Man do I feel old now. I remember using that in college when it was brand new. These were in the days when Yahoo practically WAS the internet and Google was a scrappy upstart.
I remember trading mp3s on AOL before it. I remember how much effort it took to download an mp3 over a 56k modem. Every time my brother picked up the phone I had to start over. The first one I succesfully downloaded, after trying for what must have been days but felt like months, was Gettin' Jiggy Wit It and of course it turned out our 386 computer couldn't even really play an mp3 without stuttering.
I remember moving in with two friends, a block from campus, and putting a $2,500 Gateway computer (bought from the Gateway store in the strip mall, of course) on a credit card because we were going to split it three ways. You can probably guess how that ended up. Even though that was equivalent to about $5k today it was a midrange computer at best and, of course, was replaced a little over a year later. But, we did get broadband and it could play Starcraft and online poker just fine. Worth it!
I remember after Napster exploded, it had gotten bogged down with new traffic and they started offering multiple servers, and someone wrote some third-party software that let you switch between them at will until you could find the song you wanted without too terribly much wait.
I remember my first mp3 player, a Diamond Rio 500. It used a USB cord that, of course, had the pins reversed, so you couldn't just use any USB cord. It held about one hour of music, 1.5 if you bought a very expensive 32mb flash card. It ran for a week on one aaa battery. It cost almost $300, which would be like $500 today. God did I love that thing.
I remember the RIAA and MPAA suing file sharers. I remember lots of tech bros saying what idiots they were for trying to use the legal system to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I remember one particularly astute, well-known tech guy saying at a YC dinner (must have been 2007 or 2008) in response to a sneering question about it that not everyone who chooses a career outside of tech is an idiot, the people who run the media companies might know more about media than you, certainly understand that selling physical media's days are numered, and that what they were doing was really a delaying tactic while they figured out how to monetize content in the digital age. (The answer, it turned out, was things like Netflix and Spotify, but those were still a few years away. Netflix's first original content wasn't until 2012!)
I remember after Napster got sued into oblivion there were so many others. The toothpaste was out of the tube on file sharing. Limewire. Edonkey. Bittorrent. For every one they killed two more appeared. Fragmentation wasn't even an issue since everyone ran (and thus seeded) several.
Good nostalgia for a Saturday,.