Did you actually use Napster during its heyday? Of all the P2P software I've ever tried, it was probably the worst--or perhaps just the one most poorly suited to casual piracy. The search system was a joke. Even when your search turned up results, it was hit or miss whether they were actually what you were looking for. My favorite example was a file named "Beethoven's 9th symphony - by Mozart" (it was actually a Handel piece).

Now it's easy to find private torrent trackers with huge, well-maintained collections in very high quality. Comments and ratings make it easy to decide which of several versions to download, and moderators will even help look for rare files if someone can't find what they want.

I think the death of Napster was a big favor to pirates everywhere.

The "Napster" brand still exists. Its now a streaming service and competitor to spotify.

But I think the essence of what Sean Parker was saying was that there are still many hurdles that a legal system like Spotify will have to overcome. If you really want everything without restrictions, pirating is still a better option.

The legal Napster was created years after the original had died, was completely different and not very compelling. It felt like it was designed to fail.

mp3.com was an honest attempt but they didn't have label support. That's what killed them.

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.

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.

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

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.

If that paraphrase is true then Joel Spolsky has no idea what he's talking about on this subject.

Without a doubt the key feature of Napster was that students could download-- not stream-- music. For free. Students would consequently fill their harddrives with everything they thought they'd want to listen to in their lifetime, often buying 2nd harddrives to populate with more mp3s. (Well, that and pron.) Keep in mind many dorms were still using dialup connections during this period-- thus there was a pattern of students running to the library computer lab to download a few mp3 albums to zip disk (yes, zip disks) then bring them back to the dorms.

What facilitated immediate listening/viewing was sharing directories in Windows with the rest of the LAN on college campuses.

Quick digression to argue against the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect-- while your paraphrase of Joel Spolsky expresses an idea that is indeed false, I reserve judgement on anything else Spolsky has ever written (and frankly on whatever his verbatim words were on this same topic). I mean what kind of pathetic, impulsive nimrod would I become if I simply through out an entire body of someone's work on a single passing impression?

Edit: Just to cover my bases-- in every case I can remember, students who were playing music in their dorms or a shared space had winamp or some other such player loaded up with a playlist selected from thousands from their own collection. Napster was the place to download songs for your collection, not the place to build an ad-hoc playlist in realtime. Maybe there are cases where people were doing this. But the overwhelming supermajority of Napster users were using it because they could replicate a subset of the whole to build their own lifetime library of music. For free.

The backend servers were linked. If your request couldn't be fulfilled on one, your search was forwarded to the next server. The total number of files on Napster at its peek was over half a billion files. Further, that picture must have been from a server that just started because the average server had significantly more users/files on it.

Further, Napster users were ripping everything in sight. There were mp3 encodings of old wax cylinders uploaded for goodness sakes.

- The discovery on Napster was non-existent. You could browse through a users' collection, the same way you can browse through playlists today.

There was an entire curated music website dedicated to music discovery that loaded into the client.

The chat and instant message system allowed people to talk about music which created a massive music-focused community. It was wildly popular.

And don't underestimate browsing. People would search for the one song they were interested in, notice who they were downloading from, browse the other user and then start pulling down their music if they noticed several songs they liked in it. They then could send a message to that user and add them to a friend's list. That was not just music discovery, but friend discovery as well.

- I am pretty sure it was a substring match

The very first versions were substring match when there were maybe 10,000 users. Later version were not and allowed basic boolean queries like term exclusion.

- Not going to get into speed, because it wasn't Napster's fault, but even back then it was far easier to get music elsewhere other than Napster if possible

There was an algorithm on Napster that did network distance biasing. Basically, if you were an AOL user, you'd first get AOL users back when doing a search. If you were an Internet 2 or even @Home user however, your speeds were epic.

* Note: I built and ran the Napster server.

Ping?

It was shutdown by a court in 2001. When it was shutdown it had 52 million users.

One year before it was shutdown 50 million Americans voted for the Democrats and 50 million voted for the Republicans - in other words - there were enough Napster users that if they represented a political party, they would have handily won the American election and quite possibly would have elected a better president than the one the Supreme Court chose ..."