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Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#231
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify loves money so much it has yet to show a profit in almost 20 years.

As long as you can invest in growth, why not spend on that? The alternative is to report a profit and have it taxed. Amazon did the same for a long time. It’s a fine strategy if your investors don’t need the immediate returns.

If the market believed there was growth potential, their annual returns would not be trailing SP500 by 3%+ per year.

Amazon’s market cap grew by much more than the SP500, because the market (correctly) anticipated Amazon being able to earn profits.

Spotify’s ability to earn decent profits is not a given, and in my opinion, their whole business is currently being a negotiating chip between the 3 businesses that own music copyrights (Warner/Universal/Sony) and Apple/Amazon/Alphabet.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#233
post #208
post #15

Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…

About quality, it's weird it doesn't matter how much bandwidth I seem to have (currently with 1Gbps fiber), the streaming keeps the quality varying down without explanation. If I just pirate the highest quality in less than five minutes I can download the best version of a movie at around 20 GB and watch it in the best quality from start to end without any degradation. Why can't the paid streaming services deliver at…

They can. You know they can, others (ie: the pirate versions you mention) do. Larger files consume more bandwidth and storage on the CDN, which makes it more expensive. And while there are indeed some issues with lower quality (especially in dark scenes, I'm reminded of the muddy mess in the final episodes of Game of Thrones), most folks are "fine" with the quality we get today. Fine enough, anyway, that they keep paying for the status quo.

That's not to say that they're not interested in providing more quality. There's heavy investment in per-video, and sometimes per-video-section encoding and next generation codecs like AV1. The goal for them though is to get more quality with the same or less storage and bandwidth budget.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#234
post #87
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to hear more informed thoughts from old ISP folks, but afaik one of the things that made Napster possible was that 56kbps connections were roughly symmetrical (~33kbps up?). By capitalizing on the oft unused upload bandwidth, Napster provided a benefit at little cost. Would be fascinated to hear what this looked like on the PSTN backend load side, ~2000.

> 56kbps connections were roughly symmetrical I don't think so, asymmetry was the innovation that made 56K possible on POTS (plain old telephone sevice, with only enough bandwidth for squawky voice)

Sorta-kinda.

v.90 didn't work at all between two regular POTS-connected analog modems. In order for a v.90 connection to happen, the ISP-end of the connection needed to be a digital circuit (typically using ISDN PRI).

By being digital, the gear at the ISP-end was able to precisely and distinctly control each individual bits that would ultimately be converted to analog at a point that was physically near to the user (their local CO switch). This was what gave us asymmetric nature of "56k" v.90.

Eventually, we got good enough at learning how to handle changing line conditions and thereby twiddle the bits with a modicum of precision in the upstream direction. This allowed us to produce a standard with a bit more symmetry: v.92.

v.92 offered up to "56k" (~53k due to FCC limits) down, and 48k up.

A lot of users -- at least in the US -- never experienced v.92. It wasn't formalized until right around the turn of the century, which corresponded well with the time when xDSL, DOCSIS, and/or BRI started showing up even in fairly small not-completely-rural communities at fairly reasonable prices. The local dialup ISP market was beginning to die by then and many never bothered with upgrading their gear to support v.92 before they closed their doors for good.

(All of this wacky dial-up modem tech was both enabled and limited by digital switching in the PSTN. Speeds over dry-pair phone lines could be far higher if there wasn't a digital conversion in the middle, and avoiding that digital conversion is how DSL became possible.

Which is interesting: A DSL circuit was meant to go only across town (ish), and was always betwixt two fixed points. But a point-to-point v.90 or v.92 connection could be established to any properly-equipped machine by just dialing its phone number, and that machine could be across town or on the other side of a continent; it didn't care.)

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#235
For the younger folks: Napster arose when CDs and radio were the dominant official commercial distribution platforms for music. CD ripping into MP3s and portable music players drove the need to share them, and the internet was new, but needed a more scalable way to exchange them. Back in the day, it was mostly IRC channels, but these were slow and cumbersome. So Napster, Gnutella, and Hotline took off. These gradually gave way to eDonkey2000/eMule, KaZaA, and Limewire. These also then gave way to BitTorrent and overlay p2p apps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#236
post #83
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement. In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.

Indeed. Many of these pirates are the most devoted fans of the music they store and distribute. They go to gigs, buy merchandise and vinyl editions, and otherwise support the artists directly. In contrast companies like Spotify don’t care about the music at all. They would just as well sell you white noise if it would somehow give them the slightest improvement in growth or margins. Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, regular…

For sure, I mean to me, what.cd was the ultimate intersection of musicphiles (as opposed to audiophiles, though there's an overlap) and torrenters.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#237
post #208
post #15

Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…

About quality, it's weird it doesn't matter how much bandwidth I seem to have (currently with 1Gbps fiber), the streaming keeps the quality varying down without explanation. If I just pirate the highest quality in less than five minutes I can download the best version of a movie at around 20 GB and watch it in the best quality from start to end without any degradation. Why can't the paid streaming services deliver at…

Because higher bitrates cost more to store and transmit.if they can drop the size of every file they have by 40% that's 40% savings every time someone streams something even if it looks like dogshit.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#238
post #15

Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…

Napster is p2p done right, it's a game changer that the music industry was only saved by listening to Apple (read Steve) and doing that catapulted Apple to the first Trillion dollar company in history. It's so good that Metalica members were loosing their sleeps over it. For personally one of the best software I have used of more than 30 years using computer and it's fit for purpose metric was second to none.

Mate, it only takes a few minutes downloading mp3 song that's only a few MBytes, unless you are using dial-up or ADSL connection further down the road from the residential switch.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Presumably if you're pirating music you aren't "completely detached" from the music - otherwise why would you do it?

Hoarding.

I’m half joking but all these tools to automatically download TVs and movies has absolutely led to this class of user that habitually downloads stuff just for the sake of doing it. Terabytes of movies they have no interest in. The psychology of it fascinates me.

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