For me napster was a game changer that got me into music period. Before that discovering and learning what music I liked was tedious and low signal/noise along with high cost that I never developed any interest in music until napster existed.
Got me into computers really. I didn’t “get” the internet prior to Napster. It felt like a toy with no real value. But I was a teenager at the time and the access to music was a game changer. I was hoarding so much content I had to learn how to build my own systems and storage solutions. I used to download video content (music videos, live concerts, etc) from IRC too around this time.
Kazaa
The only problem I had with Kazaa is how often people would rename files for reasons I'll never understand.
Like...imagine downloading "The Matrix.avi", and you start playing it, and it turns out it was actually a copy of Fight Club.
WHY!?
For the same reason trolls are everywhere: because they can :/
A large chunk of the internet exists for the lulz. Imagine having to postpone your phone calls for an entire weekend in order to download a 1GB copy of Final Fantasy 7 on a crappy 32 kbps dial-up connection, only to open up the game and realize you got Leisure Suit Larry 6.
I was lucky enough that we had a second phone line dedicated to the modem.
One thing I liked about Napster and the like is that bootlegs and B-sides circulated along with the official releases. I miss not having these on Spotify. Yes, there are official live albums on there. And yes, you can still find these bootlegs elsewhere. But there's enough friction that I rarely do this.
Yeah, Napster's value still hasn't been replaced in full. I remember pulling some obscure song from another endpoint halfway around the planet and then being able to browse their music collection, which turned me on to other cool music. You can kind of do the same thing on spotify by following people and playlists, but it's not the same discovery magic that Napster had, especially for obscure or hyper-local stuff. I'm not enough of a music nerd anymore to care as much these days, but Napster really was the cat's venerable pj's back then.
I'm pretty sure there were servers out there taking incoming search strings and slapping them on the end of file names. You could search for RANDOM_STRING and find a "britney spears matrix hot babes unsavory search (2)(1)RANDOM_STRING.mov.wmv.exe"