Napster is probably more successful because of its single-format sharing--music by itself is a wide enough spectrum, and is certainly popular enough. If Napster carried everything else, searches and listings would be muddled by endless porn, ill-named executables, advertisements, and a lot of crap masquerading as something valuable. Hotline was great a few years ago. It used to be open sharing of all kinds of quality files, but now to get on any server requires negotiating a minefield of banner ads to get to pages containing logins and passwords (which 30% of the time you can't find); or setting up bogus accounts with some new dot-com service; or uploading Photoshop 7.0 or Quake IV. Even after all this, there is no guarantee you will ever get on the server or be able to download files. If you are lucky enough to download anything, chances are it's severely flawed. When's the last time you tried to download something in Napster and got the message "You are not allowed to download files"? Or downloaded something that was not actually a song, but an advertisement for Dog-Screwing Chicks? You may not always get the best-quality song, but on Napster problems are few, and the mp3-only format has kept out a lot of garbage that would have buried the program in its first month.
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Napster is probably more successful because of its single-format sharing--music by itself is a wide enough spectrum, and is certainly popular enough. If Napster carried everything else, searches and listings would be muddled by endless porn, ill-named executables, advertisements, and a lot of crap masquerading as something valuable. Hotline was great a few years ago. It used to be open sharing of all kinds of quality files, but now to get on any server requires negotiating a minefield of banner ads to get to pages containing logins and passwords (which 30% of the time you can't find); or setting up bogus accounts with some new dot-com service; or uploading Photoshop 7.0 or Quake IV. Even after all this, there is no guarantee you will ever get on the server or be able to download files. If you are lucky enough to download anything, chances are it's severely flawed. When's the last time you tried to download something in Napster and got the message "You are not allowed to download files"? Or downloaded something that was not actually a song, but an advertisement for Dog-Screwing Chicks? You may not always get the best-quality song, but on Napster problems are few, and the mp3-only format has kept out a lot of garbage that would have buried the program in its first month.