When my roommate used Napster back in the day the average search returned a good enough list to download something at a decent speed. But let's look at Kazaa. The average list resulting from a search is insanely long and the combination of downloads for a higher speed is SO much better.
I'm gonna have to disagree. At its prime Napster offered a lot of rare, independent, and live-recorded music that simply made it a great resource for sampling most anything the average record store could stock or have on order. Kazaa's indexing and scheduling setup may be technically superior, but I still can't get anywhere near the selection (excepting Top 40 and really old blues and folk, I find).
I think Audiogalaxy was the real golden era of music piracy, due to the sheer ease of it, and the fact that you could queue any song that appeared on the system from any computer and probably have it appear in your share folder within hours. The selection just-pre-filtration was simply staggering.
I know a lot of people who don't have the pateince to hunt down albums on P2P systems anymore, after losing both the power and familiarity Napster and AG. (Especially now that intrusive *wares are a well-known cause of concern.)
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I'm gonna have to disagree. At its prime Napster offered a lot of rare, independent, and live-recorded music that simply made it a great resource for sampling most anything the average record store could stock or have on order. Kazaa's indexing and scheduling setup may be technically superior, but I still can't get anywhere near the selection (excepting Top 40 and really old blues and folk, I find).
I think Audiogalaxy was the real golden era of music piracy, due to the sheer ease of it, and the fact that you could queue any song that appeared on the system from any computer and probably have it appear in your share folder within hours. The selection just-pre-filtration was simply staggering.
I know a lot of people who don't have the pateince to hunt down albums on P2P systems anymore, after losing both the power and familiarity Napster and AG. (Especially now that intrusive *wares are a well-known cause of concern.)