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Napster: the Day the Music Was Set Free
theodp writes "Before iTunes, Netflix, MySpace, Facebook, and the Kindle, 17-year-old Shawn Fanning and 18-year-old Sean Parker gave the world Napster. And it was very good. The Observer's Tom Lamont reports on VH1's soon-to-premiere Downloaded, a documentary that tells the story of the rise and fall of the file-sharing software that started the digital music revolution, and shares remembrances of how Napster rocked his world. 'I was 17,' writes Lamont, 'and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame (OMC's How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. I installed the software, searched Napster's vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive.' Sound familiar?"
What I liked best about the early Napster is that collectors shared a trove of unreleased and rare material. Demos, live cuts, b-sides, non-album tracks - almost anything I could think of, I'd type it in and download it. I got digital versions of stuff that would have taken me man-years to digitize from the originals I had (LPs, cassettes, etc), and stuff that would have cost bazillions to buy from dealers. Remember, back then in the late 90s, the current practice of adding rare tracks like b-sides to CD releases of LP records (which were usually about 40 minutes long, giving plenty of room for extra tracks on the CD) was just beginning, so a lot of this material was very, very rare. As Napster got more popular, all this stuff faded away quickly to be replaced by stuff you could buy in stores on CD. I've always thought that was one of the greatest tragedies of file sharing.