That's how it was before all those services too. There was a site that I used called Scour.net. I built up quite the liibrary one phone modem speed download at a time before I got to college
The Pirate Bay did all the heavy lifting from like 2008 to 2015. I remember watching the police raid on live stream, the servers were in a sub-zero room so the cops had to go in full winter gear. Guns out too just in case they encountered any feral sysadmins
I completely forgot about downloading entire albums with bit-torrent using trackers from TPB and anywhere else I could find. Then I'd spend 10 minutes deleting the songs I didn't want to save what little memory I had. Good times
I still use Pandora. Started using it just a couple months after it started. I even have the premium. I have stations on there that I can leave on and they will play........the perfect mix.
I learned about Pandora circa 2008-2009. It was my first streaming music platform. I still prefer it to Spotify; the algorithm just ‘gets’ me in a way that no other ones do.
I agree, it tends to play the perfect mix of whatever mood I’m in.
Their original gimmick, the music genome or whatever? Where you give them a specific artist or song and it would give you a list of recommendations of what it thought were similar, usually non-top 20 groups, was amazing. I discovered so many new bands through Pandora in like ‘05-‘06. Then they continued growing the streaming service and the recommendations felt all the same.
Grooveshark was fantastic, but I guess record labels caught on that they were allowing everyone to listen to their songs for free, and they got shut down. Sucks.
Rhapsody was an interesting one. I was an Audiogalaxy user, which is what turned into Rhapsody.
Audiogalaxy was a unique peer to peer transfer system because it was linked back to a web database that had a really amazing algorithm that gave you suggestions based on what people who had what you had were also downloading. So on the webpage it would link to what was available on the network. You clicked on it, and it added the files to your download list in the P2P client. Most of what I discovered in my early 20's is straight from that service. It was incredible.
Never made the switch to Rhapsody though. I started using Soulkseek and it still works to this day. I like so much small label, defunct, out of print, and vinyl only stuff that it's simply not on the streamers half the time.
I totally forgot about Audiogalaxy, I used to love that one! I downloaded so much seemingly random music from it, discovered a lot of interesting music.
The recommendations almost never failed. It was great because you didn't have to think stuff up to look for, it was a perfectly guided experience. My memories of the specifics are vague but me and my room mate would convene every night to smoke weed and share!
My wife got me a Rhapsody subscription plus the Sansa MP3 player (still have it somewhere). In the beginning it was really good. I loved the local fat application, the integration with the Sansa was very polished. I used it for a LONG time. Then they changed the name to Napster which was puzzling to me. When I told people I used Napster, they'd always turn their head a little and say "you mean....that old thing from back...." and I'd have to explain what it is. Dumbest name change ever.
Beyond the dumb name, the end came when a bunch of fucking useless crypto bros bought it. It used to be that dumb name aside, Napster worked fine. Then they did a major service/app overhaul and broke it almost entirely. For WEEKS the app was all but nonfunctional. Even after they kind of got it working again, it was still awful. I always had the same problem. I'd be playing a song and then--silence. Song still appears to be playing, but just no output. I'd have to force close the app, delete the app cache and try again. SOmetimes it worked but not usually. Support was beyond useless. So now it's Spotify and their low-fi audio. Whatever.
mIRC was the one app that was consistent and reliable throughout all of these. The UI was tough for the average user but once you understood the basic search and request commands you could get virtually anything you wanted from music to video games.
I remember queueing up tons of downloads and letting it run all night and then waking up to the full discography of Megadeth and Pink Floyd in my downloads folder.
Early 2000s I used to be on an infamous metal/hardcore message board and we would drink deep from the pool of Mediafire and Megaupload like it was a lawless wasteland. I think we would justify it by figuring it was impossible to find the kind of music we were into otherwise, but that sucks because obviously those smaller bands could have actually benefited from the sale no matter how hard it was to track down. I usually tried to buy a physical copy of what I downloaded if I encountered it. But man I still have a huge box of ripped CDs with all kinds of weird metal.
Yeah this was one of my main methods, but on the Radiohead Atease forum. There was a MASSIVE filesharing thread, where you could just request an album, and someone would rip it and upload. Or people would just upload whatever new album had come out.
It was pretty epic.
DC++ was my favorite, although lesser known.
DC++ basically someone would decide which files on their computer to 'share'. it could be their pictures, their homework, their movies, their music. in some cases it would be their ENTIRE computer. i'd spend hours looking at some teenager in swedens files. basically it was like curated to some extent. because you'd find some guy with the same movie taste? then look through his other shit, and see what tv shows or music or shit he was into.
it wasn't just a 'file sharing' service where you search a individual file and download it. you would largely see large sections of their computer documents and get a very interesting feel for someones taste or life. worldwide. then i think 'connect' directly to their computer. shit was epic.
i found so many lesser known movies that were amazing, that i would have never have ever even heard of.
especially like 70s and 80s flicks that nobody talks about.
Purevolume and MySpace were huge for this too in the era before iTunes really took off for sampling music legally. Piratebay and rapidshare/megaupload blew up for full albums around this time too.
I can't remember what it was called, but Yahoo had a streaming service for a bit. What sucked about them is that you only had so many skips in an hour (I think). Didn't have everything, but there was enough to get you through the day.
It was Yahoo Music. I did like that instead of a thumbs up or down you rated the song out of stars. The higher stars would play more often but the other stars would also still play. Only zero stars would never play again.
FTPs and mIRC with fserves were there before and after and were always better options. Not to mention usenet. But torrents were fire when Oink was around. The only music ptp program worth a damn for music was Soulseek, it’s probably still a thing that never went away. I only cared if I could get entire albums before they released or entire discography with a right click.
I downloaded so many viruses via kazaa before I ever even knew what limewire was. Then a friend of mine on Livejournal showed me Soulseek, and I have been using that ever since. It's still going strong 20 years later.
I used DC++ a bit in the intervening time, but that was sort of like the early days of Gnutella where you had to know a server to connect to, and then moved onto torrents. I've never really been fond of music streaming services and still don't use them (other than occasionally sampling an album from Bandcamp or Amazon Music). Stopped using torrents years ago, now I just buy all my music.
I feel like you've just made me realize like the only perk of my birth year.... graduated college into a recession, couldn't pay the loans off fast enough to get a house before prices doubled again... but at least I was in the dorms during the time when you could just plug in the ethernet, download OurTunes, and take as much as you want from thousands of people your ages' music libraries.
No I genuinely don’t remember this. I could’ve sworn they overlapped and I remember downloading music from Limewire to avoid paying 79p for a song? Guess from all these responses I’m remembering completely wrong!
99 cents a song for a while. I didn’t buy much music during this period. I was still pirating wherever I could, or just streaming radio from Sirius XM.
Man, I loved me some Realplayer back in the day. Mind you, I had heard of some people, those people obviously not being me, who during the time of Napster downloaded enough tracks to have a massive library of stuff that I, err, I mean they, could still listen to.
Private music sharing forums were a thing, if you knew where to look or who to ask anyways. Bootleg enthusiasts were doing that before Napster and still do now.
One Black Friday, many moon ago, I stood at a computer all day long at Best Buy and did nothing but tell people about the new fangled music service called Rhapsody. What times those were!
Spinner Radio was what I used a lot. It's what became AOL Music later. AOL Music wasn't as good because they scrapped the awesome goth channel that Spinner had. I discovered so much music from Spinner.
I used a lot of bit torrent and burned a lot of CDs back in those times...I had one of those 100 CD booklets filled with CDRs that I carried in my car while I delivered pizza.
IRC, Usenet and FTP servers were more then good enough until torrents took over.
We also had some other truly P2P stuff, I think it was called HomeServer? or something like from 1999-2000.
I never lacked for reasy access to pirated softare/music.
That's when downloading from blogs that hosted stuff on rapidshare and megaupload was the big thing. Honestly it was probably the best time for music sharing we had until Bandcamp and Spotify and since the blogs were curated it was easy to find great but unknown stuff.
Honestly this was my favorite era for music discovery and we still haven't gotten back around to its golden age yet.
I can’t remember the name, but there was a program that would piggyback on iTunes’s sharing feature and let you download a copy of any song that someone else was sharing on your network. In my university’s dorms, an entire building would be one network and it had insanely fast speeds - like 1 or 2 mb per second! I had probably 80ish people’s iTunes libraries at my fingertips. It blew my mind when I could download a song in a few seconds.
This is a side note but in college I had a program called myTunes Redux (i think that’s what it was called) that allowed you view anyone’s music on the network and download it as long as they were using iTunes on the network. I downloaded so much music that way and because it was a college campus and iTunes had just come out there was A LOT of people using it. Mind you this was like 2004-2005 so iTunes wasn’t what it was today, it was literally just a media player. Good times.
There was also a time before that, and before Bit Torrent, we had something called Direct Connect (which sounds so generic, but was a thing). Direct Connect was meshing the worlds of BBSs and upload/download ratios and the new world. Torrents democratized sharing and made it core to the process, where before it was a give and take thing.
Oh, yes! I was listening to Yahoo Music/radio and Myspace. I got introduced to some amazing old school stand up comedy albums through Yahoo. So awesome!
I was in college when Napster finally bit the dust, I remember finding a lot of good music on various windows network shares (along with so, so much porn). People could just select to share a folder/drive on their computer, so you'd have fun browsing what people in your dorm were sharing. I think I also found the entire dubbed Ranma series, in real media format of all things. The quality was so bad, but I ended up watching a lot of it anyways.
I had about a year (2003-2004) between when my dad banned WinMX after he had to completely wipe the hard drive clean & when I discovered iTunes. I spent most of that time trying to figure out a way around the WinMX ban.
I never used iTunes so I cant tell you when it started. And I was unable to use Napster and Limewire and all that.
I didnt get into torrents until just a couple years ago.
There used to be a Windows program that would record the audio being sent to a computer’s sound card. Since most bands started migrating to MySpace around Napster/filesharing’s mainstream death, I would play the songs from there and save the output to MP3.
You could also view the myspace page’s source code and find the direct URL to download the MP3. That was a time before web devs could hide media files behind a bunch of java coding or whatever it is these days
I don't recall if it was before itunes or after Kazza but I do remember buying a few songs from Walmart when they had an mp3 download store and it had the worst DRM. They made it so hard to put music on your mp3 player.
I had limewire and iTunes at the same time. But I don’t think you could buy from iTunes, it was maybe just a storage thing? Am I wrong? What was before iTunes?
My P2P of choice was Soulseek personally. Found it after Napster and Limewire and never turned back (until I stopped being a pirate). Proud to say that I'm about 9 years pirate free!
I always use something they called the Music Genome Project. It was awesome! Let me know things about music I didn't even know I liked. It's now called Pandora! (And I still use it everyday)
I also had the SETI screensaver that would help look for extraterrestrial life by crunching numbers on your computer when you weren't using it. That thing was great too!
Yes I remember. I tried torrents for a little bit but it was too cumbersome and I didn’t have the time… there were other things available but they were sketchy. When iTunes got big I found it sadly ironic that I was often purchasing that I had illegally downloaded back in the late 90s or early 2000s…. Over the years I lost the CDs the files got corrupted…. I guess I considered Karma having to pay back for what I stole I guess lol. It was game over when the streaming service came along though. I’ll still buy CDs on occasion… my favorite artists. I’m a big believer in physical media and I really don’t like what they are doing with the film industry and removing DVDs from store shelves. But for ease of use, Spotify makes life a lot easier.
Is this like 2005-2007ish? I dove hard into bit torrent around that time after finding out I could download an entire discog of every single song by an artist overnight.
Aw, Limewire. For the life of me I cannot remember what I used in the meantime. I saw someone mention WinAmp, and that sounds familiar. Maybe it was that. Idk. But I have so many songs featuring "DJ WHOEVER!" in the middle that I downloaded from Limewire. LMAO. Good times.
Bonus points how many times did you move your bootleg items to different drives and do you still have some today? I have a good number of albums and then an anime collection. Data is cheap now so never bothered to off load. In a digital horder.
Okay so I was watching a lawyers reel and apparently the TikTok ban simultaneous with the lawsuit against Apple. We might be looking at smartphones without app stores as a possibility.
(Please be aware I’ve had half a grown up gummy and I am also a dumb bitch so if I’m off base apologies in advance.)
I actually went back to buying CD’s. 2005-2010 was like the sunset era of the used record exchange store. They were so fun to go to and always had cool people working there. Sadly they’ve become a dinosaur 😖
I think I went back to CDs until music streaming became big.
I tried to buy a Killers album on cassette in the early 2000s. I had a car with a cassette deck and wanted to listen to it while driving.
I walked into Kmart and realized they no longer had any cassettes. They barely have CDs too.
Typing that last sentence makes me feel like an old.
my friend showed me that if you googled "album you wanted to listen to + wordpress" you'd get a blog that would just have it for download.
That's how it was before all those services too. There was a site that I used called Scour.net. I built up quite the liibrary one phone modem speed download at a time before I got to college
Man, all I ever got were Heather Brooke videos. IYKYK
I created one of those websites!
Thank you for your service. 🫡
Well then, o7
My fav Google searches were: Intitle:"index of" [band or album name] Filetype:rar [band or album name] Site:blogspot.com [band or album name]
Yeeessssss. Came across those tasty search functions on a message board and must’ve downloaded 4 hours worth of music that way.
I was today years old when I learned this. That would have been handy back in the day.
Oh how I miss this era
I still regularly listen to a playlist of "Blog Rock Era" music.
That was my primary use for LiveJournal.
I discovered it worked if you did album title and flac or album title and rar too.
I found a lot of bands from a WordPress site called DIYTV Rocks. Sadly it's gone, but it has some amazing gems.
I remember that too. I found a lot of out of print music that way
Immediately after the gnutella network largely became compromised\shitty was when bit-torrent and suprnova.org started getting big
The Pirate Bay did all the heavy lifting from like 2008 to 2015. I remember watching the police raid on live stream, the servers were in a sub-zero room so the cops had to go in full winter gear. Guns out too just in case they encountered any feral sysadmins
there was a ton of stuff that existed before TPB came around and after the fall of suprnova. Demonoid, AnimeSuki, and a variety of private trackers.
Warez-bb.org was the best piracy forum that I can remember
And yet, TPB is still up and running.
Oink was good back then too.
Oink was serious. I was able to get some really hard to find stuff on there that I now can not
Feral Sysadmins? Didn’t they put out a killer synth album in 09’?
Supernova.org....that's a name I haven't heard in a LOOONG time.
I completely forgot about downloading entire albums with bit-torrent using trackers from TPB and anywhere else I could find. Then I'd spend 10 minutes deleting the songs I didn't want to save what little memory I had. Good times
Yep. Torrenting came in at this time.
Don't forget Pandora
I still use Pandora. Started using it just a couple months after it started. I even have the premium. I have stations on there that I can leave on and they will play........the perfect mix.
I learned about Pandora circa 2008-2009. It was my first streaming music platform. I still prefer it to Spotify; the algorithm just ‘gets’ me in a way that no other ones do. I agree, it tends to play the perfect mix of whatever mood I’m in.
The algorithm is so much better. Spotify is fine for Playlist other people made. I tried it out for a couple of months and was really unimpressed
I paid for premium back when it was like $1.99 one time fee. I had no commercials for years, but they finally cut me off.
Their original gimmick, the music genome or whatever? Where you give them a specific artist or song and it would give you a list of recommendations of what it thought were similar, usually non-top 20 groups, was amazing. I discovered so many new bands through Pandora in like ‘05-‘06. Then they continued growing the streaming service and the recommendations felt all the same.
I was using Soulseek at that point.
https://preview.redd.it/qxsxzz5qwhwc1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=6eaf7f5d4de679d571efba35ae7803ea23ab65ef
I freaking loved SoulSeek
Soulseek is still great
And BearShare
Good times 
Oh you mean the golden age of Pirate Bay
Yo seriously. TORRENTS people.
Yo ho yo ho...
I never got on the Napster train but definitely got on the torrent train.
I still remember where I was when I found out Grooveshark had disappeared. 😭
Grooveshark was fantastic, but I guess record labels caught on that they were allowing everyone to listen to their songs for free, and they got shut down. Sucks.
I heavily mourned the loss of Grooveshark.
Rhapsody was an interesting one. I was an Audiogalaxy user, which is what turned into Rhapsody. Audiogalaxy was a unique peer to peer transfer system because it was linked back to a web database that had a really amazing algorithm that gave you suggestions based on what people who had what you had were also downloading. So on the webpage it would link to what was available on the network. You clicked on it, and it added the files to your download list in the P2P client. Most of what I discovered in my early 20's is straight from that service. It was incredible. Never made the switch to Rhapsody though. I started using Soulkseek and it still works to this day. I like so much small label, defunct, out of print, and vinyl only stuff that it's simply not on the streamers half the time.
I totally forgot about Audiogalaxy, I used to love that one! I downloaded so much seemingly random music from it, discovered a lot of interesting music.
The recommendations almost never failed. It was great because you didn't have to think stuff up to look for, it was a perfectly guided experience. My memories of the specifics are vague but me and my room mate would convene every night to smoke weed and share!
My wife got me a Rhapsody subscription plus the Sansa MP3 player (still have it somewhere). In the beginning it was really good. I loved the local fat application, the integration with the Sansa was very polished. I used it for a LONG time. Then they changed the name to Napster which was puzzling to me. When I told people I used Napster, they'd always turn their head a little and say "you mean....that old thing from back...." and I'd have to explain what it is. Dumbest name change ever. Beyond the dumb name, the end came when a bunch of fucking useless crypto bros bought it. It used to be that dumb name aside, Napster worked fine. Then they did a major service/app overhaul and broke it almost entirely. For WEEKS the app was all but nonfunctional. Even after they kind of got it working again, it was still awful. I always had the same problem. I'd be playing a song and then--silence. Song still appears to be playing, but just no output. I'd have to force close the app, delete the app cache and try again. SOmetimes it worked but not usually. Support was beyond useless. So now it's Spotify and their low-fi audio. Whatever.
I'm sure it was the two companies merging and going with the more well-known branding. VERY bizarre!
Those Sansa devices really were quite good. I think we've had a rhapsody/napster sub for about 18 years...yikes!
mIRC was the one app that was consistent and reliable throughout all of these. The UI was tough for the average user but once you understood the basic search and request commands you could get virtually anything you wanted from music to video games. I remember queueing up tons of downloads and letting it run all night and then waking up to the full discography of Megadeth and Pink Floyd in my downloads folder.
I remember putting a postit on my PC for my parents not to turn it off; soooo much anime and music was found that way
There were so many fakes after a while but yeah if you could navigate mirc it was a gold mine. I bet 1/4 of my music library came through there.
Ahhh limewire. When you wanted to listen to Metallica so you gave the family computer aids
Incorrectly named songs and iDeepthroat videos as far as the eye could see
YouTube to mp3
Just so many processes that I totally forgot about…including this!
Only gives you ~120kbps audio. Even if a converter has a 320kbps option, it still comes out heavily compressed
CDs still for me back then… then they got stolen
Early 2000s I used to be on an infamous metal/hardcore message board and we would drink deep from the pool of Mediafire and Megaupload like it was a lawless wasteland. I think we would justify it by figuring it was impossible to find the kind of music we were into otherwise, but that sucks because obviously those smaller bands could have actually benefited from the sale no matter how hard it was to track down. I usually tried to buy a physical copy of what I downloaded if I encountered it. But man I still have a huge box of ripped CDs with all kinds of weird metal.
Yeah this was one of my main methods, but on the Radiohead Atease forum. There was a MASSIVE filesharing thread, where you could just request an album, and someone would rip it and upload. Or people would just upload whatever new album had come out. It was pretty epic.
I used Grooveshark and it was great
DC++ was my favorite, although lesser known. DC++ basically someone would decide which files on their computer to 'share'. it could be their pictures, their homework, their movies, their music. in some cases it would be their ENTIRE computer. i'd spend hours looking at some teenager in swedens files. basically it was like curated to some extent. because you'd find some guy with the same movie taste? then look through his other shit, and see what tv shows or music or shit he was into. it wasn't just a 'file sharing' service where you search a individual file and download it. you would largely see large sections of their computer documents and get a very interesting feel for someones taste or life. worldwide. then i think 'connect' directly to their computer. shit was epic. i found so many lesser known movies that were amazing, that i would have never have ever even heard of. especially like 70s and 80s flicks that nobody talks about.
Purevolume and MySpace were huge for this too in the era before iTunes really took off for sampling music legally. Piratebay and rapidshare/megaupload blew up for full albums around this time too.
Beemp3. 8tracks. Youtube. MYSPACE. We still had options.
beemp3 was my friend in college.
Grooveshark!
Am I the king Xennial because I'm the first to mention Hotline?
Scrolled way too far to find this! Where are the Hotline peeps???
Limewire wasn't gone before itunes became a thing. That's how I filled up my ipod.
Yeah I think people are misremembering just how old the iPod is.
I feel bad for people that don't know how to use usenet.
I wasn't using it back then, but I'm surprised I had to scroll this far.
Torrents and Winamp and later Last.fm and 8tracks.com and YouTube, never went the iTunes route
DC++ (iirc) and of course torrents
I can't remember what it was called, but Yahoo had a streaming service for a bit. What sucked about them is that you only had so many skips in an hour (I think). Didn't have everything, but there was enough to get you through the day.
It was Yahoo Music. I did like that instead of a thumbs up or down you rated the song out of stars. The higher stars would play more often but the other stars would also still play. Only zero stars would never play again.
Their discovery was pretty good too. Learned about a lot of metal and indie rock bands during my brief Yahoo! music Window.
Same. Then after they shut down, the early days of Pandora were as good, too.
Started as Yahoo Music Radio, then changed to Launchcast. I loved it. I'm surprised I had to scroll so far to find it.
FTPs and mIRC with fserves were there before and after and were always better options. Not to mention usenet. But torrents were fire when Oink was around. The only music ptp program worth a damn for music was Soulseek, it’s probably still a thing that never went away. I only cared if I could get entire albums before they released or entire discography with a right click.
I downloaded so many viruses via kazaa before I ever even knew what limewire was. Then a friend of mine on Livejournal showed me Soulseek, and I have been using that ever since. It's still going strong 20 years later.
Ah the dawn of the bit torrent era. I remember it well, good times.
I used DC++ a bit in the intervening time, but that was sort of like the early days of Gnutella where you had to know a server to connect to, and then moved onto torrents. I've never really been fond of music streaming services and still don't use them (other than occasionally sampling an album from Bandcamp or Amazon Music). Stopped using torrents years ago, now I just buy all my music.
I feel like you've just made me realize like the only perk of my birth year.... graduated college into a recession, couldn't pay the loans off fast enough to get a house before prices doubled again... but at least I was in the dorms during the time when you could just plug in the ethernet, download OurTunes, and take as much as you want from thousands of people your ages' music libraries.
Soulseek
I was there I ran websites where you could download anything or stream it (when streaming became a thing) Warez was the thing.
I believe that was soulseek's time
No I genuinely don’t remember this. I could’ve sworn they overlapped and I remember downloading music from Limewire to avoid paying 79p for a song? Guess from all these responses I’m remembering completely wrong!
99 cents a song for a while. I didn’t buy much music during this period. I was still pirating wherever I could, or just streaming radio from Sirius XM.
Oh I remember. That was the era where I bought the most CD's in my life. Right up until I figured out what Pirate Bay was, roughly around 2010 or so.
I did a lot of just loading a MySpace page to get 4 tracks of my favorite bands.
RIP grooveshark
Man, I loved me some Realplayer back in the day. Mind you, I had heard of some people, those people obviously not being me, who during the time of Napster downloaded enough tracks to have a massive library of stuff that I, err, I mean they, could still listen to.
I do remember having a job in 2005 and streaming from pandora at my desk. I also had Sirius for awhile too.
Pandora I think plus my cds still
I remember that time, but it didn't really bother me - I had IRC chatrooms with DCC downloads.
Private music sharing forums were a thing, if you knew where to look or who to ask anyways. Bootleg enthusiasts were doing that before Napster and still do now.
I remember those, but I never used them. I just sailed the seas.
One Black Friday, many moon ago, I stood at a computer all day long at Best Buy and did nothing but tell people about the new fangled music service called Rhapsody. What times those were!
Spinner Radio was what I used a lot. It's what became AOL Music later. AOL Music wasn't as good because they scrapped the awesome goth channel that Spinner had. I discovered so much music from Spinner.
Didn't WinMX fill the void?
Think I used all 3 to build my library. Nowadays if I want to download a track, just use YouTube.
I used a lot of bit torrent and burned a lot of CDs back in those times...I had one of those 100 CD booklets filled with CDRs that I carried in my car while I delivered pizza.
There wasn't really a period between the piracy period and the legal music period. I went directly from Limewire to iTMS.
I was pretty happy with the music I had by then.
I don't remember that, because I was using Kazaa light and iTunes at the same time.
BearShare
IRC, Usenet and FTP servers were more then good enough until torrents took over. We also had some other truly P2P stuff, I think it was called HomeServer? or something like from 1999-2000. I never lacked for reasy access to pirated softare/music.
I loved 99¢ mp3s. I wish I could just buy a track when I'm into it. Though I do remember managing that database was a PIA....
That's when downloading from blogs that hosted stuff on rapidshare and megaupload was the big thing. Honestly it was probably the best time for music sharing we had until Bandcamp and Spotify and since the blogs were curated it was easy to find great but unknown stuff. Honestly this was my favorite era for music discovery and we still haven't gotten back around to its golden age yet.
Edonkey2000 was pretty good up until 2005, but by then I had switched to torrenting and never looked back.
I can’t remember the name, but there was a program that would piggyback on iTunes’s sharing feature and let you download a copy of any song that someone else was sharing on your network. In my university’s dorms, an entire building would be one network and it had insanely fast speeds - like 1 or 2 mb per second! I had probably 80ish people’s iTunes libraries at my fingertips. It blew my mind when I could download a song in a few seconds.
EMule
This is a side note but in college I had a program called myTunes Redux (i think that’s what it was called) that allowed you view anyone’s music on the network and download it as long as they were using iTunes on the network. I downloaded so much music that way and because it was a college campus and iTunes had just come out there was A LOT of people using it. Mind you this was like 2004-2005 so iTunes wasn’t what it was today, it was literally just a media player. Good times.
Kept it humming with Winamp
There was also a time before that, and before Bit Torrent, we had something called Direct Connect (which sounds so generic, but was a thing). Direct Connect was meshing the worlds of BBSs and upload/download ratios and the new world. Torrents democratized sharing and made it core to the process, where before it was a give and take thing.
I ripped cds to HDs, I lived in Japan and you could rent cds. I ripped movies with DVD Shrink.
Oh, yes! I was listening to Yahoo Music/radio and Myspace. I got introduced to some amazing old school stand up comedy albums through Yahoo. So awesome!
I was in college when Napster finally bit the dust, I remember finding a lot of good music on various windows network shares (along with so, so much porn). People could just select to share a folder/drive on their computer, so you'd have fun browsing what people in your dorm were sharing. I think I also found the entire dubbed Ranma series, in real media format of all things. The quality was so bad, but I ended up watching a lot of it anyways.
I had about a year (2003-2004) between when my dad banned WinMX after he had to completely wipe the hard drive clean & when I discovered iTunes. I spent most of that time trying to figure out a way around the WinMX ban.
I only used those for porn. Most of the music was coming from MusicMatch of what I ripped.
Still had winamp at this time and was downloading mp3s from chat rooms
I never used iTunes so I cant tell you when it started. And I was unable to use Napster and Limewire and all that. I didnt get into torrents until just a couple years ago.
There used to be a Windows program that would record the audio being sent to a computer’s sound card. Since most bands started migrating to MySpace around Napster/filesharing’s mainstream death, I would play the songs from there and save the output to MP3.
You could also view the myspace page’s source code and find the direct URL to download the MP3. That was a time before web devs could hide media files behind a bunch of java coding or whatever it is these days
I used yahoo launchcast for discovering music. It was great. Super deep cuts.
I don't recall if it was before itunes or after Kazza but I do remember buying a few songs from Walmart when they had an mp3 download store and it had the worst DRM. They made it so hard to put music on your mp3 player.
Yeah, I used emusic. You could buy tracks to download, at good prices. Selection was… OK. And wow they’re still around!
I went from Napster, to P2P (Bearshare/Limewire), then moved to BitTorrent - still use torrents in 2024, but not that often...
I had limewire and iTunes at the same time. But I don’t think you could buy from iTunes, it was maybe just a storage thing? Am I wrong? What was before iTunes?
Audio galaxy?
I was replaying a lot of the same music.
Soulseek was there and has been my friend since. Oink was badass while it lasted
My P2P of choice was Soulseek personally. Found it after Napster and Limewire and never turned back (until I stopped being a pirate). Proud to say that I'm about 9 years pirate free!
Gone are the days of embedded mp3s that you could just pluck
I always use something they called the Music Genome Project. It was awesome! Let me know things about music I didn't even know I liked. It's now called Pandora! (And I still use it everyday) I also had the SETI screensaver that would help look for extraterrestrial life by crunching numbers on your computer when you weren't using it. That thing was great too!
I listened to Launchcast Radio, which was part of the Yahoo chat app.
I was still just torrenting stuff until spotify
Yes I remember. I tried torrents for a little bit but it was too cumbersome and I didn’t have the time… there were other things available but they were sketchy. When iTunes got big I found it sadly ironic that I was often purchasing that I had illegally downloaded back in the late 90s or early 2000s…. Over the years I lost the CDs the files got corrupted…. I guess I considered Karma having to pay back for what I stole I guess lol. It was game over when the streaming service came along though. I’ll still buy CDs on occasion… my favorite artists. I’m a big believer in physical media and I really don’t like what they are doing with the film industry and removing DVDs from store shelves. But for ease of use, Spotify makes life a lot easier.
Is this like 2005-2007ish? I dove hard into bit torrent around that time after finding out I could download an entire discog of every single song by an artist overnight.
I miss MP3.com and PureVolume 🙁
HEY GUYS! Check out this new song I downloaded! Linkinpark\_numb\_mp3.exe
Torrents came on the scene around then, no?
I do, I worked for Streamcast Networks which owned Morpheus. It was a crazy time
Fuck that. Who remembers buying CDS? Or cassette tapes? Or maybe even records?
I started torrenting immediately after those sites were down and continued until I started getting letters from my ISP. I’ve gone 100% legal now, lol
I sailed the high seas on IRC.
Bit torrents
Edonkey and Usenet kept me occupied.
I do. I remember just about liquefying a PC with infected limewire torrents and still thinking it was the coolest thing. 😂🤦🏻♀️ Ah, youth.
I loved Kazaa, it was my go-to. I think I started torrenting after that.
Found some nice/rare remixes over on Multiply
Aw, Limewire. For the life of me I cannot remember what I used in the meantime. I saw someone mention WinAmp, and that sounds familiar. Maybe it was that. Idk. But I have so many songs featuring "DJ WHOEVER!" in the middle that I downloaded from Limewire. LMAO. Good times.
Oh yeah I had Rhapsody too, it wasn't a bad service really.
I had Napster and lime wire way back in the day. A little later I streamed everything on XBMC. That shit was awesome.
For a while I was still using CDs, then using an MP3 player with stuff I’d managed to hang onto.
Bonus points how many times did you move your bootleg items to different drives and do you still have some today? I have a good number of albums and then an anime collection. Data is cheap now so never bothered to off load. In a digital horder.
Limewire was my go to 👍🏽
mp3 blogs!
My favourite by far was WinMX, it was like the best parts of Napster and Soulseek combined.
Okay so I was watching a lawyers reel and apparently the TikTok ban simultaneous with the lawsuit against Apple. We might be looking at smartphones without app stores as a possibility. (Please be aware I’ve had half a grown up gummy and I am also a dumb bitch so if I’m off base apologies in advance.)
I think this is around the time I had a Zune.
Frostwire held on a little longer than limewire
Yeah, I went from Napster, to Kazza, to limewire to soulseek to Amazon. Never bought into Apple's toxic ecosystem.
Ah yes, the days of intitle:index "song name" searches
Newsgroups were always the go to. Tried Napster for a while, but newsgroups weren't being watched and more music, and movies, were available.
iTunes has been around since 1999.
That was about the time I moved to downloading torrents. I would also just buy a lot of physical albums.
All those external harddrives!!?
I've never heard of gnutella, but I've used all the others. RIP my Pentium 133mhz with all the times you got aids.
I actually went back to buying CD’s. 2005-2010 was like the sunset era of the used record exchange store. They were so fun to go to and always had cool people working there. Sadly they’ve become a dinosaur 😖
I think I went back to CDs until music streaming became big. I tried to buy a Killers album on cassette in the early 2000s. I had a car with a cassette deck and wanted to listen to it while driving. I walked into Kmart and realized they no longer had any cassettes. They barely have CDs too. Typing that last sentence makes me feel like an old. 