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I, personally, felt that Audiogalaxy was the hallmark program from this era. It was the most surefire way to get the songs you were looking for and discover plenty more in the process.

You'd set the music folder you wanted to share (there was no opting out) and so long as you had the program open your files were available for download by other users. The program operated like an always on satellite torrent program with very low impact. You'd find a file to download and the file would come in many chunks from any available user who had the file on their client side. Downloads were fast and in the event you lost connection or closed Audiogalaxy the download would resume immediately on reload.

From my POV Audiogalaxy was extremely threatening to Copyright holders in a way that prior p2p programs weren't. Your comment about software being especially 'disruptive' and ruffling all of the right feathers is what reminded me of Audiogalaxy.

There was no indication of who you were receiving files from. There were no usernames or features outside of download and upload. In terms of creating a piece of software that picked a mission and executed it I'll always look at Audiogalaxy and think it achieved precisely what it set out to do, entirely.

Soulseek is still alive with the same system. The program does not make you share anything but users can disable sharing files with users who don't share files.

At least in 2012-14 Soulseek was very popular with extremely niche and obscure music fans (stuff not even on What.cd!). Not sure how it is now.

Yes strange that soulseek seems to have been the one that has lasted longest. Probably its just flown under the radar and hence not been targeted legally or otherwise like Napster Kazaa Limewire Edonkey etc . I dont think its in any particular way more technologically advanced.

In any case today YouTube is now surely the biggest repository of illegally shared music by some distance yet seems accepted in general by the recording industry.

> yet seems accepted in general by the recording industry

YouTube (Google) pays the recording royalties out of their own pocket for those videos to keep user engagement on the site. If YouTube actually banned this sort of content, everyone would have left the site a long time ago. (IIRC, some gamers moved to Twitch after ContentID flagged their channels on YouTube.)

Underground electronic music lovers heavily use soulseek to this day.

While Audiogalaxy was great at doing P2P, the magical feature that differentiated it from the competition was that all known files were always indexed and available for download. This was not true about, say, Kazaa or Soulseek; when someone closed their client, their files would disappear from searches.

This meant that you could search out a whole bunch of files you wanted, and queue them up for downloading, and whenever the sharers came back online the downloads would start and go through. These days, BitTorrent operates the same way.

Unforunately, the rise of streaming content services has kinda killed off the need for file sharing for most people.

Back in the day of mytunes on a school network, I had HDs full of mp3s. I actively browsed friends (and complete strangers) libraries to find new things, complete an artists discography... etc.

Now? Spotify Premium is probably the best value/$ of any purchase I make in a month.

Even if I wanted to go back to my old ways... its just not there any more. I believe iTunes patched out the features that made mytunes possible, and people don't have computers full of mp3s discoverable on a network anymore.

> the rise of streaming content services has kinda killed off the need for file sharing for most people.

The history is a bit different. Napster was sued out of existence. As I recall, this was done by the record labels, but the argument was that file sharing was unfair to artists. Which it was. But that was obviously not the real point. Streaming services are notoriously stingy when it comes to paying artists for their work. So access to music is still easy, and the net change is that new middlemen are profiting wildly.

(Streaming vs. file sharing is a different issue. I want to own the music I listen to. I don't want to be dependent on an internet connection, a server, a revokable license, etc. )

I can get all the music I can listen to for $15 a month (Google Play Family which comes with YouTube Red) and share it with my wife and 4 kids. I think that people can get music on SoundCloud, Pandora or YouTube made the illegal less necessary. I personally prefer to just pay the money and get my music on all my devices and upload the music I have that isn't available.

I also LOVE YouTube Red and it helps the content creators multiple of times more then my little ad revenue. How is it that people flaged YouTube Red as anti-content creators and were going after Google with pitch forks and now content creators keep saying that Red Members give them so much more per person. One creator says 1/4 of his income is from YouTube Red (He makes a living on YouTube).

From a revenue point of view, streaming is not a very good way to support an artist[1][2]. The Verge article I linked to states that artists are paid "somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084" per stream.

If we are very pessimistic about the royalties of a CD sale - let's call it 20%, and say a single CD costs $10, that's ($10 x 20%) / 0.0084 = 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD.

If you take audiophile-level paranoia like buying vinyls, SA-CDs or FLAC masters, I think there's an argument to be made that an artist could make more money from people buying high-quality editions of their work to pirate than from people streaming their music.

It's food for thought.

Disclaimer: I am a music student.

[1]: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-muc... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/7/9861372/spotify-year-in-r...

238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD

Justin Bieber has very roughly 5 billion plays on spotify. Using your math, that would equate to 17 million CDs sold. Seems pretty reasonable. I'm sure he would have been better off before the internet, but it still seems doable.

Besides which I think youtube celebrities and twitch gamers have shown it is clearly possible to make a decent (if not quite profitable) living off creating content to be streamed. It's just music doesn't have the pre-eminent spot and advantages over other media it used to.

If a single CD contains (say) 10 songs, then it seems odd to compare the cost of a listening to a cd to streaming a single song. Listening to the whole CD would be the equivalent of 10 streams.

And if we divide those 238 streams by the 10 songs on the CD, it seems as though we only need to listen to a cd about 25 times before streaming becomes a better option for the artist.

We "only" need to listen to a CD about 25 times? That's ~25 hours of listening to a single album.

Over a lifetime of owning a CD, that doesn't sound too crazy. I think it is a safe bet that there are albums I've listened to 25 times this year. And if I bought an album today, I would think it unlikely that I wouldn't average 2.5 plays per year over the next 10 years. I'd probably burn 10-15 of those plays in the first few weeks, and then only need 1-1.5 plays per year to break even.

Of course, I won't listen to all my albums this much. Some might only get a few plays. So I suspect that the Miles Davis estate would be better off if I streamed 'Kind of Blue' rather than owning the CD. Conversely, Creed have done relatively well from my ill-advised CD purchase because I can guarantee I'm not going to hit 25 plays on that.

So I guess the moral of the story is that I should stream from artists that I love, and buy albums from artists I am on the fence about.

I disagree with this. Labels are the main beneficiaries of music distribution[0]. In addition, the non-committal nature of streaming makes it so much easier to get people to listen to your music. There are tons of artists I love with <10,000 plays that I never would have even heard of if not for music streaming services.

Even if royalties are the biggest source of income (which I don't believe to be true), I still think streaming is beneficial to small artists. Using your math of 238 plays per CD, at 10,000 listens they would have to sell more than 50 CDs for CDs to be more profitable for them. There are an incredibly high number of artists on Spotify who have 10k plays on a single song who probably couldn't have given their CDs away.

I've gone to shows to see the opening acts and co-headliners because of streaming services. I've bought merch from plenty of small artists that I never would have even known existed. I've listened to genres I had no interest in and found artists I like and support because of streaming services.

I feel like the exposure and the ability to produce your music (and actually have people be able to find and listen to it) massively outweighs any potential loss of revenue. There are potentially some medium sized artists who would have done better in the CD model, but probably not with how prevalent music piracy was in the 2000s.

[0]https://splinternews.com/buying-an-album-isnt-the-best-way-t...

This is why Independent Music is the only way to go and have grown almost 500% of full-time musicians. Labels are nothing but dead weight unless you are making millions.

> From a revenue point of view, streaming is not a very good way to support an artist

I wonder what percentage of the top 100 artists on streaming services even own their rights? I don't know for sure, but I suspect more money flows to the rights holders when I listen to a Pandora station while I work than if I turned on an actual radio.

> 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD

This is just one data point, but before I signed up for Google Music, I was buying two CDs a year and spending around $35. Now I'm paying $10 / month. How does the amount spent on streaming today compare to the spending on CDs in 1990? Does the equation change if you consider environmental costs of making those CDs and getting them to consumers?

Oh you're not nearly pessimistic enough:

>>In the U.S., recording artists earn royalties amounting to 10%–25% (of the suggested retail price of the recording[37] depending on their popularity but such is before deductions for "packaging", "breakage", "promotion sales" and holdback for "returns", which act to significantly reduce net royalty incomes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royalty_payment#Mechanical_roy...

Buying music is primarily supporting the distribution network that supports the artist, which has its pros and cons. I normally go to live shows and buy shirts or merchandise to support an artist because the margins on shirts, for example, are a lot better for the artist compared to the CDs. The label may pay for touring needs but a ton of artists not named Taylor Swift have to pay for almost everything themselves either because the label fronts no money or because the label will force a loan on the artist by having them pay it back in the form of ticket sales. Meanwhile, the label oftentimes works with venues to get a cut of, say, alcohol sales from them too.

LPs and such, while coveted by hipsters, is really tough to recommend as a revenue stream for more mainstream genres. The music business has devolved back for many cases where it’s possibly better for an artist to experience play local shows and promote themselves as an entrepreneur rather than to be an employee of a label as almost an unpaid intern.

Depends on how much you listen to as whether you're contributing more or less. I listen to spotify all day while I work, cycling through songs that I like often once every day or two. An artist that I like enough to have purchased a cd in the past will get multiple plays a day. That means less than a year to generate one cd's worth of revenue from me, and it's going to keep paying out after that because I'll keep listening to it years down the road if I really like it.

Also worth noting that 238 streams is ~20 playthroughs of your average 12 song album, for those who frequently listen to entire albums.

Add to that the fact that streaming services have made discovery a much bigger thing. The less mainstream artists are now getting the benefit of appearing on streaming radio and such, making their growth that much easier (after they've passed a certain threshold of course).

I believe that DC++ file sharing had a model like that, but the torrents outcompeted it for most purposes; most people don't want friend-of-a-friend filesharing, they either want the most effective way to get the latest goods from whoever has it, or the ability to upload stuff while remaining mostly anonymous.

Minor nitpick, Direct Connect (DC) was the protocol, DC++ was merely a popular client but by no means the only client. It wasn't even the official client.

Direct Connect really excelled at college campuses. All the traffic was internal so it was blazingly fast plus the hub had a chat feature which is incredibly useful (pre-reddit) and sometimes people would share old tests and stuff.

I'll add that DC is alive and well on my college campus. Beyond speed, it's less likely to get you in trouble with the college + ISP than torrenting, and has some textbooks and other locally relevant content.

Are you serious? Most people on my college campus did not even realize that they could drop their files in the public_html folder to share them online, let alone setup an ADC file sharing program as esoteric as DC++

Well, depends on the campus ;-)

We had a BulletinBoard based community with FTP sharing, and someone built a crawler to index the servers. So everyone just knew this staic IP which was out campus version of Google.

We then slowly transitioned into DC++ by constantly educating and sharing content on both FTP and DC++

The real shame was that move to DC++ actually caused the BulletinBoard community to die slowly. No more announcement posts, no more requests, no more SuperStar uploaders who “magically” found the latest TV shows aired in the US.

Depends...

Public school? Probably not. Tech school? Absolutely.

Yeah RIT students run an underground DC network.

Funny you should mention it...but.... Funny you bring it up, it's been well over a decade since I graduated, but RIT alumni here!

The RIT DC hub was the shit back in the day....

Back in the day there was nothing underground about it, at least for CS students. :) Connecting to the DC hub was a right of passage. So I am speaking from experience. :)

Yes, that's the school I went to

Yup, we used DC++ a lot on our college campus about 5-6 years ago. It is definitely one of the best, if not best, to share files on an intranet.

I think the biggest motivation for peer-to-peer networks was the lack of legal options for digitally accessing movies and music. The current streaming services and online stores have reduced this ache.

I agree. In fact, I started to realize I've been using sites like The Pirate Bay just to get a sense of what people are watching, new releases etc. Ratings would tend to be very low, of course, it's their culture to say that any movie sucks; but at least I can get a list of titles and then search for them in paid service providers.

I use Rottentomatoes

It's a very different measure, because the sort of people who rate media have certain characteristics to their taste that are more likely.

Very true for certain genres. If you want schlocky horror movies, for example, RT isn't going to do you any good because reviewers hate all the things that make those films good.

Peer-to-peer was killed by the advent of home routers doing NAT, making arbitrary inbound connections impossible. Configuring port forwarding was generally too difficult for "normal users", the web-UIs offered by typical home routers didn't make it easy enough. NAT traversal methods exist, but from my experience they are generally unreliable and/or slow.

I still remember the days when P2P connections over the internet "just worked, always" (the early Napster/Kazaa days), and then it went to "it works sometimes", and finally to "almost never works (except if the service offers some kind of middle-man datacenter to bounce the connections between the two NAT'd peers)".

Try to do a IRC DCC file transfer with anyone these days and see what I mean... long ago, it "just worked".

I blame today's unfortunate centralization of internet services largely on NAT breaking P2P connectivity. Who knows, maybe spread of IPv6 will fix this mess... some day...

IIRC, consumer wifi routers supposedly support a protocol that allows a computer to request a temporary port forward and release it when its finished using it.

Anyone remember what that protocol is called?

UPnP, Universal Plug and Play.

Yep, that's it. How useful is it in practice? I haven't ventured into those settings ever since I got my Airport Extreme.

Pretty much every torrent software supports UPnP/NAT-PMP today. The problem was UPnP came a bit late - the spec was published only in 2008, and by that time everything was fire-walled off and required more-than-idiot-capability to expose.

Bittorrent is good enough and there aren't really any law enforcement concerns any more. Pre 9/11 FBI and other agencies were actually doing prosecutions against people for unlicensed content distribution but after 9/11 they decided to focus on higher priorities so nobody really cares about security any more.

A warning letter from the ISP is not quite the same threat as a few years in a fed pen.

In Germany, it is currently quite dangerous to use Bittorrent illegally. There is a high chance of getting an "Abmahnung", which costs around 600-900 euros.

Using sharehosters with for-pay premium accounts is popular, as is using VPNs with bittorrent. The alternative is low-quality streaming.

I think the content industry isn't pushing for eradicating illegal downloads, they just want it to be at least as expensive, or more inconvenient than the legal options. (Which are quite good by now, if the shows you want to watch are available from your provider.)

That's why the OP suggested that everyone only connects to friends.

Interesting. Wasn't aware of that. VPN is good option.

This brings up a good point though. Bittorrent is not free. People who use Bittorrent do pay to use it (bandwidth, setup costs, etc), and pay more to get good quality stuff, but Bittorrent offers better quality and better selection than any licensed service.

This just isn't true. I see these all the time. It's all automatically generated these days.

> was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of your friend don't know that the file is originally coming from you, it is completely transparent. The goal is to not let anybody you don't trust know what you are down- or uploading.

This very thing exists and readily available for use in form of Freenet https://freenetproject.org/

I think freenet is very different. I know freenet from back in the 2000s. It is a platform to decentrally, anonymously store data. At some point, they did add a friend-to-friend option I think (which is what used to be called "darknet" - now that refers to sites like silk road, but back then it meant closed P2P like WASTE). The closest analogue would be Tor hidden services.

What I envision is more like a modern version of Kazaa. The experience would be like iTunes or Spotify. Select your media folder, give it access to your contact list, and voila, "Pirate iTunes". The closest current analogue would be RetroShare.

I'm impressed that Direct Connect is still kicking while all those services slowly died off.

I used to work for an on-demand content streaming company, so I'm biased, but the cataloging, searching, and quality of content are big scaling issues for the average user.