Napster fans - The first, the original Napster

Bearshare! Yep, I remember that one too. eMule I don't remember using, but the name rings a bell.

 

Downloaded tons off Napster, with dialup (NetZero, mostly). After some time, I read an article in Newsweek (several pages) with a huge headline: "Nothing Can Stop Napster". I still have this article somewhere, I saved it because I knew the minute I read it that the end was coming for Napster. The cat was out of the bag (no pun intended on the name "napster", which IIRC was the name of the cat the developer of the software owned, and maybe the reason for the cat logo). Soon after the article came out, the lawsuits started. Up until then, you just downloaded without fear - your IP address changed every time you dialed in. Later, with cable internet you IP tended to remain static and it was much easier to track you. We all know what happened later...

 

I got a cable broadband connection in 1999. I remember buying a 1GB hard drive because I was filling up disk space so fast! At that time I was a huge music fan who had just got married and started my first job and living away from parents for the first time. I still loved going to record stores but I could rarely afford to buy anything. A couple years later I became a father and moved to another state to start grad school so I was even poorer. By then Napster was gone (or at least the original free version) and I was on to WinMX, Audiogalaxy, Soulseek and torrents. A few years later I was downloading lossless audio files via newsgroups. Around that time I started to enter a period of greater financial security and I still loved going to record stores although there were way less of them than there used to be.

For the last 10 years or so I haven't really done much downloading MP3's instead preferring to buy CD's and records. In my MP3 days I was always excited about getting to hear a leaked album early but at that time I couldn't afford to buy albums. Once I could afford to buy albums I lost all interest in hearing early leaks and looked forward to the actual release day like I did prior to getting married. While I would never want to go back to the days were downloaded MP3's were the only way I could hear music I was interested in I sure did learn about lots of great music that I would probably have never heard. I grew up in Chicagoland and got to listen to WXRT so I was able to hear a fairly broad array of music everyday and XRT provided me lots of tracks to follow. One of the first great MP3 finds that I can remember was Black And White by the dB's. I liked Love Is For Lovers and Spy In The House Of Love when I heard them on XRT but nothing prepared me for how awesome Black And White would be. That same day I downloaded I Want You Bad by NRBQ and discovered one of my favorite albums.

I can also trace back lots of my favorite music discoveries to my MP3 days. In the late 80's early 90's I was a big fan of a lot of the guitar pop in the UK, that kind of stuff was rarely played on WXRT (sometimes on the Big Beat) and was hard to find in Chicagoland record stores. I can remember seeing The Primitives and Wonder Stuff singles in record stores and not having enough money to buy them and then going back later and they were gone for good. Tracking down all of those UK b-side releases was a great passion of mine in my MP3 days (now I have almost all of them on vinyl and CD!). I remember meeting someone on Napster who had some Primitives holy grail tracks and I chatted with him (he was from Mexico). I turned him on to The Flatmates and he turned me on to Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes (now one of my favorites) - he also gave me a salsa verde recipe that I still make today!

Tracking down Jesse Garon releases in the US is really hard and was very slow going, I would occasionally get something from the UK via ebay. Growing up I was a big fan of The Muppets and would record whatever I could on VHS. Years later I was still a Muppet fan and while some of the things I had recorded had official releases, there were many that had not. On one of the Muppet fan forums I participated, every year around Christmas time there would be fans trying to relive memories about Christmas specials that hadn't had a DVD release. I was ticked off that each year a certain member was making money hand over fist selling burned DVD copies of said specials and I decided to stop them by offering a B&P where if anyone sent me a blank DVD and return postage I would burn the Christmas special on their DVD and put it in their SASE and send it back. I got a few people from other countries that were interested but couldn't do the return postage. They usually offered some money but I said maybe you can find a cheap record or CD that I can't find that would be equivalent to the postage cost. Through that I got some cool things, like The Go-Betweens - Before Hollywood from Australia and one of the favorite things in my collection - an autographed Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes - Cabinet of Curiosities.

I would have never have known about Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes if it wasn't for Napster. In fact I can trace that same thread even farther to a brand new just released record that arrived last week. The same person who sent the Jesse Garon record also sent a BMX Bandits CD based on some of the other things I said I liked. I am now a huge BMX Bandits fan and a few years ago I was in Scotland and had a chance to meet Duglas from BMX Bandits. I asked if there was going to be any Bandits gigs during my short stay in Scotland and while he said that there wouldn't be any Bandits shows that he was doing a vocal spot on a song at a Christmas charity gig with Teencanteen. I went to the gig and was very impressed with Teencanteen (Eugene Kelly from The Vaselines also played with them!). As I kept track of Teencanteen, I saw they were playing a show with several other bands and I checked those bands out and discovered The Tuts (one of my favorite current bands). Through reading interviews with The Tuts I discovered The Aquadolls and I just got a limited edition blue splatter vinyl release of The Aquadolls debut in the mail last week. Teencanteen, The Tuts (and their sister band Colour Me Wednesday) and the Aquadolls are some of my current favorite bands. I have had the chance to meet several of them in person and have had direct correspondence with all of them via email or other electronic means. That's something that wouldn't have been likely back in the day.

Teencanteen, The Tuts, Colour Me Wednesday and The Aquadolls have all done physical releases. I have vinyl by all of them (except The Tuts, who have done CD releases but not vinyl). Those bands and their fans care enough about music to purchase physical media. Most of the band members are young (think free music as long as they can remember generation) as are many of their fans. These bands are not the kind of music that is likely to break through to a massive Nicki Minaj type audience and they have a clearly different type of fanbase. These bands and their fans convince me that rock n roll and physical media are not dead and won't be dying any time soon. To be sure sales are way down and undoubtedly much of that is due to devaluation of music, something free MP3 distribution has played a role in. However I think that most of the "money lost" is by people that view music as disposable. You know the type that like Top 40 stuff and the greatest song ever totally sucks two years later because it's old. All one needs to do is spend a few minutes at a thrift store or even a record store to understand that the population at large has long considered music to be disposable as evidenced by the condition of CD's and records.

I think that the proportion of the population that are more interested in music and view it as something beyond disposable is probably not that different from what it was previously and that group will always be glad to support their favorite artists by purchasing their releases.

 

...usually the really hard-to-find stuff you were most dying to hear.

 

Add Audiogalaxy to the list -- I got a lot of really rare stuff with that one.

 

I'm surprised more people aren't mentioning this one. Soulseek was really the only one myself and anyone I knew used.

 

Ditto. I remember when I switched from a PC to a Mac and the panic I had when my Soulseek wouldn't work on it! There was a workaround or whatever that I eventually found, but for awhile I was lost without Soulseek.

 

Audiogalaxy, if I remember right was what I started off with.

 

Napster blew up in my freshman year of college (1999-2000). I didn't have it on my machine, but one of the computer whiz kids in my dorm did, and our little crew of friends would download random stuff and burn it to CD. I still have the one CD I burned...it had the Pixies, Husker Du, the Clash, Motörhead, etc. All sounding like complete garbage. We didn't care.

A year or so later, I put Audiogalaxy on my little Gateway laptop. Found lots of rare stuff and specifically got into Big Star and Material Issue that way. It also absolutely RUINED my laptop. There was this weird sort of spyware/malware right there on the desktop, called "AdGator" or some such thing, and the logo was a gator peering up from the water. Hahaha I was an idiot for using that.

Even later, in grad school (2003), I put Limewire on my Mac. Awful program. Unable to delete it. I think it was the worst of the lot.

I guess Soulseek is still a thing? I know a couple people who use it and have tracked down whole discographies in a day.

 

Yes I remember napster. Do not have any files left from that time, well maybe something is on the old Dell I have in the basement. I remember I also recorded that stuff on to mini disc with the lp4 setting to fit more songs. I think not even a 2015 DAC could make those files sound good. Or Maybe?

I was 14 in 1999 and bought my first record player that year also so a lot of the stuff that I liked I bought and still buy on vinyl. I have not bought a cd since Sonic Youth Murray Street came out but I have always catched up with the latest "sampling" programs. Now I have Spotify Premium which atleast are legal. And I still buy a lot of records.

 

Or even worse, like 99.7% of a file? It happened to me constantly!!
The official Limewire program was actually fairly benign, but many of the sites you could download it from attached lots of crapware in the installer.

 

I loved Napster at the time, even though I was also on a dial-up connection. Here is a screen shot of Napster on a Mac (Classic OS, not OS X):

 

It's kinda crazy waxing nostalgic over this stuff, but it was a lot of fun.

 

I used it. I remember when there would occassionally be rumors that it would be shut down and everyone would be on at the same time trying to download stuff before it was killed. That was a great time, as with all those people on, you could find some truly hard to get stuff.

 

Napster morphed into a subscription site that we used for a few years before it closed down. There was a monthly fee, and if you wanted to burn CD's of an album, you payed a flat rate to do so. There was a fairly extensive jazz library, which was great for me. I got to listen to a lot of music I'd never heard before. I still kinda miss it, even though all the music files were DRM encoded.

jeff

 

I found Napster, and most of the similar sites, frustrating because most of the time the titles, artists and songs themselves were named incorrectly!

The low quality of the files were irritating. I'm glad things have improved!

 

Great story! Obviously Napster has contributed to the success of these bands you cited.

 

I don't have much to add about the experience of using Napster (you guys have said it all!), but I will say that it never stopped me buying anything - the idea of downloading more than one or two oddities at 56k modem speeds would have been laughable to me.

However- as soon as I got my first broadband connection and discovered the world of torrents - that's when I went through my phase of downloading EVERYTHING. Entire discographies at good quality in an hour's download time... That was the only time I amassed tons and tons of music I had no time to listen to. I also found that I was less inclined to give things a chance when I hadn't paid for them.

Eventually I had a crisis of conscience, bought all the albums I'd downloaded and liked (either on CD or from iTunes), and deleted everything that was an illegal download. It felt good, and I've actually not illegally downloaded anything since (I think this was about 2007?).

 

It was a good tool, as it introduced me to some cool music...which i did buy, and sometimes go see. That and all the free roio stuff. Pretty much said Buh Bye to tape trading at that point.

 

I absolutely loved it. I got a lot of songs I didn't have, and quite a bit of the stuff that I downloaded was in pretty decent quality. If something was really horrible, I dumped it.

 

Yes, sure.

Over time, I have since replaced the files with the actual CDs, mostly in used condition because the sound quality of the files that fit through the 56k modem just wasn't good enough. Since I mostly downloaded rare tracks such as out of print b-sides, it wasn't easy tracking down the stuff but it was worth the effort. And there were some items that weren't exactly cheap either. But I finally wanted to listen to them in lossless sound.

See above.

Yes, certainly, they did. Even though I mainly focussed on rarities by artists of whom I already had many CDs before.

I used to have a friend to whom going online and downloading stuff turned into some kind of a habit, similar to collecting just for collecting's sake. I didn't care about that. I once made her a mixtape and she said it included some great stuff she had never heard about before.
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When Napster disappeared, I had not found all the rarities I had been looking for yet. But as the community then split into several different ones, each using a different software, I quickly realized that the kind of rarities I was looking for, were just not shared anymore because the people who had them, just seemed to not show up anymore. Maybe I picked the wrong successor for Napster, but anyway, I got the feeling the succeding file sharing communities were not about rarities anymore but instead all about the big hits for free. Basically, people were file-sharing the stuff that fills the used bins now.

The amount of CDs I purchased during my Napster days was not lower than before but instead, roughly stayed the throughout. I guess I must have logged onto there for the last time in early 2001.

Another friend had the police knock on her door whilst she was having breakfast early in the morning at some time in 2006 or 2007 whilst she was online at Soulseek and they caught her pirating stuff. However, her case was later dropped due to being of minor importance and mainly due to the enormous amount of likewise cases during that time.

 

I was a college freshman in August 1999, 300 miles away from home for the first time. I had brought only a fraction of my CD collection with me to save space in my dorm room. Napster was incredible because it let me have my whole collection from home, plus try out new stuff I'd never heard. The university's internet connection would download a song in about a minute or two. I didn't mind the crappy quality, as I was used to taping things onto cassettes, and bootlegs still sounded like bootlegs to me. The worst part of Napster was that nobody knew how to correctly label files, or they'd guess at the artist name and get it completely wrong. That would get shared thousands of times, and it got difficult to search out the correct material.

I eventually was banned from Napster in my sophomore year - I had grabbed a few Roy Orbison tracks, and apparently his widow or estate was one of the first to actively crack down on this type of stuff. It didn't matter though, I just went through a program called Napigator that let you choose your server or something, and apparently Napster didn't recognize my computer then.

I did keep some of these early Napster downloads for a long time, but for a strange reason. Often the original rip would have a digital artifact in it, and I would get so used to the sound of it that I would miss it if I bought the CD later. I still have a few discs that I burned back then. Definitely didn't think back then about it being the death knell of the music industry, since I still went out & bought CDs.

 

More than once, I sent an IM to the person I was downloading from (it had that function, although it was rarely used) and begged them to stay online long enough for me to finish my download. Virtually everyone was nice and replied 'no problem". It was actually a pretty good experience overall, using Napster. I didn't like Kazaa much when it came along, and it wasn't until eDonkey/eMule came along before I really got into downloading. By now, probably the eDonkey network is pretty much dead, I suppose, since Torrents have pretty much taken over everything. I haven't tried to use eMule for at least three years or more. I rarely download anything these days, if I do, I'm more likely to use jDownloader and just grab something from a DDL site.

 

I was using Limewire and WinMX

 

Shame we didn't have fast internet back then! I primarily used Napster. Tried LimeWire, but the virus triggers were ridiculous. I probably lost all the discs I had due to the damn storm in 2005. Karma.........