Who Loved Napster? Who Doesn’t Even Remember It?

First, there were squeaky 78s. Then along came 45s and LPs. We moved on to eight tracks and cassettes. And finally CDs and streaming. In so many ways we have paid for the music we love. But for a short while around the turn of the millennium, we had a different way to get our sounds. It was free, it was exciting, and it was probably illegal. It was P2P and Napster was its king. Mr. DA, if downloading music via P2P is the charge, I plead nolo contender.

For those of you who were never familiar with Peer-to-peer (P2P) music file sharing, and to those of you who have forgotten what it was all about, P2P was a method for peeking into the music files on someone else’s networked computer. If you found a song you liked you could transfer a copy of the music to your own computer as an MP3 file. Everyone’s computer seemed to be on the network. It made the world one big jukebox.

Music artists and record labels justifiably fought like hell to shut the system down and were successful within a year or two. But from 1999 to 2001, pirating music was a national craze.

And I was a big user, or should I say, abuser. I was in my prime running years, my years of running dangerously, and I needed music, music, and more music. How did I get it? Napster, of course.

I would use the program to hunt down songs I liked (mostly classic rock, but also a little punk, a little grunge, a little Laurel Canyon, and for the haters, a little Nickelback,) transfer them to my computer, and each time I had collected a dozen or so songs, burn the tunes on to a CD. (You remember CD burners, right?)

I would listen to the tunes as I ran with my hand-held portable CD player. And not just any hand-held CD player! No, it was the hand-held CD player with the best anti-skip protection money could buy. I jogged my miles listening to Springsteen and to Pink Floyd, to The Clash, and to Nirvana.

In the two years of Napster’s reign, I compiled 19 song-packed CDs. They went into a large black CD case where they languished for more than a decade.

Today I had the urge to hear them. I hunted down my old boombox with a built-in CD player. I opened the CD case holder, plopped Disc #1 on the player, and had the sounds for my basement workout. 14 songs, lots of good memories, and some unexpected songs too. U2s appearance was no surprise, nor was Hotel California or the Joni Mitchell classic Court and Spark.

But Gwen Stefani? It is hard to believe she has been around since Y2K but there she was with No Doubt, emoting Don’t Speak as the last track on my compilation.

My plan is to listen to another disc every day until I have made it through all 19 of them. It will be a blast from the past and good motivation to keep me working out.

And if I get indicted for my past download indiscretions, at least I know I won’t be alone.

---