More than the music, though, Napster had chat rooms where you could get legit recommendations of new music that far exceeded the recommendation engines of today.
(The only reason is our absurd, anti-culture copyright laws)
Back when broadband had just hit Seattle I ran a server on an old PowerPC
IA paraphrased quote from a user:
> I am actually signed to TVT records but it this server’s contents that enables my creativity.
These days I pay for everything, but that testament to digital freedom sticks with me.
I agree to delete all backups within 24 hours as per the internet act signed by Bill Clinton.
Not that many years before the dawn of BitTorrent, I was making, mixing, and trading APEs and FLACs of self-recorded tapes (dubs, live, local) and record collections in niche communities and channels that no longer exist- bullied off the net because they didn't make money for someone else. I lost everything to hardware failure a few years later and left the scene, but I'd be thrilled to find anything from back then still circulating.
Have a music sharing service accessible via subscription. You can share anything you want including copyrighted music. If someone downloads copyrighted music from you, detected via audio fingerprinting, the service will pay the copyright holder from subscription fees - kind of like how streaming services do it now.
Granted this would require copyright holders to all buy-in but I guess we can just exclude the music of non-cooperating copyright holders from the network, again via fingerprinting, although this “restricted form” of the service will be of lesser value.
Now that I think about it, in a way, I feel YouTube has already taken up this role in the aforementioned restricted form since it publishes everything without seeking anyone’s permission and only removed stuff if there are complains.
Really? Spotify and Netflix pale in comparison to what Napster was. For all the content you think you have access to, Napster gave us the ability to see what other people had stored on their drives, stuff that they wanted to share rather than whatever media Spotify has a license for. That opened a world of discovery unmatched by any streaming service, or all of them put together. Want a club track from an unknown Russian group that only existed for a few nights back in 1998? That was on Napster. Netflix cannot deliver classic Simpsons episodes.