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Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

#71

Post by tuna »

Aloisius wrote: post #66
Mizza wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's incredibly fascinating! Thanks for posting such a great reply! You built something that really changed the world, in my opinion, and you should be very proud. I'm particularly pleased by the use of ASN/distancing weights in your results! None of the BT trackers I've hacked around on have had anything like that in them. Where is the code now? It should be in a museum.

No problem! It occurred to me that I've never really talked about the Napster architecture or algorithms publicly. I once hacked up Transmission to re-prioritize based on network distance. It worked rather well when it discovered over the DHT. It is a lot easier when you only have to calculate distance between you and other networks. Storing the graph of distances between two arbitrary users is harder. The code was p…

you should definitely publish this kind of things somewhere. it was big way before the whole big data stuff around.

cheers.

Re: Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

#72

Post by keypusher »

rmc wrote: post #17
bitterfounder0 wrote: post #15

My college used DC++ to internally share music, movies, tv shows, and porn. You could browse someones entire media collection. It gave you an overall sense for their taste in music and was a great way to find new bands. Reading about Napster reminded me how much I miss this feature. The article glosses over how slow Napster '99 was. I remember waiting a couple hours to download an album. Fast downloads are more impor…

To be fair, this was the age of dial-up, not broadband.

I disagree. 97-99 were the years of massive broadband cable rollout to suburban America. This was the time that broadband arrived, and you see it reflected in the software of that era particularly video games for example Quake, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Ultima Online, Everquest. It was the boom of real time multiplayer, which required a broadband connection.

Re: Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

#73

Post by dasil003 »

xpose2000 wrote: post #33

Napster was cool because it had live music and bootlegs that are often times very tough to find. A lot of napster was sifting through crap songs to find the good versions. Spotify and the others are cool because you can stream stuff while on your phone. And getting to the music you want to hear was more seamless and straightfoward. So in summary, almost, but not quite. Napster was also one of the first geek-tools to…

You really nailed it with this comment. Napster is from another era when the thrill of discovery was much greater than it is now. Objectively maybe Napster isn't as great as all the nostalgia would have us believe. Maybe there are actually more songs on Spotify (probably not, but humor me). The thing is, back then, if you searched and didn't find today, it didn't mean you wouldn't find tomorrow. You never knew when you would find a gold mine of a collection that not only had what you were looking for but actually schooled you on a bunch of new stuff.

Napster was a magical moment where the underground went mainstream for a split second before being snuffed out. Of course these type of (smaller) communities still exist online, and music fans are better off than they ever were, but Napster embodied a sea change that could only happen once.

Re: Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

#74

Post by cdcarter »

bitterfounder0 wrote: post #15

My college used DC++ to internally share music, movies, tv shows, and porn. You could browse someones entire media collection. It gave you an overall sense for their taste in music and was a great way to find new bands. Reading about Napster reminded me how much I miss this feature. The article glosses over how slow Napster '99 was. I remember waiting a couple hours to download an album. Fast downloads are more impor…

And now, my university uses Mojo to browse and download an entire users collection. It works incredibly well, and you really do get to know people. I remember meeting someone a year after downloading almost a 1/3rd of their library, and being able to talk right away.

Re: Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

#76

Post by corford »

palish wrote: post #56
Aloisius wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available The backend servers were linked. If your request couldn't be fulfilled on one, your search was forwarded to the next server. The total number of files on Napster at its peek was over half a billion files. Further, that picture must have been from a server that just started because the average server had significantly more users/files on it. Further, Napst…

Note: I built and ran the Napster server. I just want to say: thank you for building one of the most important inventions of our time. (Napster kickstarted the information sharing revolution.)

Usenet might wish to contest that claim :)

Re: Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

#77

Post by skeptical »

Natpster's 'catalog' was incomparably wider than any of today's music download services. For more than ten years, I've been telling p2p users that I never found anything that offers what napster did.

The thing I dislike the most with spotify and the like is that they are finite and relatively static catalogs. Sure they have millions of tracks, but once you've hit a search with an empty result, that's pretty much it.

In the old days, we would go to a record store and browse the current offer. To find a record store with interesting things was a whole science, and knowing the right place to buy records would mean being able to reach more interesting and rare stuff.

Spotify (itunes, amazon, whatever) is like ONE big record store. A huge one, but it's still only one. Grooveshark is more interesting but it is legally threaten because of that.

Even nowadays, if you head up to your local second hand store and dig through vinyls there are tons of stuff that won't even return a single google result. It is simply impossible for spotify and the like to solve this problem, they are broken by design.

This doesn't apply only to music, it applies to pretty much everything. No matter how good your product is, you can't just put a hard constraint on people's personal experiences by offering them large catalog of experiences they can have. The book 'The Cave' by José Saramago nails this problem, it's well worth reading.

Re: Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

#78

Post by Aloisius »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #68
meatsock wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no but the music industry can destroy the music industry, and they're doing a bang-up job of it. maybe a different way to think of it is: it's been more than a decade since napster and the music industry is just now beginning to get a clue.

The iTunes Music Store has been around since 2003. It has been three years since all DRM has been removed and files are 256kbit/s AAC. Granted, this happened despite the music industry's efforts, it took a lot of pressure from Apple to get there. But still, I very much prefer the current situation over when Napster reigned. (Does noone remember the amount of garbage on Napster? The malware, the fake files, the low qu…

Actually, SNOCAP started selling DRM-free music on MySpace exclusively back before DRM-free music was a glimmer in Apple's eye. We were mostly doing indie music when we had all the major labels come to us and ask how they could sell music on MySpace and eventually negotiated deals for it to all be DRM-free.

After that, it was relatively easy for Apple to go DRM-free (though oddly, they still refused to do it for some time after).

* Note: Shawn Fanning and I founded SNOCAP after Napster blew up.

Re: Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

#79

Post by icehawk »

brianwhitman wrote: post #21

I disagree with this -- i was a very heavy Napster user in 99 and am a very heavy Spotify user (and, NB, they are a customer) today. Obviously it's a fun angle for a SXSW talk, but: - The "depth of catalog" is actually incorrect -- Spotify has far far more songs than Napster did (you can see in that screenshot even, most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available, and of course those are just total index…

- The "depth of catalog" is actually incorrect -- Spotify has far far more songs than Napster did (you can see in that screenshot even, most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available, and of course those are just total indexed, in reality almost 50% of downloads would not be available.) Yes, you could find niche stuff on Napster-- as a musician in 1999 I would make sure all my stuff was available, pre-release, demos, etc. But we have Soundcloud for that now, so...

The numbers depend on when one took the screenshot. Here's part of one I took on 02/02/2001 23:32PM CST with more than a million files available:

https://1e400.net/i/BP6LdMPm/napster.png

Re: Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

#80

Post by skeptical »

invisible wrote: post #49

Absolutely a fluff piece. No mention of any other legal services that offer exactly what the author is writing about (namely Grooveshark).

Not exactly the same, but yes, grooveshark is the most similar thing to napster that we have these days.

It is worth to mention how popular napster was compared to grooveshark, or even spotify for that matter. Napster was much more popular.

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