For some reason I was thinking about Napster earlier today.  Do you remember Napster?  If you weren't around circa 1999-2000, then chances are probably not.  Basically it was the original file sharing program.  Or at least the first one I was aware of.  It made a lot of waves at the time.  Metallica sued them.  And their own fans for using it!  It caused the music industry to freak out, which was actually kind of funny because the music business is notoriously one of the sleaziest businesses out there.  I didn't feel too sorry for them because they made multiple billions in profits all while overpricing CDs at like $18 each while packaging them in the cheapest, flimsiest plastic known to man, which would crack if you breathed on it funny.  Seriously, I can't tell you how annoying it was when those little plastic hinges would break on the CD case, which happened ALL the time.  I also shudder to think how many thousands of dollars I must have spent on CDs back in the day that I could have invested in, like, Facebook or something.

Which brings us back to Napster.  It offered the promise of sticking it to the music industry and getting music for free.  I still remember the first time I heard about it.  My brother hipped me to it.  It seemed like the craziest thing at the time.  Hold on, you're telling me I can get music off the internet for free?  That doesn't make any sense.  But it was true.  And Napster was only the beginning.

The thing about Napster is that being the first version of something isn't always the best.  It was inevitably kind of primitive compared to what came later.  You could get music for free, but if you wanted to get a whole album you sort of had to work for it.  You just sort of downloaded one file at a time and it took a pretty long time just to get a single song.  On top of that there was a lot of stuff on there that was mislabeled or wasn't what it purported to be.  So you might spend a couple hours thinking you were getting a rare track by your favorite band, only to discover it was a Meatloaf song.  Heck,  people like Madonna even purposefully flooded it with fake tracks in their (losing) efforts to combat it.

I downloaded a lot of stuff off of Napster, but to be honest, at least at first it might have increased my purchases of CDs.  It was a pain in the ass to search for and download every individual song on an album, so instead I'd often download a track or two from a band I was curious about just to "sample" them, and if I liked what I heard I'd go out and buy their CD.  It was actually a kind of neat tool in that regard.  I mean, the best music stores back in the day would have listening stations where you could check out albums before you bought them, but standing in the middle of a store with headphones on wasn't exactly ideal listening circumstances.  For that matter I didn't think listening on my computer was the best circumstances either, which is another reason why I continued to buy CDs for a while even after the age of Napster.

Napster was a pioneer, but in the end the lawsuits brought it down.  A ton of other file sharing sites spread in its wake and for a few glorious years there , illegal downloading was the way the majority of people got their music.

I bet a lot of people don't know this, but Napster actually tried to relaunch themselves as a sort of proto-spotify back in the mid 00's.  For some reason it didn't seem to take off, but they were actually pioneers in the streaming world, too.  I only know this because a friend at the time showed it to me and once again my mind was boggled.  You mean you can just log onto this site and all these albums are here where you can play them?  This is madness.

Streaming seems to be the preferred mode of music listening for most people these days, and while it is pretty cool, the one thing I really don't like about it is you're subject to whatever the sites or the artists themselves choose to make available to you.  I guess on some level it was always true that you could only buy a CD that an artist and record label chose to release (if we disregard bootlegs, which we shouldn't), but the fact remains that once you bought it, it was theoretically yours forever.  Nowadays streaming sites can take things away from you with or without warning.  One day you could be rocking out to your Neil Young on spotify and the next he pulls all of his music because he's pissed at Joe Rogan.  All I'm saying is that never happened back when we bought CDs.