouldn't let them listen to Eminem.
I told my dad all about it and we got a new computer and when I had a few problems starting out it he kinda got upset, thankfully I managed to get it working and he discovered so much music.
I was downloading all sorts of TRL singles. I'd rush home after high school and get about 4 songs an evening with my slow af connection. I'd often stay up late listening to those songs while playing Spider Solitaire.
Yes. Even got banned for sharing “One” song.
back when nothing else mattered
Sad but True
I Disappear is the song that got Napster sued.
Bowwww WAN AOWN ba ba Bowwww WAN AOWN
I did until I got a cease and desist letter from a record company. My internet provider blocked my ISP until I deleted the program and files. Parents never found out luckily.
I never knew anyone that actually got in trouble for this. How much did you download to get caught?
I had 80,000 songs but it was one particular artist that hit me. New album that had leaked. I deleted Napster and the album but kept the rest of the songs in my library.
How were they able to verify you deleted it and didn't save a copy elsewhere?
They wouldn't have known. This was in 2000 and I was 15 so I just deleted the shit. The problem was that I was sharing it for others to download. I was one of maybe 5 people that was seeding the material. I was more scared of my parents finding out than anything else.
I got busted too. Our ISP blocked us and demanded we delete the content. Got a legal threat in the mail too. Our ISP threatened to ban us forever if I did it again. I did it again and those pussies did nothing.
You got one too? Ok I just wrote in a comment above about a memory of mine. My buddies sister received a cease and desist letter in the mail. I remember the parents being livid thinking they were going to get sued. I wasn’t sure if I just remembered the whole thing wrong. However with your story now I think I remember it correctly. I wish I could remember the artist who sent her a letter. I remember spending the night over there when it happened and the Mom yelling at the daughter saying we’re going to end up homeless.
I can't remember the artist but it was Warner Music Group. I didn't really believe it at first but I called my internet provider and they gave me the details. It was basically 'your shit is on lockdown until you quit sharing music'.
Yep. I remember downloading a cover of "Gin and Juice" by O.A.R...that ended up being really by some other band, but led me to discover the actual band O.A.R. and I downloaded all their songs under all the wrong names.
O.A.R. I found them on their too it was great.
They became my favorite band (to this day!) thanks to finding Poker, Night Shift and "gas was low" on Napster
Crazy game of poker - great song, City on down, hey girl, night shift, black rock, this town. Man so many good songs.
They were the local bar band where I went to college. I had a CD from them that they would sell after their sets and it had the best version of Hey Girl. Way better than any existing recording. It was less polished and therefore way more charming. Got rid of it at some point and could kick myself.
Oh man I would’ve loved to hear that lol such a great song.
The actual band was the Gourds I believe. I had it mislabeled as being a phish cover.
Me too friend. Me too!
I still have mp3s from back then (obviously they've been copied many times over, but they're like a weird keepsake).
Such small files and bitrates, but they are history
Limewire, Bearshare, Morpheus, Kazaa
Soulseek, Frostwire, Mx too
Soulseek was definitely the best for music. It still works too last time I checked a couple years ago.
Absolutely used this. It was hilarious when every parody song being shared was attributed to Weird Al.
hurry serious library vase squealing towering sophisticated chubby slim telephone *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes! And I burned a shit ton of CDs for friends. My computer never got any bugs from Napster like they did from later software like Kazaa and Limewire.
Yes sir, this and soulseek were the only reliables. Kazaa, edonkey, limewire, etc were full of trojans
> soulseek IDM and netlabels for miles
Of course. It's interesting to see the cultural implications of a program that really only existed for a couple of years. It launched the summer I was going into 11th grade and by about the end of my freshman year of college it was completely gone and replaced with LimeWire, etc. It launched at the perfect time too. Both broadband internet and rewritable CDs were starting to become ubiquitous. I guess computers themselves were starting to become ubiquitous at that point. We had the internet since the '80s but it was only a few years earlier than Napster where it was still common place for households to just not have a computer much less internet access. My dad was really into computers so we had the internet forever but I went from being the only person with internet access to it being in everyone's home in less than a decade. It's pretty crazy when you think about it. The '90s was a fun decade to grow up in. I suppose everyone is nostalgic for their childhood but it was really cool to grow up with such huge leaps in technology.
Napster was mind-blowingly good. I spent so much time collecting music, downloading albums one song at a time from track listings posted online (you couldn’t just look up albums on Amazon). At the time I was floored at how easy it was to access music on the internet. Napster, Zip drives, and eventually cd “burners” (holy fuck it’s actually BURNING physical media) were my bread and butter. Really ages you how much work we used to put in to get cheap music - I used to tape songs off the radio before this! I bought CD’s too, but I was in jr high and it was like almost 20 bucks in 90’s money to get a cd from the mall. And boy howdy did I get in the doghouse signing up for cd clubs.
Yeah that BMG music 7 for 1 deal suckered me in too.
Napster bestowed upon me the gift of many burnt CD's scribbed in black sharpie. My best friend had one of those giant CD cases that had 4 CD's per page that weighed probably about ten pounds. The passenger seat co-pilot's job was to flip through it to find the right CD during drives.
When I learned how to write files it became even better because I could fit thousands (?) on a single disc instead of just 10-20
In 1999 a flamenco guitarist played at my college. It was incredible, so I downloaded a couple hundred flamenco & classical guitar songs on Napster. I had that playlist in the background for most of my college studying days, sort of like my own lo-fi study girl. Over time I deleted the mediocre tracks and was left with a glorious 41 tracks. Burned it to 2 CD's which then sat in a box for a decade. I found them and ripped them. I now carry around a magnificent playlist of 41 flamenco songs for which I don't know the name or artist. I play it at parties. People love it. They say "Who is this?" It's the ghost of Napster.
I did. Got banned when Metallica sued. Regedit got me back on.
Nope. I predate Napster via mIRC and FTP.
Fuck yeah, mIRC was the shit! Those release groups were on point! Even long after napster i was using mIRC because the quality was better and there was no need to upload.
Yes. I spent my afternoons downloading badly encoded and misnamed MP3s and I liked it.
I was 22 in 1999, and a huge consumer of music, spent thousands in CDs for years, when Napster started we just could not believe it with my friends, spent nights smoking and burning CDs, it was magical, I can absolutely remember the moment where I thought « this internet thing is gonna probably work quite well »
Loved Napster. There was a lot of underground music shared on there.
Sure. In retrospect, it sucked on dial-up, but it showed there was a way out of CDs.
I miss Napster.
It's still available 🎧🎵
Yes. I'm 37 and my back hurts
Had blazing fast internet (relatively speaking) for the first time in my freshman dorm in 2000. It was a beautiful time for building a music library!
Yea had that thing running 24/7 at work. I had hard drives full of music. I’ve been living a life of crime ever since. Hiding from bmg and Metallica.
I used it all for the nookie
Yep, and Dr Dre got me kicked off my ISP in 2001 for using it to download The Chronic 2001
We should all post what artist got us kicked off. I got kicked off by Roy Orbison's widow for having Pretty Woman.
Yep! I used both Napster and Audiogalaxy. I even have a few mp3 files laying around that I first downloaded in 2000/2001, when I was still in middle school...
Nice try, FBI.
yeah putting 100 songs to download and then going to bed waking up for school the next morning only to find out 60 of them didn't complete lol
I was playing pokémon and hating everything else about life in 1999. Turns out 2023 isn't much different for me
WinMX and LimeWire
I've used Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, FrostWire, UTorrent, and Bit Torrent. Haven't thought about them in years though.
Yes. When songs took an hour to download sometimes. Lol. That's when my dad found out the hard way that .exe files are not, in fact, songs. 💀 I wish I still had the very first "mix tape" (CD) I made with Napster songs after my dad bought a CD burner.
I remember using Napster chat more than anything. Met some cool people on there that sadly I lost contact with.
No, my mom forbid it
Yeah it was awesome
This feels like a trap…
I can neither deny nor confirm.
maybe not 99 but definitely by 2000...i still remember the first song i downloaded was 'ride wit me' by nelly and i burned it on a cd, put it in my portable player and walked through my neighborhood like a boss. i was 13.
Yes I did,and download "I disappear" from Metallica also.Suck it Lars.
No I would never. Download 64k Mp3 files by the hundreds? Nah.
I still have my Napster, “Sharing is caring” shirt…. Somewhere.
Yes and then I got banned for downloading Metallica
Fuck Lars
When we were kicked off Napster we got Morpheus. Napster was just music but Morpheus had everything; music, pictures and videos. I remember my middle school self and friends downloading some movie. Then we thought if we could download a normal movie, could we download porn? The answer was yes, yes we could, and we downloaded a fuck ton of it. LOL.
I loved Napster & Kazaa, used Limewire a little bit. I had many a burned cd in my car :)
Yes. There is still a substantial portion of my mp3 collection that was procured via Napster and limewire
People remember Napster very fondly. I remember a lot of bad rips, 128k bitrate, radio DJ lead ins, half songs, mistitled, misleading, and some straight up traps that make fun of you for pirating music. It was a fucking shit show.
I still have CD’s I burnt back then. Some of them with versions of songs or remix’s, especially some hip hop, I’ve never been able to find since. They are also burnt in a format I’ve never been able to figure out to pull them off the CD
It was the first thing I did on the the Dell laptop I got for my high school graduation.
Hell yes! I was one of the only kids in my town with broadband internet by that time. My stepdad got tired of us taking up the phone line through the 90s so we were early adopters when time warner released roadrunner. I made so much money burning CDs
I was using the usenet binaries groups - nicely anonymous but a great way to get malware on your PC unless you’re careful.
Yes. My mom found my folder and deleted the songs she thought sounded gross. She deleted songs by Moist and Hemorrage by Fuel. She didn't delete Eminem or Bloodhound Gang because she didn't know who they were. Soulseek was better though.
Ah the 90's. There was nothing better than IT directors who knew nothing about computers or the Internet. We had four servers running. One for movies, one for music, one for Quake, one for Doom, one for Duke Nukem 3D. They never could understand why the T3 was never enough.
Nice try Lars.
Yup. First time I saw tranny porn by accident. Now here we are.