deviantArt's Angelo Sotira on the demise of Napster:

While we all knew Napster was probably not going to be making a strong come-back, many of us wanted it to live on. Same with Audiogalaxy, Scour.Net and others centralized, fast, efficient and quality P2P networks that gave us a glimpse of the future and were snapped away without being given a chance. In the end, artists stuffer and no one else. This is by all means an extremely controvercial subject, but remember one thing before forming your opinion: With the Internet in existance, there is no way to prevent peer to peer networks, piracy and trading. What you can do is embrace, control and monetize the activity. The record industry had this opportunity with Napster. Napster was their advantage, their leverage over the space and their value is (was?) the ability to make it easier for consumers to download music, not harder. Instead they killed the kitty, setting us all back for who knows how many years to come.


The Contest

The purpose of this contest is to pay hommage to Napster and to Shawn Fanning for his leadership and vision. To give thanks and love from our community to the folks who try so hard to make a difference with unique technologies, only to be stopped by the fear and ignorance of established industries fallibly incapable of adapting to the changing times. Create whatever you like to honor Napster and wish it Farewell! The contest ends in exactly two weeks from today on Wednesday, September 18th 2002.

....Do you ever wonder how all this music got on the Internet in the MP3 format to begin with? Because I know many of you have probably never even ripped a CD, you probably use a Napster-equivalent-but-not-as-good to download the files right off. When I was 14-15 I ran one of the largest MP3 groups in the world. Living my life virtually on efNet, I helped manage 300 kids who would rip, encode and upload music to FTP servers around the globe. I would secure the relationships with folks who had FTP sites and hard drive space, mostly on University connections that had lots of pipe and I would make sure plenty of people got the tunes. At the time, I had no idea these activities were illegal, and the RIAA wasn't actively making it clear that they were. Dimension Music was started around this time and it acted as a front-end for all of this music. In effect it was one of the first Napsters. The first stage, the second being search engines like Scour, the third P2P apps like Napster. Dimension Music's popularity was astounding; at it's peak ( 1997 early 1998 ) it received over 200,000 unique visitors per day. I may continue that story another time, but the point is I started Dimension Music in late 1996. Cybertropix was started around mid-1998 if I remember correctly. The DMusic Network was formed in January 2000. A child of this Network was deviantART which took off in a way none of us expected.

page 1 | 2 | 3