> What a pity the large labels a decade ago didn't appreciate that Napster was a social network – just one built around music. Who knows, today it might be as big as you-know-who.
"Napster is the future of the internet. It will come back. But the world has to evolve on a social level before this can happen.
We saw the same with the printing press: the Powers That Be first banned it, then tried to control it, and eventually had to relent. It will happen with data sharing too, eventually. It might take a century, but it will happen."
>Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof.
You say that, but before Napster, there was Seti(?), a program that would search for extra-terrestrial life - by distributing the work load on top your personal laptop
> That's fine and all, but it's very important today. There were file sharing services before Napster, but Napster became popular after cdrw started being put in desktops you could buy at the local computer store (yes, people went to those back then).
are you forgetting Apple TV, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, HDMI cables, etc?
>People liked having Napster, but it didn't stop file sharing going from a big mainstream app to underground sites run out of Russia (or other places that ignore copyright law). Sure, you can download music/movies still, but it's not like the Napster days.
Definitely, but that's not because as society we managed to put an end to piracy. It's because people are just not as interested as they were before. Piracy networks for media are alive and well, I'd even say that some are in the best shape they've ever been.
> Streaming music was popular even before it became legal
Downloading music was popular. You download once, you listen many times. On Napster, it could take hours until a song was downloaded. No way you'd delete it and download again next time you want to listen to it.
"Until now, no digital musicservice has met, let alone exceeded the bar set by Napster."
Did he ever use Napster? It was slow, search was terrible, most files were bad copies, there were viruses everywhere...
Napster was great because it was the first widespread way to get digital music. It was terrible as a platform, and quickly surpassed by its successors in every meaningful way.
Parker's got his reality distortion field going full blast if he thinks napster was a better music delivery system than Kazaa/Limewire/etc, or torrents. With Grooveshark and the like out there, saying Napster has yet to be surpassed is like saying a PII is superior in every way to an i7.
I'm not entirely sure if I would agree with what you say about Napster. While for a while what you said was true, these days we're back to most people listening to music in walled gardens like Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
> An analyst I know once argued pretty strongly that Napster became popular not because it was free but because it was more convenient than going to the record store and buying a CD.
Some context for the younger HN audience: a CD used to cost $15-20 new and almost no artist in the US sold singles. If you wanted a song you heard on the radio you needed to go to one or more record stores to find the CD and pay your $15. Rarely did you get to sample anything on the CD at the store. So you'd get home only to realize you essentially paid $15 for one stupid song. Hopefully you liked half the songs on the album so you were maybe paying $3 per song you liked. Ripping that CD to MP3 was also more time invested.
Even over a 28.8k dial-up downloading the same song of Napster would only take about twenty minutes.
As the various online music stores showed, money wasn't the main issue with Napster et al. People were fine paying for music so long as it was convenient. By the early 00s buying CDs was far from convenient for how people actually wanted to listen to music. Music streaming is just the latest convenience since everyone has an Internet connected device in their pocket and their "library" is just every song in the service's catalog.
> I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster.
I'm even more nostalgic of Direct Connect: Hey this person has this cool and rare thing I'm searching for let's download his file list to see what else they like.
The "Napster" brand still exists. Its now a streaming service and competitor to spotify.
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