- A couple of decades ago – well before a $10 monthly fee would unlock access to virtually every song ever recorded through streaming services – digital music piracy was rampant around the world. Whether it was because you were young and couldn’t afford to buy MP3s, or simply couldn’t access them in your country, it was all too common to simply download music shared by other people on the web.
What was particularly interesting back then was the wide range of ingenious methods people used to share tunes. Back in the day, people went beyond simply hosting music on public-facing websites, and instead, found ways to send and receive tracks directly with other internet users. Let’s take a walk down memory lane and take a look at some of the ways people grew their music collections in the late 90s and early 2000s.
During this era, I was mostly dependent on friends: my dad didn't get any kind of broadband until 2005, meaning I was relegated to dial-up until I moved away to college in 2002. By that point Napster was already done, so it was all about Soulseek. Thanks to high bandwidth and little oversight (thank you, small private university) I went from maybe 100 MP3s tops to tens of gigabytes worth. To this day I don't fully remember what I have. But in the meantime, I'd have to get friends who had better connections to burn me CDs. By my mid-teens once I was working I also bought a ton of music, and was more focused on that (plus I didn't have any way to play MP3s in my car).
- Oink: 2003 - Demonoid: 2004 - The Pirate Bay: 2003 Sony was busted leaking releases on Oink ahead of publication to get hits into the hands of taste-makers and Trent Reznor called Oink "the world's greatest record store." Torrents didn't really take off among the tasteless wannabes looking to download Britney Spears and Nickelback but for those who were passionate about music, Napster and Limewire were primarily venues to download someone else's viruses and troglodytic ID3 schema.
Oink and Demonoid were both private trackers started by warez kids and run like it, you got an invite because you knew someone and you kept it by keeping your ratio up. The 11-year-old on a dialup connection wasn't keeping his ratio up even if he somehow got an invite. Torrents displaced soulseek and limewire when distributed tracking meant you didn't have to have friends and not be a leech.
I was trading MP3s in 1996 on mailing lists and newsgroups. I switched straight to Oink in 2003. Napster was what the guy in the checkout at Circuit City recommended and Kazaa was where my buddy downloaded a virus that shitcanned his computer. And I'm not weird. Yeah - Napster/Limewire were definitely where the people who didn't know anybody spent their time. But Oink was the one taken down by the IFPI. It made the front page of USA Today. And regardless of how important or unimportant you feel the torrenting community to be, go ahead and ctrl-f "torrent" on that article.