How do I explain Napster?!

[Zoologydragon]

Ok, I'm mid thirties and DP of many years is knock, knock knocking on 50's door. Tonight, whilst watching Bgt, Mr Blobby came on. Cue much hilarity about me being our DD's age whilst he was being a teenage renegade when
Mr Blobby was number one.

Somehow this turned into "the olden days"

I am prime Napster for music age. He has no clue at all what Napster was!

How do you even explain napster to someone who doesn't know life before YouTube in terms of music??

Oh right. I wonder how I missed that??

but I'm not a huge music person & travelled & worked for myself, so there's that I suppose.

glad I'm not the only one in my age group not to have a clue!

Not exactly - you could share music files though. So not a paid for streaming service the way Spotify is, but a site where you could download music, so not far off.

@Kanaloa

Caught up on all the explanation now, thanks!

It was a decentralised peer to peer music sharing program. You copied your CDs into mp3s and then put them online using Napster so other people could download them. It meant you could have an almost limitless access to music before streaming was available and the only alternative was the radio or buying millions of expensive CDs. The main issue was that it took 3-30 mins to download a track and there was no standard for labelling the files so they were often a bit weirdly labelled which made them difficult to identify once downloaded.

I am late 40s and had never heard of it - just googled and it was 1999-2001; I was travelling overseas most of that time. I also live rurally and we couldn’t get internet until a good few years after 2001, not sure if that made a difference

To be fair, I'm in my 30s and while I've heard of it, I have no idea what it is.

So I guess in more easy to understand language, it was an "app" you downloaded that allowed you to upload your cd collection and share it with everyone and they then shared theirs with you.

Really surprised people in their late 40s/early 50s haven't heard of it. LimeWire was another one. Sometimes it would take 1 or 2 minutes to download one song and others would take a whole day, especially if you're dial-up modem kept cutting out.

The podcast ‘you’re wrong about’ do a whole episode on Napster for anyone who’s interested.

I’d say Napster was more like an illegal Spotify 🥲 I’m 30 if it makes a difference!

I still have a great fondness for the noise of a dial up modem connecting. I am early 40s so was peak napster age.

Yes, was defo illicit😂But yeah was quite like Spotify but very very rough around the edges!

I'm 40 and only vaguely know what Napster is - mainly from the legal battles about it. I never used it because I always wanted to ensure that music artists I liked got the revenue.

DH and I both used it and we are 66 and 60 so it seems age is meaningless in this regard.

Ah, nostalgia! Napster, limewire, MySpace, bebo and MSN.
Those were the days!!

It was a platform to share music files with other users, peer to peer file sharing. Illegal but its use was widespread.

@mynameiscalypso how do you access music now? Spotify pay on average $0.003 per stream to artists - more goes to the rights holders, too, who might be the artists, but might not - so not much better that Napster. The rate just keeps declining too - dropped about 50% from 2018 to 2021.

@ChickenMacaroni I'm guess I'm old school because I mainly listen to music that I have bought (often on CD back in the day!) but which is all stored on a central hard drive that my DH set up.

I still have mostly CDs too because our car is 12 years old and that's where I do most of my listening. That said, I wasn't as committed as you - I probably still have an illegal copy of an Atomic Kitten cd (infamously labelled by my friend's dad as The Automatic Kittens 😸) somewhere