Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”.
I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun.
Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an artist’s entire discography in one go. Or if you’re into automation, lidarr , sonarr , and radarr can pull in your favorite things as soon as they’re released.
What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. It blows my mind how different groups fight to offer the best version of a free thing. And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version.
> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality.
For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement.
In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
Indeed. Many of these pirates are the most devoted fans of the music they store and distribute. They go to gigs, buy merchandise and vinyl editions, and otherwise support the artists directly.
In contrast companies like Spotify don’t care about the music at all. They would just as well sell you white noise if it would somehow give them the slightest improvement in growth or margins.
Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, regularly makes statements that suggest he’d rather see professional musicians disappear. Most recently:
Spotify is a prime example of an amazing service (yet still no FLAC equivalent) offering with a highly developed customer base ruined by the love of money.
Executive compensation is part of a business’s expense, so it is not a separate issue from profit, since profit = revenue minus expense.
Also, Ek could have sold his equity years ago and made more money with less risk by sticking it in SP500. If he really loved money, wouldn’t he have gotten rid of stock in a business losing money and stuck it into something less risky?
My point is to say that Spotify is obviously in a difficult business, given the vendors it has to negotiate with, the competitors it has to compete with, and the customers it has to sell to. It is not some conspiracy or excess short term greed by executives that is hampering its success or ability to pay artists.
Spotify “loves” money implies that Spotify is penny pinching because it is in such a powerful position that it can afford to alienate customers, whereas my point is Spotify is probably making a calculation to reduce expenses because it is not even known if it is a viable business yet.
Spotify’s executive compensation is what it is, it is still a large organization managing 9k employees with 600M customers, so they obviously want a carrot to work. Shareholders and board members can vote on compensation they think is undeserved.
In fact, Ek hasn’t even received compensation since 2017, so he’s just been offloading his existing equity from being a founder from way back when. And since Spotify stock has lost money relative to the market for 7 years, Ek has been working for free. He literally could have more money if he had quit working years ago.
If the market believed there was growth potential, their annual returns would not be trailing SP500 by 3%+ per year.
Amazon’s market cap grew by much more than the SP500, because the market (correctly) anticipated Amazon being able to earn profits.
Spotify’s ability to earn decent profits is not a given, and in my opinion, their whole business is currently being a negotiating chip between the 3 businesses that own music copyrights (Warner/Universal/Sony) and Apple/Amazon/Alphabet.
Why is that relevant? The organization he has lots of equity in due to his negotiations as a founder has 600M customers and 9k employees. The public markets still believe it might be worth a few billion dollars for an organization that has 600M customers with recurring revenue.
The “tech bro” founder could have had billions of more dollars if he had dumped all his Spotify shares years ago.
It does not mean the organization is making a ton of money, or has any pricing power. An alternative is Visa or Verisign of Intuit or Microsoft or Qualcomm or Apple, those businesses have fat profit margins. Those businesses get to set their prices at the highest profit margins. Spotify barely limps along hoping one day it can eke out more than a low single digit profit margin consistently.
In the early 80s, the local pirate scene in my hometown revolved around a guy who I'll call George. George's entire basement was devoted to boxes full of diskettes (5 1/4" in those days) of pirated software and photocopied documentation. All kinds of software - games, office apps, scientific stuff, you name it. Some was downloaded from BBS's but the majority of it was shipped USPS from god knows who.
Thing is, he used virtually none of it. He collected software for the sake of collecting it. He didn't even play video games, just loaded them up once to make sure they ran. He was a hoarder basically, who had stumbled into a niche hobby, and like most hobbyists he would happily share it with anyone who asked.
I'm not saying every pirate is like that, or even most, but I am saying, I don't think the pirate scene works without people like that. The music fans are spokes, but people who do it for the sake of doing it are the hubs.
For the hoarders that don’t share, I don’t really see much of an issue. Sure, they have all that stuff, but they would have never bought it. It’s not actually a lost sale.
I’m half joking but all these tools to automatically download TVs and movies has absolutely led to this class of user that habitually downloads stuff just for the sake of doing it. Terabytes of movies they have no interest in. The psychology of it fascinates me.
Wait, what? There are so many assumptions packed into this statement.
Why should we view things through the lens of whether we are glorifying pirates or not? Is your assertion we should be condemning them? Why? Is it because they are taking bread out of the mouths of musicians? Is it equally bad if Spotify uses their leverage to commoditize and devalue music so musicians can no longer make meaningful money from recorded music? What about music labels who structure deals so they get the bulk of the money for a fraction of the work?
I'm curious to understand the principles you hold that give you such a black and white view on piracy.
First, when someone uses "many" and "most", it indicates they are avoiding "a black and white view," by acknowledging there are some exceptions.
As to the main point, no individual has the right to take someone else's intellectual property (such as songs, movies, books, etc that were often created by large teams of people over months or years) and, without asking any permission, "liberate" that content so that it can be freely copied and consumed by virtually anyone, anywhere, around the world, without recognition or attribution.
The question isn't whether distribution of the work ultimately does or does not benefit the creator(s), which it often does. It's that the "pirate" has no right to independently make the irreversible decision to freely distribute the content.
Copyright impedes accessibility, an important human right. The “pirates” sometimes “liberate” content that has no hope of being released due to a snarl of copyright and artificial regional restrictions.
For example: audio description. Audio description is an accessibility technology that allows people who are blind or low vision to watch films, essentially by providing an extra soundtrack with a narrator concisely providing context for what's going on that can't be accounted for by dialogue or sound effects.
I have owned, in my life, 5 copies of the film Alien. None of those versions are audio described. Up until last year there was no way to hear a described version without resorting to “piracy”. The only way to hear a (mediocre version with a synth voice instead of an expressive human one) described version is to pretend to be in Canada, or attend a theatre capable of delivering AD with the new re-release. It's not a world-wide release.
So, sitting here in a cow-paddock in rural Western Australia, I still have no legal way to watch the audio described version of an oscar-winning film over 40 years old. Having paid 5 times for it, damn right I pirate that. And while I am not vision impaired, there are many others who are who depend on AD to participate in culture, and when they find barriers to that, they pirate that content too.
I have films on DVD I paid for, but cannot legally watch because I'm too many kilometers from some notional border or other. Damn right I “pirated” those!
As to your main point, you note that no individual has the right to take someone else's intellectual property. I presume you are giving your ethical blessing and a free pass to OpenAI and Midjourney et. al. who have provably leveraged a pirated corpus into highly profitable products?
> So, sitting here in a cow-paddock in rural Western Australia, I still have no legal way to watch the audio described version of an oscar-winning film over 40 years old.
Put a note up in the nearest local store, invite someone from the foodbank around and swap a meal for them describing what happens as you watch the film together.
FWiW I'm also currently living in wheatbelt W.Australia, my father (born 1935) makes a habit of helping out older people (Meals on Wheels, book reading, etc) in the local area that are struggling ..
You might have more legal options than you realise.
(Where I am the community is not so great. If you need a casserole, they're in your corner. If you supported gay marriage, and if prefer to do indigenous patch burning instead of let it turn into a wildfire so you can be a hero, then you're about as welcome as a blowfly).
Anyway I'm not vision impaired, I just enjoy audio described films while I'm doing chores or commuting.
Audio description is very much an art, and while some do resort to ad hoc description from friends, it's often clumsy and not immersive. Producing the real thing is highly asymmetric to the film run-time. It takes about 2 hours to properly describe about 20 minutes of a film, depending on the overal genre.
The blind community face an even greater hurdle. I've heard so many stories of blind people signing up to a streaming platform to watch a film, only for the audio description not be avaiable on that platform for that film. Because streaming platform X doesn't have the rights to the AD produced by streaming platform Y. It also leads to a great deal of redundancy as multiple services create entirely distinct AD tracks for the same film. It's crazy!
Piracy is the only way some of these movies and television shows can be enjoyed by some people, and often those people are of limited means.
I did some digital | electronic support work for the WA Institute for the Blind(?) in Perth back in 1984 (ish) and understand the value of goo audio description (and piracy .. or file sharing in hobbyist communities as I might think of it) so I understand your position.
Just being that person on teh internet that likes to point out there are many ways to skin cats .. not that we do that in the country anymore.
Stange presumption on your part... groups, companies, associations, teams, cooperatives, guilds, whatever... they are collections of individuals and no, they don't have any right to piracy. That includes anyone working on or involved in AI, so if it is unclear to you, I absolutely do not support OpenAI, Midjourney, Claude, ChatGPT or any other AI technology to "learn" or "train" off of others' works without their permission.
I discover stuff on Spotify more than i would ever from pirating and only then i can go watch their live stuff and buy their merch. If I want a Flac i go to Bandcamp though
Makes me wonder if artists would see the same benefit then if piracy were legal and someone made a nice Spotify-like frontend for it. I think about how places like library genesis have to be so weirdly arranged because of how illegal they are.
Bitrates are tied to the subscription tier. If you do the 4K plan, it's visibly noticeable that 1080p video bitrates are higher. They don't have much 4K content, but the 1080p difference is worth it for my 4K projector.
Still frustrated that 1080p bluray looks and sounds significantly better than 4k Netflix. Will a lot of quality stuff be lost forever when these companies disappear?
Being constantly reminded you are a tool watching some dark filter compressed pseudo-4k video at the mercy of some conglomerate takes away some of the fun in consuming culture.
I feel way freer when watching downloaded films. Like the old VHS days. It is mine.
Not as a goal within itself, but when the audio quality is so bad that you cannot understand the dialog without closed captions turned on.... That is a problem...
I find this often the case with streaming. I used to think that this is just how they make movies now, but when trying out the same movie in Bluray, every word comes out crystal clear.
Hahahaha I had the same problem. Had to buy a vinyl for 80€ and digitilize it. Did upload it then. Now the artist has a bandcamp with the collection for free so sharing is caring
Yep, that is why I pirate as well, movies and shows are simply lower quality when streaming than via direct downloads. Plus, I can play them with my own media player and use software like SmoothVideoProject to interpolate the frame rate and use upscalers for sub-4k content.
already, Disney has been censoring past episodes not even based on today's sensibilities but it seems purely based on keywords.
there's an episode of the suite life of zach and cody where zach pretends to have dyslexia in order to get extra time in his exams, and near the end of the episode he gets busted and they have a thoughtful conversation about how it's unfair and hurts the people who need the extra time, and he should be less lazy and do the work, etc, and somehow that's too offensive now.
Disney is only slightly better about nuking old “offensive” content than other providers. Many times they just gave an unskippable “this is culturally offensive to some” text and call it good. For example the old lady and the tramp has that “we are Siamese” song, which I guess is offensive… at least they still let you watch it.
Hulu on the other hand just pulls shit. For example they pulled my favorite it’s always sunny episode where they do that diehard movie. I guess the fact they do black face makes it racist (which they call out as such in the show itself!) and since we are all apparently too stupid to think for ourselves about the content we watch they better block it. After all they know better than me about what is offensive.
… shit like that… that is what is gonna lead me back to piracy.
The creators of always sunny pulled that themselves just fyi. They decided as artists that they weren’t cool with it and I think that is their right as creators, personally.
I believe the opposite on this actually. You may be the creator of something, but once you've shown it to me, it becomes the property of the human race. Something our species has done and enjoyed (or hated). You have no right to erase it from existence. You could make a big speech about how bad it was, put a warning at the start, etc, but removing it entirely from existence is just vandalism. Imagine if the Pharaohs decided to blow up the pyramids after they built them!
My hope is human nature will prevail. SOME are that sensitive but I think there’s a growing amount of people maybe even a majority that don’t want censorship and nannie’s in media / comedy etc.
What’s offensive changes from generation to generation. Blackface is a problem because racism is a problem. I can envision a future where racism against blacks is so low that blackface in itself is no longer triggering.
As an example: I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s with the feminist second wave. Women of my generation hated being called girl, for good reason! In that time, men were men, and women were considered children.
Their granddaughters don’t seem to mind the term girl at all. They didn’t suffer the same trauma their grandmothers did. Society has progressed, at least a bit.
People don't like to be discriminated against based on their skin color or gender so there is always going to be resistance against bigots like you, who justify and rationalize the discrimination. There has been some progress as evident by the fact that your racist beliefs are already a relatively fringe minority. Even people like you changed, you no longer advocate for slavery or colonialism and probably don't support lynchings, murdering gay people or banning women's right to vote, to understand social change in your case you just have to shift your timeframe by a hundred years or so. You will be dragged along into the future or die, that's how social progress happens, older bigots die off and are replaced by slightly less racist bigots. Overall, slowly progress will be made.
people in the majority/oppressor groups have always defended themselves like this, slavers saw themselves as the victims with black people stealing their livelihood, increases in womens rights or levels of education is seen as taking something away from men/boys... equal opportunity and affirmative action has always been seen as discriminatory instead of the necessary corrective uplifting of historically oppressed groups. White people are forced to share a bathroom with black people, cis people are forced to share a bathroom with trans people, etc. Always conservatives predicted the end of society as we know it, it was never true, nothing bad ever came of society becoming more progressive and less oppressive against minority groups.
The patterns are obvious and the future is clear, it's obvious who is going to be on the wrong side of history. There is no place for social regressive conservatism in a free and open society, that doesn't mean you are being oppressed not matter how convenient of an idea that victim complex is, society at large will progress, with or without you and there is nothing you can do about it.
Considering the demographics I find it hilarious that you believe that current perceived discrimination is the result of a majority.
Because if there is one thing that's for sure, it's that the white person is a race in extinction considering the fertility levels that do not beat the replacement rate in pretty much every single western country.
And you clearly don't understand much about what you are talking about. The fact is that society as we know it is clearly going away, precisely because the fertility level is so abysmal that at this rate in two generations the genetic heritage that built all this world of freedom will be extinguished.
There is actually a trend of "strong women" going out of their way to bring around men from foreign countries to mate and create a family, precisely because of all the problems the social propaganda has created. Another society will perdure that's for sure, but it definitely won't be the same and the more time passe the more it looks like the replacement won't be as nice and open to liberties as what it replaced.
I don't even care, this is what happens when a culture gets too complacent, it gets overthrown and replaced by a stronger competitor. Now the question is: will it be better? So far, I fear the signs are not in favor of this conclusion, but we will see...
All these feelings and emotions of great anxiety and fear of getting replaced by the "inferior" other, its so primitive. Just like these ideas of the "strong" dominating over "us" because we became "weak". It's such a primitive way of looking at the world.
How do you think people felt that opposed social progress in the past? They felt exactly like you are feeling, but you don't agree with them now do you? Everything you say is derived from those base emotions, but it's all just in your head. You don't have to fear people who are different from you, they are all just people, we are all the same, we are all the same species, race, gender, sexuality, religion, language; it's all unimportant, we all just want to live happy lives in peace. Anyway
It's not discrimination when it's based on objective reality.
But I guess you are one of those who will call discrimination when someone doesn't make the cut because they weren't good enough, whether it is in sport performance or intellectual capacity or anything else for that matter.
We are still hearing about discrimination of women in STEM subjects when not only they have the same exact opportunities but we reworked a lot of the education system to accommodate them in preference.
We can never win with your type because there is no logic, it's all about the feelings and emotions that uncomfortable truths create.
And nice trying on the racist insult, I fundamentally don't think there is a superior race or whatever, just that there are objectively different genetic heritages that are better at some things (and vice versa). It's the same thing for women, men are not able to make other humans, that's an objective truth.
Either you take advantage of that and assign different things to do depending on actual relative strength of peoples or you put your head in the sand, makes everyone go through meaningless competition that bring about the same results, just less efficiently and with way more casualties than necessary.
People are complementary, you can't have the smart ones doing masonry while the strong ones doing architecture, that's just stupidly inefficient and a sure way of creating problems in the long run...
And to be clear, I strongly believe in the equality of opportunities as well as equality in laws but that doesn't mean you have to engineer a whole system against "discriminations"; it won't work no matter how much you believe.
This is especially true with the current wave of upscaled 4k releases that are, frankly - awful. Eventually, these will be the only versions we have access to on streaming platforms, but someone will have the original Blu-ray remux or DVD rip on their Plex server.
High quality piracy, especially for music, can convey a lot of social status. Many of the “pirate clubs” online are gated behind presenting your own vault of gems: lots of lossless FLAC files and maybe some rare foreign cd rips.
> In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
Yeah, nah. WhatCD’s full catalogue has never been recovered.
By virtue of being a private torrent tracker, WhatCD never had that full catalog, itself. The members did and what you consider to be an inability to recover is only because the torrents were never remade. The same thing would happen if the tracker was up and there were no seeds.
About quality, it's weird it doesn't matter how much bandwidth I seem to have (currently with 1Gbps fiber), the streaming keeps the quality varying down without explanation. If I just pirate the highest quality in less than five minutes I can download the best version of a movie at around 20 GB and watch it in the best quality from start to end without any degradation. Why can't the paid streaming services deliver at the same quality as the pirates?
They can. You know they can, others (ie: the pirate versions you mention) do. Larger files consume more bandwidth and storage on the CDN, which makes it more expensive. And while there are indeed some issues with lower quality (especially in dark scenes, I'm reminded of the muddy mess in the final episodes of Game of Thrones), most folks are "fine" with the quality we get today. Fine enough, anyway, that they keep paying for the status quo.
That's not to say that they're not interested in providing more quality. There's heavy investment in per-video, and sometimes per-video-section encoding and next generation codecs like AV1. The goal for them though is to get more quality with the same or less storage and bandwidth budget.
Because higher bitrates cost more to store and transmit.if they can drop the size of every file they have by 40% that's 40% savings every time someone streams something even if it looks like dogshit.
Gosh this is such a throwback... One of my first experiences with Napster was trying to download Britney Spears' Oops I Did It Again and getting a shitty remix. The worst part was that I didn't check the song, so I ended up burning it to a CD only to find out after the fact that the song wasn't what I was looking for. And every song took so long to download because it was dial-up... It's crazy how much things have changed in a mere 20 years.
I had plenty of experiences like that, but also a happy one once. There was some Slipknot song I had downloaded that was edited to repeat the final chorus 2x. When I head the real song on CD I was disappointed, it was actually a lot better with that one more run through the chorus.
A friend of mine downloaded a bunch of videos "funny hidden camera" and then burned them on a CD and one turned out to be porn. Like, even back then it boggled my mind why he wouldn't have checked.
Napster is p2p done right, it's a game changer that the music industry was only saved by listening to Apple (read Steve) and doing that catapulted Apple to the first Trillion dollar company in history. It's so good that Metalica members were loosing their sleeps over it. For personally one of the best software I have used of more than 30 years using computer and it's fit for purpose metric was second to none.
Mate, it only takes a few minutes downloading mp3 song that's only a few MBytes, unless you are using dial-up or ADSL connection further down the road from the residential switch.
A ton less latency, though. T1 connectivity still felt snappy for web browsing long after cable modems pushed up average available bandwidth because the latency was so much better.
Look. It was 25 years ago. I’m an old man now. My memory of that time is a haze of multiplayer Quake strategy. How about I rephrase it: it FELT like 3+ hours.
It could still have been 3 hours as you would have been constrained not only by your own download speed, but also the peer’s upload speed, and they might have been on an even crappier dial-up line or sharing their bandwidth with other uploads.
25 years ago i had an engineer come out: everyone on the street was sharing a connection in the local box. We chatted about tech etc and he put me on a single connection.
Sod the neighbors (their connections didn't get slower, mine got faster).
Curious to hear more informed thoughts from old ISP folks, but afaik one of the things that made Napster possible was that 56kbps connections were roughly symmetrical (~33kbps up?).
By capitalizing on the oft unused upload bandwidth, Napster provided a benefit at little cost.
Would be fascinated to hear what this looked like on the PSTN backend load side, ~2000.
The 56k specs were asymmetrical, the downstream connection could be 56k (actually 53k) while the upstream connection was only 33.6k. The key with v.90 was the ISP could send a fully digital signal down to the customer but they could only send an analog signal up which was capped by physics to 33.6k.
The later v.92 spec supported a digital upstream and could hit 48k upload.
Regardless, dialup users did not have a lot of upstream bandwidth available. They also suffered through high packet loss and latency making their throughput even lower than their line speed would suggest.
I don't think so, asymmetry was the innovation that made 56K possible on POTS (plain old telephone sevice, with only enough bandwidth for squawky voice)
v.90 didn't work at all between two regular POTS-connected analog modems. In order for a v.90 connection to happen, the ISP-end of the connection needed to be a digital circuit (typically using ISDN PRI).
By being digital, the gear at the ISP-end was able to precisely and distinctly control each individual bits that would ultimately be converted to analog at a point that was physically near to the user (their local CO switch). This was what gave us asymmetric nature of "56k" v.90.
Eventually, we got good enough at learning how to handle changing line conditions and thereby twiddle the bits with a modicum of precision in the upstream direction. This allowed us to produce a standard with a bit more symmetry: v.92.
v.92 offered up to "56k" (~53k due to FCC limits) down, and 48k up.
A lot of users -- at least in the US -- never experienced v.92. It wasn't formalized until right around the turn of the century, which corresponded well with the time when xDSL, DOCSIS, and/or BRI started showing up even in fairly small not-completely-rural communities at fairly reasonable prices. The local dialup ISP market was beginning to die by then and many never bothered with upgrading their gear to support v.92 before they closed their doors for good.
(All of this wacky dial-up modem tech was both enabled and limited by digital switching in the PSTN. Speeds over dry-pair phone lines could be far higher if there wasn't a digital conversion in the middle, and avoiding that digital conversion is how DSL became possible.
Which is interesting: A DSL circuit was meant to go only across town (ish), and was always betwixt two fixed points. But a point-to-point v.90 or v.92 connection could be established to any properly-equipped machine by just dialing its phone number, and that machine could be across town or on the other side of a continent; it didn't care.)
One of the coolest things about the modem age is that you could easily try a different ISP if you weren't happy with your current ISP's performance (upstream and down).
You can still do that in some places that have open fiber networks! I actually have two ISPs right now running over the same fiber connection (via separate PPPoE connections) - one ISP gives you fixed IP addresses with custom reverse-DNS for cheap so I use it for my apex domain, and the other ISP is Dynamic DNS but has much better performance.
IIRC Napster downloaded from multiple peers if possible. Each peer could restrict bandwidth so that they didn't get overwhelmed with outbound traffic. So speed would depend vastly on the popularity of content... if many people could provide a song, you could download it quickly (for the time: maybe a few minutes per song), but those where you had to rely on a single peer at a time could take hours.
I think so. KaZaa was somewhat famous for implementing that feature using the non-cryptographically secure UUHash algorithm (instead of something like sha1) for better performance, which allowed trolls to insert fake file parts into your downloads.
I found a post talking about KaZaA and Napster, and that's right: I forgot but Napster had a central server to provide files, that's why it was so easy to shut down...
KaZaA didn't store the files itself so it was thought they wouldn't be possible to shutdown. From the site above:
"While Kazaa claims to be "completely legal," there are those who disagree: The free-to-download blue files are controlled by Kazaa users and include copyrighted content."
"Later that year, Kazaa was sued again, this time in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association (MPAA). As of February 2005, the decision in that suit is still pending."
I remember they started suing individual users at that time... I found an article explaining that:
"In September 2003, the RIAA filed lawsuits against over 250 individuals, accusing them of illegally distributing about 1,000 copyright music files each, using P2P networks. RIAA sought an average compensation of $3,000 per case."
The result of the first case:
"In July 2006, the MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. caused Sharman to settle for $100 million, the amount to compensate the loss of four major music labels – EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music. The company also agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the studios in the industry."
It's unclear exactly how Kazaa got down, the article concludes with "In August 2012, the Kazaa website was no longer active."... "the rise of legal streaming services such as iTunes, Spotify, and Netflix further compounded Kazaa's demise.".
Looks like the music industry managed to scare people away from pirating instead of actually succeeding in bringing them down directly, which is more or less what I remember.
Napster used a centralized server for indexing but downloads were peer-to-peer. This is what made Napster so awesome on college campuses: you could find anything, but if you chose a local peer, the actual download would happen over the college LAN at godly speeds.
Gnutella brought peer-to-peer searches. Basically it used a flood-fill algorithm: your search would be broadcast to all connected peers, which would broadcast it to all peers that hadn't seen it yet, until somebody responded with the file and their IP and you could download directly from them. Interestingly Ethereum uses basically the same algorithm for block distribution, with some optimizations that were first published by RTM, who was one of the founders of YCombinator.
Kazaa's innovation was to split the peer space into "ordinary nodes" and "superpeers", with the observation that not all bandwidth links were equal. It would enlist hosts on high-bandwidth connections to form quasi-centralized indexing nodes to organize the network topology for all the low-bandwidth consumer nodes. It's a similar principle to how the Lightning Network works for Bitcoin, or how L2s on Ethereum operate. This also made it easier to shutdown than Gnutella though, because being a superpeer made you a legal target for the RIAA.
I don't think you had figured out you needed to download from hosts with the lowest ping to get the top modem speed. I remember like 15min for one song on a 56k modem but like 6-7 min at top speed, which was rare.
It was more like 4 mins per song on a 56K modem. So you could listen a full song while downloading another. Hence pretty acceptable. The less acceptable part was that nobody could use the phone.
Which Quake? Are we talking Q1 E1M1 and the rocket launcher, Q2 Base1 + Quad damage +
double-shotty, or Q2CTF and grapple hook-fishing, Action quake or what?? :)
maybe you are misremembering creating mp3 files from CDs, on a 486 it took quite a while to generate a mp3 from a 4 minute wav file. Pentiums with MMX made it quite alot faster.
Hah, my first MP3 took about 2 weeks to download, over ZModem on a 14.4KBps link. I had to work around my parents' Internet-time restrictions - they'd say "times up", I had to disconnect, then I'd pick up again the next time I was allowed on the computer. Then I needed to convince them to buy a ZIP disk to free up enough hard disk space so I could decompress it (my Centris 660AV wasn't fast enough for real-time MP3 playback), then it took another 2 hours to decompress once I'd freed up the requisite 40 MB of hard disk space.
It was 1995 and pretty magical to get CD-quality audio coming out of the computer, though.
Yes it was for me 3+ hours. It all depended on codec and length of song. And also the fact that your phone line was kept busy while using it and loosing the connection when your parents wanted to make a telephone call. It was weird but funny at same time
Napster wasn't a huge improvement at all. More people could use it sure, but it was awful on a technical level compared to anything else. You couldn't resume transfers. It automatically shared your library with everyone else. You could cancel any active transfers.. all this meant that most things I tried to download via Napster were from people who weren't intentionally sharing their mp3s, and would cancel any transfers they saw going. I had so many that I waited 10-15 minutes to download only to end up with an incomplete file that I had to throw away because I couldn't just resume it.
Downloading via IRC was objectively better in every way.
I also remember having cable modems and parties with Napster station where people would find download and then play the song of choice. No sign-ups no artificial borders just music. This is still not possible...
My personal feeling is that Spotify and youtube et. al. killed music piracy. I'd rather pay a small monthly fee and have access to an always up to date music library then torrent everything artist by artist. But that only applies because spotify has basically all the artists i like and want.
Spotify is cool but I have playlists where half the songs are missing because some invisible licensing deal expired and the songs disappeared from reality.
With Spotify you are renting art. The moment you stop paying rent, your library disappears. Sometimes even before that.
There isn't always a studio behind a videos release. Sometimes the only remaining copy of a show is found in somebodies VHS collection and its filled with static and audio pops. These often get a standard 'as-is' release and then somebody in the community will clean it up, upscale the video, and fix the audio for a 'proper' release. Same goes for audio, sometimes its a old bootleg tape of a show that gets digitized and cleaned up.
This is before even getting into 'fan edits' where people will re-add cut scenes, or do other edits to films. For an example of that, search for 'Topher Grace Star Wars Prequel'.
For a great example of fan edits, compare Harmey’s Despecialized Editions of Episodes 4, 5, and 6 to the butchered final copies that George tried to make be the only available versions; the Despecialized versions are astonishingly superior in content and audio/video quality.
> For an example of that, search for 'Topher Grace Star Wars Prequel'
A funny detail in The Obi Wan series are the prequel lookbacks that, if you don't remember how bad they are, make them seem like mediocre movies instead.
Sometimes they further optimize it for a goal, or maximize it to have everything. Sometimes organize it, provide additional material that fans might appreciate, add commentary. Port it to a platform where previously it was inaccessible.
For examples, an artist's discography is sometimes neatly organized in folders, by year, and the files are tagged with metadata. In case of anime, fans improve or outright provide subtitles. They often do extra things like including karaoke for the opening and ending, color coding subtitle lines to match the speaker's personality or design, and provide stylized subtitles for signs and other letterings on the screen. In case of movies, they are often optimized to a specific kind of usage, for example to be able to be viewed on every phone, or to have a minimal file size. Sometimes, especially older releases, are digitally cleaned up and enhanced. Games install easily and is packaged in a way that it just works, without faffing about with the launchers and things like that.
If you want to watch Lord of the Rings without either a weird color cast or janky AI upscaling artifacts, you need to get a version that pirates have fixed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkNFZkUHeKQ
Streaming services show unskippable ads for their other shows before your stream. Amazon showed an ad for a violent war movie before a kids movie my family wanted to watch.
With pirated copies, you can often get subtitles that were not available with the original (fan-subs)
In the case of software removing DRM and shitware either bundled with the product or necessary to use it. In the case of music it's less clear but I would suggest curation and completeness.
Same, and what's the thing about those old records - there are either streaming services which have some of it (but streaming services are garbage so I don't consider those) or you can buy the original records one by one, if someone has a copy to sell. Sure, there are CD compilations and whatnot but usually out of print and they aren't sold digitally.
I share that attitude, but you assume that “discography” is an existing product that should magically appear for you to choose. I don't even mean tangled distribution rights, and other legal problems, someone has to do significant about of work to compile such collection. And it's no different from other media. If I decide to collect all books from some author (and it's not a superstar money maker who gets fancy limited edition collected works printed each couple of years), I have to do some research, an understand that Book X has not been reprinted in 15 years, Book Y has a single really questionable translation (or some horrible cover, or a completely delusional editor's preface that the author would never accept), Story Z was only published in some journal, etc.
“P2P discography” is more like a personal collection, personal library shared with others. That person still has to do the similar amount of work to make sure it's not a smoking pile of data. Sometimes they do understand it, sometimes they don't.
I remember burning CD's full of 1 minute songs that never completed because someone was always calling our house line, disrupting the internet connection (and there were no resumable downloads). Good times ;)
I remember getting transfer rates of around 10kbps and giving a solid nod of approval as I watched it go. Nice! I’ll get to listen to my song in… 80 minutes!
> How can it be better than the OFFICIAL version!? How nexactly is that possible?
Some content, e.g. Netlfix, has DRM that limits the quality that you can view in certain browsers/operating systems.
As another example, a DVD/blu-ray sources are often significantly higher quality than what streaming services offer, so if you have a choice to watch some movie on Netflix or a pirated blu-ray copy, the pirated copy will often be higher quality than Netlify while being more convenient than blu-ray.
It in unclear though how you could possibly get higher quality than the best quality that the source offers.
Best part of Napster was searching for that one song you were interested in, and then looking through all of that user's shared files. It was an amazing discovery mechanism which I missed dearly with all the subsequent P2P apps. Spotify now fills this void, but it's not quite the same.
I ran a Hotline server for a few months, but ran KDX and Carracho servers for years. Same client-server setup as Hotline. Great communities and interesting people.
I'm pretty sure I discovered far more music through browsing people's Napster shares (and the file shares at LAN parties) than I ever have through the discovery features in the modern music streaming apps.
Hanging out in mates' rooms at uni, listening to and copying tunes, talking about music and software, smoking weed. This is the ultimate music discovery experience.
My personal favorite was Audiogalaxy, which had a fairly decent recommendation engine. I discovered a lot of excellent music (which I subsequently bought) through this.
so it's the year 2000, right. you got home from school, you're at 6th grade. saw your sweetheart and got fired up all day. summer's around the corner, it's been a pretty good day. a friend at school told you about napster, you download it and install it. you are amazed. you login to icq and wait for her to come online. in the meanwhile you search for some metallica and limp bizkit. it's insane! everything you search is there. you just have to be patient. you download nothing else matters, start playing it. she logs in and says hi, already missed you. and nothing else matters..
Still remember the very last day Napster was alive. It was an absolute feeding frenzy as thousands and thousands of people were attempting to download everything they could before it all went away. Napster was, basically, a giant middle finger to the record companies and their control over what got released and their ability to put out albums containing one or two songs people wanted and then stuffed with what ever crap they could shovel into it.
Napster was a little before my time, though I fondly remember torrenting when I was a kid and oddly enough, it was a small time scam that got me into it.
I remember when I was a kid (maybe 13 or 14) I really (and I mean really) wanted to play Grand Theft Auto. My dad picked up a copy of GTA San Andreas for me about a year prior but after seeing the violence and language he forced me to take it back, that put the taste into my mouth and I wanted more.
So I searched for "free video game downloads" and I remember I went to this site that claimed that for just $30, you could "download unlimited video games for free". I begged my parents to let me sign up and pay the $30 until they finally relented and bought it for me.
What it turned out to be was just a tutorial on how to use uTorrent (and they also had an "addon" for unlimited MP3's which taught you how to use Limewire).
I realized pretty quickly I got scammed and I think to date this is the only scam that I've ever fallen for. Kinda worked out though because I learned how to torrent and after a few years I had a basic gaming PC with a hard drive full of games that I had torrented (everything from Crysis to GTA games to every Call of Duty game).
I was also pretty deep into torrenting music right up until Spotify came to the USA (I still remember all the "workarounds" to get Spotify to work in the US before they officially released here, though I didn't try any myself)
Since then Spotify has remained my longest kept subscription and for all it's faults I think Spotify got the solution to music piracy right. With Spotify it was just more convenient to pay them every month then to bother pirating music and uploading it to my iPhone.
Doesn't sound like a scam. You wanted to buy a fish and they gave you a fishing pole. And for just 30$? Some online training today costs many thousands of dollars. Indeed you must be young because you think online tutorials must be free and instructors charging for their work is a scam.
What Spotify does (at least for me) right is enabling me to be able to listen and download music from all over the world without any strange market segmentation going on (at least not that I see much).
I wish that would work for movies and games as well, but that's still a long way to go.
Napster may have started the file sharing revolution. But the exciting part for me was Gnutella and later Bittorrent, peer-to-peer technology in general, and the realization that we could use technology to liberate ourselves. Needless to say, I was young and naïve. That spirit is long dead, and the only remnants are crypto currencies and the community around them, which has tossed all lofty ideals in favor of blind greed.
I think you need to check better: piratebay and so many of older tech is still being used, for many different niches (I find each country having their own preferred way to distribute content in their native language).
Nowadays the only people left are the ones wanting to put the extractor effort for the principle of it, the rest can easily find most things somewhere (and if not give up). But there are still lots of us! (or so it feels like)
napster asked me if I wanted to work on his project, and I told him I saw no future because it would inevitably just get shut down. From my perspective looking back, Napster was the start of the trend of startup companies based around brazenly flouting the law directly as a middleman, then when finally called out just bargaining with the incumbents to arbitrage their user base and associated hipness for a payout.
I still don't think the dream of techno-liberation is dead. Rather the naive bits were thinking the sea change would happen so quickly, and thinking that the same old type of vectoralist hucksters wouldn't seek to corrupt our new systems. In actuality our systems need to be designed with the perspective of all possible gatekeepers as attackers. For example take the End to End principle - it's not sufficient to merely tell the network to not meddle with your communications, those communications must be cryptographically protected to avoid any temptation. Otherwise as you commit an increasing amount of value to your use of the network, it merely becomes a question of when the network operators will eventually try to take advantage of you to extract some of that value.
The big issue these days is there is so much capital funding "startups" that are essentially centralized crud apps running that same pump-and-dump arbitrage playbook. They buy lots of advertising and other mindshare (cf "It is difficult to get a man to understand something...") and generally use up most of the air in the room.
Paramount is very keen on region restrictions. I have a hobby of watching/sharing TV/Movie Trailers and 90% of the time the Paramount ones on youtube will be region locked to the USA.
Hence many don't get shared to a forum that is 80% US residents..
I rarely see it mentioned when discussing old file sharing programs, but I thought DC++ was the best. With the right hubs you could find anything you wanted, you could download parts of a file from multiple peers, you could browse a user's shared files to find new stuff, we had a server in our university network that RIAA/MPAA could find, there was a chat for each server, etc.
At our university, DC++ was the king. When I started, each dorm room had a 10 Mbit switched port, and each dorm area had a shared 100 Mbit uplink to the university network. So if just 10 people were downloading, you'd instantly overwhelm the uplink. So everyone was instructed to [tag] their username with which dorm they were in, so you'd prioritize people in the same network as yourself for the fastest downloads and so that uni IT could keep a blind eye to us as we weren't killing the uplinks.
(a year or two later, the dorms were disconnected from the university network and connected to an open city fiber network with commercial ISPs with 100 Mbit ports and no uplink contention and DC++ went away as people could now use public BitTorrents)
Before YouTube (and Google video..remember that?), Super Smash Bros Melee players shared matches and combo videos on a DC++ hub. It was THE place to find footage of people pushing the game to its (then) limits.
Another DC++ use that persisted well beyond streaming and torrents was Dtella, the file-sharing network on Purdue dormitory intranet.
For the younger folks: Napster arose when CDs and radio were the dominant official commercial distribution platforms for music. CD ripping into MP3s and portable music players drove the need to share them, and the internet was new, but needed a more scalable way to exchange them. Back in the day, it was mostly IRC channels, but these were slow and cumbersome. So Napster, Gnutella, and Hotline took off. These gradually gave way to eDonkey2000/eMule, KaZaA, and Limewire. These also then gave way to BitTorrent and overlay p2p apps.
Back around in World of Warcraft around 2009ish, there was a rogue named Napster that someone invited to the guild I was in <Death and Taxes> as a casual/friend.
I never found out if he was actually the founder for real but I always wanted to add "geared up the founder of Napster in Sunwell" to my resume somehow.
<Salute> to Vanilla WoW. DnT were rockstars. 2009 was after the drama, and the migration to the Horde side, right?
I stopped playing around that time (it was distracting me from RL stuff, as well as removing some of the elements that made it such a great distraction), but the first five or so years of that game are really special memories.
DnT died in vanilla and Napster joined during the reorganization led by Kiberian and a few other old DnT on Blackrock, yeah.
It was an interesting time for many reasons, like you said the first waves of casualitis (lol) were sweeping through, it was becoming harder to fill raids, many people who were thought to be good players in naxx were the same types that were letting scorch fall off but they were still demanding gear like they were rockstars, the game finally hit that sorta cultural moment around TBC too so we had everyone in guild chat from porn stars like Mia Rose to guys like Napster. Just wild times.
One day I'm going to write a book on that era, I think I'm one of the few people who got into Death and Taxes, Aurora, Exodus, Vigil and Premonition and I have many many stories from all the bleeding at on the bleeding edge of the US raiding scene.
Please write that book! Vanilla WoW was a unique (to my experience) social creation / culture, that I've not seen duplicated nor properly articulated. A server was a village, and you recognized (and were recognized for) competence and generosity. There was a great deal of silliness, and drama, but also real human connection, validated by the currency of time.
There were people on my friends list for whom I'd drop anything to go and help, and vice versa. I had deep, deep late-night conversations with strangers who'd become anonymous friends. I remember sitting on Southshore and typing back and forth with a guy who'd never told anyone in RL he was gay, but felt safe to share that with us. I had a guild-mate who stayed online until the very last moment before he deployed to Afghanistan - and I remember our jubilation when he logged back in nine months later, and how every raid thereafter, for a time, was built around gearing him back up. WoW was how I maintained a connection with distant friends; it's how I got to know my brother-in-law; it sustained a romantic partner and I while we were apart for a while (our guild became her family as well: she never logged in without expressions of support, and invitations to go do [whatever]).
Anyway, that was my experience in a non-elite guild, on a non-special server (we did eventually kill every boss, though - except Naxx; bloody Naxx). I could go on for ages.
Oh! One more thing: PvP was never really my thing, but I appreciated the sense of honor that developed (at least on a our low-pop server) once people realized that too-blatant kill-farming would mean the other side would stop signing back up to a battleground. Most people had toons and friends on both sides, anyway, so PvP stayed a game (though, oh, what a dreadful grind) and not the pissing contest it turned into when they put in cross-realm combat. It was a village, and that turned it into arbitrage.
I watched a lot of DnT videos, and "Puresin" rings a bell. I'd love to read your recollections of that time.
Exactly, it was such a unique time... I can't even wrap my mind around all the trends that cascaded together to create that magic but from today's vantage point it doesn't look like anything will ever compare to what we had going.
Lol, Kiberian, the GM of the new DnT was a gay 20-something immigrant from Spain that would bring back 50 year old dudes back from the club and put them on ventrillo for us. You had the libertarians, fascists, leftists, anarchists and commies all there, united for progression and hating each other outside of it, but while it lasted the purest sense of e pluribus unum prevailed and we transcended the pettiness for a while.
> According to the RIAA’s former CEO, Hilary Rosen, a few months after Napster’s release, the music industry shifted into full panic mode. In February 2000, all major label executives discussed the threat during an RIAA board meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.
> “I will never forget this day. All of the heads of the labels, literally the titans of the music business, were in that room. I had somebody wheel in a PC and put some speakers up and I started doing a name that tune,” Rosen later recalled.
> The major music bosses started to name tracks, including some that weren’t even released yet, and time and again Napster would come up with results. Needless to say, the board was terrified.
They're about to be more terrified. Suno and Udio are just the beginning of the complete unraveling of the need for studio capital.
Like the best Apple designs, the iPod redefined its product category. And it put Apple back on track for ARM-based mobile devices.
> There’s no way people were stocking those things with music they paid for
Indeed. But you could also rip physical CDs, and the iTunes store managed to sell a lot of 99 cent song downloads, as it was legal, easier than messing with file sharing, and cheaper than buying a whole CD just for a single song.
Arguably the music industry messed up greatly by not making CD singles cheap and ubiquitous (and solving issues with 3" CDs in slot-loading car players, etc.)
Mostly, yeah. My dad, brothers, and I (all one household) had probably 200 CDs between us that we ripped and listened to repeatedly. Paid once per person? Doubtful, but yes, we paid.
Maybe, but don't discount media lobbying gov't, and trying to generate moral outrage about AI stealing from artists, deep fakes, AI safety, etc to make sure only big corps control AI.
This isn't generated outage, it's genuine, and objectively justified. Trying to find clients was hard enough for artists to begin with.
We should be automating hard labor so we can focus on art and human interaction, but instead we're automating art and interaction so we can focus on slaving away even harder. This is somehow worse than any traditional dystopia story. Government propaganda posters were at least the work of a human hand.
It's not a conscious choice. It's the fact that the convolutions that create human visual and auditory pleasure are simple signals relative to logic and reasoning.
Nature itself is somehow shaped such that it is easier to create beautiful patterns than it is to engineer complex logical deductions.
It is a fundamental aspect of physics and reality. Beauty is just simple patterns.
We figured out that art is simple math. Engineering and law and planning not so much.
Art is not about making things beautiful. It's about making things meaningful. Unless compelled by external reasons (Money,...) artists wish to express themselves and to do so the best way the can.
> Engineering and law and planning not so much.
All of these aims to be as precise as they can be and wish that they could be Math. But Nature and Humanity randomness won't let them be.
I'd phrase it as: pop art and culture have been optimizing themselves against the human psyche for so long (much longer than engineering and law and planning) that we have a pretty firm bead on what an every-person will like (mathematically-speaking).
There's tons of avant garde art, but on average it's less popular (because that's not what it's optimized for).
I wouldn't be surprised if GenAI commoditizes pop art, but in turn creates greater demand for abstract, more unique forms.
By its nature, pop art and culture reduce itself to the common expectations of everyone. And as such has only few knobs to tune. But humans can appreciate a wide range of qualities and the more you play on these dimensions, the more reduced the people that will "get" it and appreciate it.
GenAI can be great for pop art, but try to create something unique to you or another person, and it will fail miserably.
I'd make the argument that the nature of tools drives much of mass/low-cost art (that is, the majority).
Very few people have the training and complete skill set to fully customize everything.
Consequently, the further you get away from "doing the thing" (e.g. playing an instrument) to "operating the tool that does the thing" (e.g. writing music for a player piano), the stronger impression the tool leaves on your work.
See also the corralling of c64 demos into hardware limitations. Or early electronic music vs 80s+.
The electronic music point is good, but I wouldn't label electronic music as inferior or not art.
It's about choosing which parts of your stack are artisanal vs which parts are implemented for you. These choices impact the form factor, but I wouldn't say that they diminish the work itself.
Yep. Imagine you are a producer that doesn't sing very well but knows exactly what you want. There are TTS VSTs that allow for custom models. You can change the key, length, modulation, etc. by just dragging the mouse along the word(s) and it integrates into your DAW like any other instrument.
Artists learn the craft of analogy, allusion, satire, and storytelling. These are portable to new forms and methods of creation, and they'll continue to serve artists that use GenAI.
Software engineers have been constantly reinventing themselves since forever. The stack and frameworks you learn won't last forever, and the field continually gets easier to enter year over year. This is no different than what artists now face.
And now bigger forms of automation and process are available to artists. They don't need studios or big budgets to achieve monumental works - they'll be making movies and games soon. (Without publishers!) And the 99% of non-artists aren't going to put the work in.
These tools are going to be incredible for the artists that adopt them. We're going to see a whole bunch of Vivienne Medranoses, Zach Hadels, and Michael Cusacks.
> We should be automating hard labor so we can focus on art and human interaction
We have being doing that for over 100 years now. Look at industrial productivity per worker, it skyrocketed throughout the 20th century. It has plateaued only because all the low and medium hanging fruit was long ago picked and now engineers are busy doing incremental improvements.
I am genuinely curious what sacrifices would have to be made of we went with a fully automated community, from growing food to putting it on store shelves, to running the store, cleaning it, everything. Obviously not all foods are possible to automate end to end, but I wonder how far we could go.
Don't blame "AI" for all the cheapening of the arts. It's been that way for a long time, largely due to mass media giving away for very cheap. No one already wants to pay for anything, and artists don't help by putting their works in digital form on the internet. If I want to train a computer model on all this digital stuff, so be it.
If you want to be an artist: perform music live, make a real object like a painting or sculpture, act in a play, etc. Don't be a digital "artist" it's already worth next to nothing.
One of the funniest moments in modern music history, to me, was when Kim Dotcom got a bunch of superstars to sing on a track about how much they loved MegaUpload. One of the least funny moments was when the RIAA and MPAA essentially directed American and New Zealand authorities to raid his house, shut down the MegaUpload website, seize all the servers, and jail a bunch of his employees (Kim himself only barely escaping extradition).
Episodes like that really do make me fearful of what corporations might push government to do. If they want to get you on something that isn't illegal, they'll try to make it illegal. If it's already illegal, they'll try to make the punishment as severe as possible. Oversight of, and accountability from, these entities is paramount.
I believe we are going to see significant garnishing of wages in creative field
A wage garnishment is any legal or equitable procedure through which some portion of a person's earnings is required to be withheld for the payment of a debt. Most garnishments are made by court order.
You think because of auto generated music there are going to be court orders to take money out of the paychecks of people in 'creative fields'?
Garnish wages means taking money out of what someone has already earned.
Napster was a big part of it, credit where credit is due, but faster networks were the critical ingredient. I was in college at the time and it blew up on campus, but for my friends still in high school on DSL or even still POTS it was far less useful.
Universities & Colleges have been ground zero for establishing pretty much every major advancement, from the internet itself to Doom, file sharing and Facebook. Lots of resources combined with young, rich people with big ideas and energy who get the benefit of knowledge & wisdom while almost universially staking out a position in opposition to the established "way things are".
I was on 56k and Napster was the best and fastest thing around for a while, but more importantly had the largest library. Gnutella/Kazaa took over but only once Napster shut down and people started making their libraries available there. Torrents came in short order but that was more coupled to when broadband became much more widely adopted
I remember having 384KB symmetrical DSL in mid 2000 from Northpoint Communications, who would go out of business a few months later. I basically had business class service to my apartment because that it all they could provide, so I didn't complain. Obviously one of the first things I tested was Napster on my Bondi Blue iMac B computer and man could you download music so fast and easily!
A guy I know used to get music from me because he knew I had quite a large collection. I asked him why he was going through me when he could just download it himself, and he said, "I can't turn it up on my stereo without it getting all staticky." He had a car stereo worth more than some people's homes. The key difference between my collection and the collections he was referring to that sounded so staticky was that mine was archival, constantly maintained quality, and his was Napster 56kbps-128. And that is why torrents inflicted a lot of damage to a previously somewhat high-quality only scene. From that point on, it was like wading through a Goodwill bargain bin. Thankfully, it has rebounded in the time since.
I remember how out of control the lawsuits got by the mid-2000s. A friend had to drop out of college and move back home over some multi-million dollar claim on behalf of the RIAA that his family "settled" for $40K. It wasn't even clear he was responsible (the lawsuit was based on IP), but he was scared and admitted to using "file sharing services", and that was that.
I'm still disappointed that laws against barratry didn't become more prevalent in the US as a result of "copyright trolling". Instead, exceptions have been slowly chiseled out of the DMCA to restore a sliver of the rights we used to have.
You could copy a book, and sell it. This was a big part of the Protestant revolution; the Catholic church didn't want the common people reading the Bible, but back then they had no legal way to control how people used the printing press.
Reviewing this a bit more, it was actually the 1710 Statute of Anne in Great Britain that took away our rights to copy whatever we wanted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
I think the biggest thing Napster did was get everyone onto a computer. I don’t know if folks here remember, but before Napster, desktop computers at home were largely the destination for folks who worked at home, nerdy kids or the occasional school research. AOL changed _some_ of that but not as profoundly as Napster did. Not everyone had a reason to socialize online but everyone loved free music.
I remember a friend of mine coming to _me_ telling me about Napster. He was definitely a lot more socially adept than me and I knew he didn’t hang out on computers much so it was quite the shock that he knew about this thing that, by all accounts, was quite nerdy.
Everything is free now
That's what they say
Everything I ever done
Gonna give it away
Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
That we're gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn't pay
I still remember how hard it was to find an mp3 on the Internet before Napster. It was awesome. And Winamp, which was quite possibly the greatest desktop music app ever IMO, truly complimented Napster.
Ah good time. Bring back memory. My involvement with that period was I wrote a p2p file sharing app using the Gnutella protocol, an alternative to the Napster. It was a fun time.
That's what Limewire used right? Is that network still a thing? Last I checked it was, but full of bots that return fake files named after your exact search query.
Yes. Limewire came out a bit later. All the apps with the same protocol could talk to each other. Initially mine was open sourced as well. I close sourced it after selling it to a company.
The gnutella.wego.com guys ran servers called mrclean on the gnutella network and ran most of the main nodes for the network passing the torch later to limewire who ran nodes and also cleaned network spam.
Buying music (singles or albums) was super expensive in 1999. It was unfair for listeners as well as artists.
Napster suddenly made it 'free'. I remember thinking, if CD's were not so ridiculously expensive and i could pick the songs on it, i would just buy them instead of spending money on data traffic time/bandwidth.
Today, we pay much less and the artists are still paid, while we can choose exactly what to listen to.
The "long tail" artists are paid a lot less. Even if you listen to Frog Eyes all day, every day most of your Spotify subscription is going to Taylor Swift.
What's wrong with current generation DHT? They work. They are secure (depending on how you define that). They are reliable. Why would we want to replace them?
Anyone with mediocre skills can take it down; ( And more ) that's the problem.
I'd rather not mention the specifics because that might give people ideas but they can be found in academic papers.
Sybil attacks are like DoS attacks. They are never going away fully. All webservers are vulnerable to DoS attacks and yet in practise it is pretty rare for major websites to go down because of them despite their simplicity.
But there are strategies to mitigate sybil attacks. Requiring hashcash style proof of work to participate in the network, increase state requirements to participate in the network, basing node id's on something the attacker cannot control (e.g. IP addressss), are common strategies often mentioned.
In the context of bit torrent, i guess it doesn't super matter that much. If your goal is to spy on the overlay network, while the entire point is to publicize the tracker data so what is the point of spying on public data? If the goal is to more actively attack the network - having bit torrent be a dual system with traditional trackers (and other ways to find peers) also, means that an attack causes degredation but is not a killing blow to bit torrent. Which in the cost/benefit analysis reduces the benefits, causing attackers to wonder if the cost is worth it.
Like denial of service attacks, the best defence is to make the attack expensive enough that it just isn't worth it.
Sybil attacks are not the only category of vulnerabilities found.
As your argument indirectly points out, the problems are quite fundamental in nature and therefore won't be resolved by a random developer but maybe by a bunch of mathematicians. ( I know that the Tribler people worked on these a lot )
What you call strategic decisions are in fact choices made on a operational level. In case of your context example, this is something the adversary is very well aware of.
Some decades ago, the did not only poison various DHT-like systems but even went as far as uploading jailbait torrents to the Piratebay, ordered hits on people via the US state department and got people extradited from non treaty countries in exchange for FTA concessions.
Striking a killing blow is not in their strategic interest but might become a operational choice at some point in the future.
In this scenario, the cost/benefit analysis is a no-brainer and that leaves us exposed and controlled.
Something I found fascinating about Napster at the time is that it was fiercely difficult to use... but it didn't matter, because what it gave people (access to ANY music) was so desirable that they would learn how to use it.
One side effect of this I remember was that, for a little while, there was a blackmarket of buying MP3s on CD at car boots and flea markets. My dad came home once with a CD with all the Beatles songs. He had paid something like £15 and thought he'd got a deal of his life.
I also wonder which year it stopped being an acceptable Christmas present to give someone a burned CD.
When I look at the personalities who made a name for themselves in corporate piracy.. err.. file sharing, I keep noticing some of the people who've contributed a lot to the current suckage in tech.
Never forget waste and Gnutella. Justin Frankel told Shawn Fanning Napster would get shutdown back when it had 50 users. Gnutella was made not to use a central server that could be shutdown.
In memory of Napster, whenever I use the search function of a file sharing network I am looking at for the first time, I search for ‘I Disappear’ by Metallica.
> Although based on proprietary software, the Napster system draws inspiration from the long-held Stallman contention that once a work enters the digital realm-in other words, once making a copy is less a matter of duplicating sounds or duplicating atoms and more a matter of duplicating information-the natural human impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict. Rather than impose additional restrictions, Napster execs have decided to take advantage of the impulse. Giving music listeners a central place to trade music files, the company has gambled on its ability to steer the resulting user traffic toward other commercial opportunities.
> The sudden success of the Napster model has put the fear in traditional record companies, with good reason. Just days before my Palo Alto meeting with Stallman, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel granted a request filed by the Recording Industry Association of America for an injunction against the file-sharing service. The injunction was subsequently suspended by the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early 2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law,5 a decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later proclaim proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online marketplace."
> For hackers such as Stallman, the Napster business model is scary in different ways. The company's eagerness to appropriate time-worn hacker principles such as file sharing and communal information ownership, while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary software, sends a distressing mixed message. As a person who already has a hard enough time getting his own carefully articulated message into the media stream, Stallman is understandably reticent when it comes to speaking out about the company. Still, Stallman does admit to learning a thing or two from the social side of the Napster phenomenon.
> "Before Napster, I thought it might be OK for people to privately redistribute works of entertainment," Stallman says. "The number of people who find Napster useful, however, tells me that the right to redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis, but to the public at large, is essential and therefore may not be taken away."
. . .
> "It's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to another," says Stallman, contrasting songs with software programs. "The right approach is to look at each type of work and see what conclusion you get."
> When it comes to copyrighted works, Stallman says he divides the world into three categories. The first category involves "functional" works-e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. The second category involves works that might best be described as "testimonial"-e.g., scientific papers and historical documents. Such works serve a purpose that would be undermined if subsequent readers or authors were free to modify the work at will. The final category involves works of personal expression-e.g., diaries, journals, and autobiographies. To modify such documents would be to alter a person's recollections or point of view-action Stallman considers ethically unjustifiable.
> Of the three categories, the first should give users the unlimited right to make modified versions, while the second and third should regulate that right according to the will of the original author. Regardless of category, however, the freedom to copy and redistribute noncommercially should remain unabridged at all times, Stallman insists. If that means giving Internet users the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it. "It's clear that private occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police state can stop that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it so useful."
> When I ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive outlook, Stallman cuts me off.
> "That's the wrong question," he says. "I mean now you've changed the subject entirely from one of ethics to one of interpreting laws. And those are two totally different questions in the same field. It's useless to jump from one to the other. How the courts would interpret the existing laws is mainly in a harsh way, because that's the way these laws have been bought by publishers."
> The comment provides an insight into Stallman's political philosophy: just because the legal system currently backs up businesses' ability to treat copyright as the software equivalent of land title doesn't mean computer users have to play the game according to those rules. Freedom is an ethical issue, not a legal issue. "I'm looking beyond what the existing laws are to what they should be," Stallman says. "I'm not trying to draft legislation. I'm thinking about what should the law do? I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."
> while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary software
Napster never sold anything. The business model was a plan to build a subscription service sometime in the future, but music labels wouldn't let us license their catalogs.
yes.. that is correct (also worked there 2000-01). Bertelsmann offered 1B to settle the suit with the Labels (including the ones Bertelsmann owned, somewhat ironically) so the subscription service that we were building could go live, but this was rejected out of hand. After that, it was an existential moment for the entire Industry.. until Steve Jobs pitched what Apple had been working on (iTunes). My personal recollection was that probably at no other time would the Music Industry agree to the terms that Jobs wanted for the iTunes service, but there literally were no other viable options at the time so they agreed. you know the rest.
When Napster came out, I started discovering a lot of new things I liked and would then go and buy the CDs. I was spending about $50 per month or so... It was wonderful.
Then they decided to start suing their own customers out of greed. I've not bought a new CD since.
Only if you use a private tracker. Public ones always have seeders whose job it is to collect IP addresses. You'll still get that letter in the mail about pirating
Isn't going after torrent makers more important than random downloaders? By that logic shouldn't big music / movie companies be targeting private trackers? (Surely they have enough materials to pass the interview!)
That was awesome. You would think of an song and right there you could download it, even more obscure stuff. Information right at your fingertips or something like that.
The day I discovered Napster is the day I unplugged. Wait forever for my favorite song as a kid to come on the radio or MTV? No thanks, the future was Napster.
I was putting a lot of effort into starting a career in the music business in the middle of the 90s. Thankfully I was not successful and „pivoted“ to IT in 1998.
Man do I feel old now. I remember using that in college when it was brand new. These were in the days when Yahoo practically WAS the internet and Google was a scrappy upstart.
I remember trading mp3s on AOL before it. I remember how much effort it took to download an mp3 over a 56k modem. Every time my brother picked up the phone I had to start over. The first one I succesfully downloaded, after trying for what must have been days but felt like months, was Gettin' Jiggy Wit It and of course it turned out our 386 computer couldn't even really play an mp3 without stuttering.
I remember moving in with two friends, a block from campus, and putting a $2,500 Gateway computer (bought from the Gateway store in the strip mall, of course) on a credit card because we were going to split it three ways. You can probably guess how that ended up. Even though that was equivalent to about $5k today it was a midrange computer at best and, of course, was replaced a little over a year later. But, we did get broadband and it could play Starcraft and online poker just fine. Worth it!
I remember after Napster exploded, it had gotten bogged down with new traffic and they started offering multiple servers, and someone wrote some third-party software that let you switch between them at will until you could find the song you wanted without too terribly much wait.
I remember my first mp3 player, a Diamond Rio 500. It used a USB cord that, of course, had the pins reversed, so you couldn't just use any USB cord. It held about one hour of music, 1.5 if you bought a very expensive 32mb flash card. It ran for a week on one aaa battery. It cost almost $300, which would be like $500 today. God did I love that thing.
I remember the RIAA and MPAA suing file sharers. I remember lots of tech bros saying what idiots they were for trying to use the legal system to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I remember one particularly astute, well-known tech guy saying at a YC dinner (must have been 2007 or 2008) in response to a sneering question about it that not everyone who chooses a career outside of tech is an idiot, the people who run the media companies might know more about media than you, certainly understand that selling physical media's days are numered, and that what they were doing was really a delaying tactic while they figured out how to monetize content in the digital age. (The answer, it turned out, was things like Netflix and Spotify, but those were still a few years away. Netflix's first original content wasn't until 2012!)
I remember after Napster got sued into oblivion there were so many others. The toothpaste was out of the tube on file sharing. Limewire. Edonkey. Bittorrent. For every one they killed two more appeared. Fragmentation wasn't even an issue since everyone ran (and thus seeded) several.
Tangent, sorry, but every time I hear a modern sound now I hear it as music and it’s beautiful. I still remember being able to listen to the HDD and feel it. I would place my hand on the case when it was struggling and I felt like a horse whisperer. I may have given it a few affirmative words of encouragement.
What's the argument for file sharing ruining music? I would think more the opposite, that it improved distribution and discovery for lesser-known artists, and so helped diversify music.
There’s a theory that for a period of time in the 00s, all the “smart” people were getting their music for free online, while only “dumb” people were buying CDs, and so popular music charts began to reflect the tastes only of the “dumb” people.
I don’t believe it because (a) crap music has always existed, and (b) Napster nerds were numerous but still weren’t a critical mass capable of moving the market like this.
I downloaded stuff from Napster (and its successors) but still bought CDs that I liked it in the store. Having a CD of vinyl collection used to be a matter of pride even if you had everything also on mp3s.
Every musician I know says this. Back in the day, you could actually make money selling records, which led to a flourishing of music. New hopefuls would work their butts off, playing gigs and selling small-print-run CDs to make ends meet while they waited and hoped for a major label to give them their big break. And they really had a shot at a big break, too.
Then file sharing happened, and if you were any good your stuff was being pirated as soon as it was released, if not before. Major labels won't touch pirated stuff, it's radioactive. The only way to make it is to take a bath on record sales and hope that enough people buy concert tickets and swag to meet your expenses. So yeah, the likes of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Drake -- they all get rich, but everybody else is struggling.
The idea that piracy helps listeners discover new music may well be true. But it doesn't help put food on musicians' tables -- just the opposite. See also: open source and the corrosive effect it's had on programmers' livelihoods.
This is so wrong it's fully in Poe's Law territory.
Musicians at no point have made a majority of their money from album sales. To make any money off an album most bands need to sell tens of thousands of records. Most records never sell anywhere close to that number.
Record labels are basically loan companies. They sign a band on a contract for X number of albums. The royalties of those albums is then divided up among the label, the song writer(s), often the engineers and producers, and then the actual performers on the recording. A majority of the royalties are kept by the labels with the rest divided up among everyone else.
For signing this contract the artist is often given an advance. The label will also front money for studio time, recordings, and promotional work. Most of that fronted money the artist owes to the label so they start in arrears. When an album is purchased the label keeps the artist's royalties until their advance and other "recoupables" are paid back. It's only then an artist actually makes money off their album sales. The only ones that even begin to see money from album sales are ones that manage many tens of thousands of sales. Most artists never sell enough albums to pay back their advance.
Amortized over time an advance for a record for most artists is pretty paltry. In order to make a living with music they need to tour or luck out with a licensing deal.
The money for artists has always been in touring. They get a cut of ticket sales and keep their profit made off selling merch. But like with everything else it's the megastar acts that make most of the money. Many artists make barely above minimum wage on tour.
Music piracy has not really changed the calculus at all. Most musicians barely get by playing music. The megastar acts have always been exceedingly rare.
But before Napster, artists could sell more records and had a better chance of getting out of the hole with the record company.
After Napster, not so much. And again, record companies won't touch your work if it's already out there on the internet.
I used to work with people who tried to make it in the Boston music scene. They say it was great in the 90s because the scene was thriving. Then file sharing happened, killed the scene, and made it more difficult for musicians to make a living.
Your Boston music scene friends are making a fundamental attribution error. They're blaming file sharing for the "scene" changing from factors entirely unrelated to file sharing.
1) In the 90s "record" sales were anomalously high. Record companies not only published new music CDs but republished fifty years of back catalogs either in compilations or CD reissues of albums that had long been out of print.
2) Movie soundtrack albums became big business. The 90s saw dozens of movie soundtracks go multi-platinum and many many more go gold. That was mostly unheard of in decades past.
3) Retail chains leaned into CD sales, some like Best Buy selling them near cost at times to pull in halo sales of other products. Specialty retail chains also grew during this time.
4) Malls as retail hubs also exploded during this time putting record stores in easy reach of more people.
5) Consolidation in FM radio and "format" stations massively increased the reach of label promoters. No longer did they need to deal with thousands of individual DJs, they could just don't-call-it-Payola-but-it-still-was promote stuff to programming directors and it would get on the air in a hundred markets.
6) CDs being much cheaper to manufacture allowed more independent labels to actually manufacture records for sale. Smaller labels serving niche genres were able to get in more records manufactured for sale.
7) Music got much cheaper to actually record and produce DAWs that just got cheaper and more capable. By the end of the decade you could record an album in a living room or garage and it could sound really good.
8) CD players became incredibly cheap and omnipresent. Every PC, portable stereo, car, and most game consoles (save Nintendo) ended up with built-in CD players.
All of these factors combined to form a massive sales bubble around CDs. It peaked around 2000 mostly because the anomalous sales of back catalog stuff reached a saturation point. It didn't totally burst because there was still a long tail of niche music being sold alongside megahits.
The sales of CDs dropped as sales through services like iTunes increased. Then further with streaming services.
While file sharing got a lot of attention it actually had a very small effect on music industry financials. Music buyers still bought music. The CD bubble burst because the back catalog sales had reached saturation.
The music scene changing in Boston or elsewhere after 2000 is more related to economic trends. Record chains overextended themselves and went out of business, they thought CD sales would continue forever. Chains like Best Buy, Walmart, and B&N ate their lunch because they could sell CDs cheaper. They could price CDs lower because they made their nut on other products. Music was just another thing to get people in the door. Apple and Amazon put the hurt on those chains with online sales.
Pretending every downloaded track on Napster was a "lost" CD sale is record label propaganda. They sell it to musicians so they blame evil pirates for picking their pockets so they don't notice the label's hands in there.
Last study I've seen, that stopped being... I won't say true, but I'd say that it stopped being a valid counterargument to that particular complaint. Now that young people can access music from any time in YouTube, their choices are more atemporal and certain remote decades keep getting much love.
If you combine that fact with current music being more marketed and aired, there's seem to be something at play here. I don't think new music is crap, but it's less catchy.
There has always been a lot of marketing an airing to make music catchy. The entire “Motown machine” wasn’t about the artists, it was about the writers, producers, choreographers etc and making sure music was “acceptable” to a wider audience.
I meant that the music that's publicized today is the music that's made today. So if even with this handicap, older music is as popular as the new, one explanation could be that it was intrinsically catchier.
To be clear: I'm not arguing that it was better, just more memorable, uplifting or touching. Actually, in ye olden times, "commercial music" was a synonym of bad and "quality music" was expected to be minoritary.
I've definitely discovered less new artists as I've aged. I'm near 50 now and last year only added Röyksopp, and Sleaford Mods, to my regular listening playlist. But I'm also still listening to new stuff by many artists like Aesop Rock, Orbital, and The Chemical Brothers.
I don't follow radio or popular music at all. However if I hear something I like, the supercomputer in my pocket tells me just what it is so I can discover new music that way.
That's because of using the IPR's for market/platform/eyeballs/etc.-gatekeeping is more lucrative.
Such behavior is illegal in any other market, but in media it's not for "unknown" reasons.
Completely agree. As much as I dislike modern streaming services' habit of preventing you from owning the art, I have to credit them for breaking me out of my deep rut and getting me to discover new artists. For decades I didn't know what I was missing.
And now rock stars who were once as rich as, well, rock stars, are largely forced to get by on a pittance from either Spotify or YouTube. It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting rich. Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else.
But, hey, the quasi-communists who thought they were somehow liberating the music from the evil rich people ended up dragging all of the music industry down into poverty.
> It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting rich. Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else.
Just becaus you don’t know them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There are way more than hundreds of “rock stars” that are getting rich now. There are also way more “rock stars” now than there ever was.
The "rock star" era was a bubble, at a time of rising demand and limited supply. Digital recording has democratized music, tastes have stratified (thank fuck) and now there's so much supply people have FOMO over discovery tools not finding them optimal recommendations in a sea of possibilities.
On the other side, in the first half of the 20th century, artists were more likely paid a one-off pittance to come into a studio and record a song, and then the record labels profit from it to this day.
Music is worth less now because the supply is vast and the demand is relatively limited. Pretty simple economics. And most artists have always made their money from touring...while concert prices are more eye watering than ever.
It’s true that in the top 50 richest musicians, most of them were already rock gods before Napster. But they all are rock gods.
But then you have people like Swift, Robbie Williams, Dave Matthews and Dave Grohl, most of which were on the cusp. But Grohl for instance worked hard for more than a decade after Nirvana broke up, and I would be very surprised if a lot of his money didn’t end up coming from a combination of the Foo Fighters and royalties. Commentary on one of those net worth sites: the Foo Fighters “have consistently been one of the highest-grossing touring acts in the world for more than two decades.” So yeah.
>Commentary on one of those net worth sites: the Foo Fighters “have consistently been one of the highest-grossing touring acts in the world for more than two decades.” So yeah.
Data about “net worth”, especially on free clickbait websites, is garbage speculation with no evidence or basis in reality. It’s not like those website makers have any access to someone’s brokerage accounts and list of assets they have title to or the debt they have.
DRM is done by elected officials, usually parliamentarians.
Whenever it's not elected individuals or institutions doing it, it's called tyranny or vigilantism.
Napster helped motivate and justify all sorts of nasty DRM and legislation, which has adverse implications for more than just piracy.
And at the time of the MP3 frenzy, there were a relatively small number of people saying, "Wait, won't this mean a backlash of adversarial laws and technology that make things bad for everyone?"
But that was ignored by the masses of newly-arrived Internet users wanting to take stuff for free.
An argument could be made that Napster contributed to the acceleration of that trend, but it was well underway already. The Software Publishers Association was coordinating raids of businesses for pirated software at least as far back as 1991. The WIPO Copyright Treaty was ratified in 1996, and the DMCA was passed in 1998 to implement it. CSS was introduced with DVD in 1996. United States v. LaMacchia was decided in 1994, leading to the passage of the NET Act in 1997. The first versions of SecuROM and SafeDisc were released in 1998. The same year, the Secure Digital Music Initiative was formed.
Yep, that's why I said "helped". Obviously software piracy was a problem in some corners. And we knew the kinds of moves that were being made (not just on this, but on things like surveillance and censorship). Then comes things like Napster, serving up on a silver platter a high-profile pretext -- and increased legitimate need that couldn't be ignored.
You're being naive if you think we wouldn't have those laws if not for Napster. If not that pretext it would be another. Floppy disks and flash drives could have been it.
> You're being naive if you think we wouldn't have those laws if not for Napster. If not that pretext it would be another. Floppy disks and flash drives could have been it.
To this day, if you can find a place to buy a cassette tape or blank CD, you will have to pay a tax (bundled into the price) which goes straight to the record industry as "compensation" to offset the presumed loss of revenue due to unauthorized music sharing.
No one "stole" anything. The original publisher wasn't deprived of anything. Don't use inflammatory language to push a narrative.
Someone downloading a single off Napster no more "stole" that same single when they listened to it on the radio. The person downloading a song was as much of a non-customer as the radio listener.
In fact Napster's rise was coincident with increased CD sales. Napster et al were not causing poor innocent record executives to go hungry or beg on the street.
The thing that killed CD sales wasn't P2P but online music stores like iTunes and then streaming. They served a market demand.
The backwards laws like the DMCA were written and passed before Napster even existed. Blaming Napster for that is not just ahistorical but ludicrous.
I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun.
Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an artist’s entire discography in one go. Or if you’re into automation, lidarr , sonarr , and radarr can pull in your favorite things as soon as they’re released.
What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. It blows my mind how different groups fight to offer the best version of a free thing. And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version.