If you haven’t heard of Napster. Wake up. You missed out on one of the single most awesome ways to get music ever.
I am always looking for ways to show how my generation has been brought up on technology and which is why we are so great at it now…
Napster is one of my biggest, most favorite examples of all time. If this smells a little sentimental, it’s supposed to.
It actually started in fall of 1999, ten years sounded better. I was a freshman at Ohio University (not Ohio State, think Halloween party, not football powerhouse) That year they started putting a computer in every dorm room. Slap a T1 internet connection on it and look out!
At this time Napster was in it’s prime. All you had to do was go to Napster.com search the artist that you liked an BAM, thousands of titles of all kinds of amazing music. I could get anything I wanted…. and I did.
My roommate bought an external cd writer which we abused with CD burning. I was pledging a Beta Theta Pi at the time. If we had a party, I was a hero because I’d bring in a mix that rocked that social with the best tunes around. New stuff, surefire classics, all of it.
What was great is that I could not only get all the popular stuff. I could get some amazing mixes of newest obsession, trance music. Paul Oakenfold particulary (before he sold his soul). This was music that wasn’t being played on MTV and wasn’t being produced in the US. It was being record live from a radio show in Ibiza Spain or Shanghai China. Yeah… and it was all mine. (if you are interested in some sick electronic trance music circa 99– comment and I’ll load up a sampling) My buddy Owen was equally into these "beats" as we liked to refer to them. We each had our own record labels, "O-dogg-smooth Productions" and "Wunderass Records" Each of us constantly try to find the next hidden gem of a music to show the other. Once Owen got a DJ mixer…it was over. Everybody loves a good DJ, we drank some Naty and mixed it up!
I’d like to make a parallel technology note: In 1999, we didn’t have cellphones. (my parents had one, but it was for emergencies only) Remember those days? I miss those days at times…
I look back on it and see how my use of the web has only grown. I point out that example because it was the most "harvesting" I’ve ever done online. Gobs of killer music. Now we can get whatever we want in about 2 seconds with google, but Napster was a big stepping stone for people my age. It also crippled the music industry as we once new it.
Yep. My people killed the old music industry.
We had a riot doing it too!
