Napster

I was always partial to Audiogalaxy during that era. Even after Napster launched.

The feeling of queueing up songs to download from school, and then coming home to listen to them was... magical in 1999.

That and the music selection on AG was far more interesting that any other platform at the time. I discovered so many good artists back then, and it shaped my music preference to this day.

It was also a nail-biting experience... you'd have to wait 20, 40, 60 minutes or more for a song to finish downloading to find out whether the mp3 was the right one or a song that someone had renamed. Many times the song had been renamed maliciously from something by a different artist and you'd have to start all over again.

Download times varied a lot. Because it was peer-to-peer, it depended on how good your partner's connection was and how close they were to you. If you got lucky and found someone on the same network (or just a really fat uplink), you could milk it by browsing their shared files list and grabbing anything that looked good. It was a nice way to discover new music!

you also accidentally downloaded the wrong track just because it was mislabeled. many artists grew from that ex: soulja boy intentionally mislabeled his "crank dat" song as "50 cent in da club" etc

The early 2000s were the wild west, Napster, LimeWire, Kazaa, BitTorrent, SoulSeek, eDonkey, as well as various websites like mp3.com/mp3.ru and so on.

Napster was the easiest hydra to behead, and was shut down after just two years. Other services either existed in jurisdictions with different copyright laws (or a more lax approach to enforcement), or were by their nature too decentralised to shutdown.

I don't recall ever seeing adverts on Napster, and as far as I understand, there was no monetisation plan, but I'm not 100% certain on that. I know that after they got fined they introduced a subscription model to try to pay off the fine, but I'm not sure whether that was the acceleration of a long term plan, or whether there was never any real plan or direction.

Was the time line this quick? As a kid I remember black Napster being amazing, then white Napster being the end. Then a mishmash of various programs like soul seek, direct connect, aimster, and dorm internal only iTunes/Lime wire until what emerged in the void of oink.

The acquisition was for the name, not for the (by then) shutdown service. Napster, the prior entity, was in bankruptcy when Roxio got the name.