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I'm always surprised and intrigued when people recall discovering music through Napster. All I remember is using it as a pirate search engine for songs that I already knew I wanted.

How did Napster work as a music discovery tool? Obviously there was some aspect I was missing out on.

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Before it got weird, you could look and see all the music a given person was sharing.... and that's how I found some amazing stuff I'd never heard on the mainstream radio stations.

I figured it was the right thing to do to actually buy the music, so I was doing that. Somewhere I've got a few hundred CDs on spindles that I bought retail at full price.

If you found someone else on, say, your college network, you could download songs from them faster than you could read their titles.

Direct Connect (and later DC++) had a few good years for this :)

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