The grass roots of MP3 were very much like those of online art today. In this community we have Brad Wardell over at Stardock, and David Gorman at DeskMOD, the folks at customize and skinz.org, Breed and iCE, ArtUproar, Wasted Youth, Bkaro, etc. In MP3, our brothers in the community were Justin Frankel, Tom Pepper, Steve Gedekian from WinAMP, Ian and Andrew from Sonique, (who we have the pleasure of working with on deviantART) the Outer Limits, the MP3Asylum, Layer3.org, python & jm2 of mp3site.com, Michael Merhej of Audiogalaxy.com, Travis Kalanick & Dan Rodriguez from Scour.Net, Shawn Fanning of Napster, and many more of course.

Today that community finds itself regressing as businesses have been forced to give up. A huge rise followed by a huge fall only in the sense of legitimacy, because piracy still runs rampant; more files are downloaded and more music is shared than ever before. Through all the lawsuits and all the effort on the part of the labels and the RIAA, their only accomplishment was to increase the rate of theft while decreasing their ability to control what is happening. To this day they fight the battle as if they wish it all to just go away. Instead of embracing consumers they fight them every step of the way, releasing wasteful and pathetic solutions to address problems they've had ample opportunity to solve.

Shawn Fanning is Napster, literally. Napster was Shawns nickname on IRC (eFNet), and on IRC there were fServs (bots that serve the purpose of distributing any type of file) that would store between 10-20 tracks of music. Usually they would hold the latest album by some artist, and you could easily and efficiently download the tracks. This was much better than using search engines, because search engines were filled with outdated and broken links. With an fServ, if you got a connection you got the file. It was very natural at that time to wish for a way to search. "man, what if we could just search all the fServ's for a file instead of asking each fserv which files it has?" we'd often discuss. I'm an extremely proactive guy, so it still boggles my mind that I wasn't on top of this - but I didn't know how to program and I had my hands full with Dimension Music, so I guess that's my excuse. Justin Frankel saw this as well but he had his hands full with WinAMP. Soon after Napster, Justin released the Gnutella Protocol and a beta version of an app that used it. Gnutella wasn't inspired by Napster, is what most people don't know. See, Napster was what I call P2S2P. Peer 2 Server 2 Peer. It wasn't true peer to peer, but that's because P2S2P works better anyway (it's faster). Trouble is, if you shut down the servers, the peers can't talk to each other anymore. Because Gnutella is true P2P, there's no way to turn it off unless you turn off all the peers. Peers in this instance are your computers, the RIAA would have to turn off your computers in order for the Gnutella Network to die. Assuming of course you have a gnutella client installed.