I argue that the real credit goes to Winamp. Napster was effectively just a slightly easier front end than an irc fserve, it was really the mp3 playback with playlists and maybe even milkdrop visualization that led to a critical mass for mp3 adoption and sharing. That later led to Napster and, ultimately, bit torrent.

But also, yeah, fuck Metallica.

Certainly soured a lot of people on Metallica.

Using Napster was one of those defining childhood memories for me. I was in junior high when it came out and I remember hearing about it through rumors at school. It was one of my early memories, realizing that computers could be used for interesting things and not just office work.

Those were the days, spending 20 minutes downloading a 3 minute song over dialup.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Napster, a free, online music-sharing platform was created 25 years ago.

It didn’t last long, but we look at how it made lasting changes to the way we consume music.

The original article contains 30 words, the summary contains 30 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Then Apple came with ipod and screwed up all my music with iTunes encrypting everything. Fuck apple forever