A tangent on the peer-swapping thing. I grew up at a strange intersection between physical media and internet piracy. In Russia. I don't remember anyone swappi

A tangent on the peer-swapping thing. I grew up at a strange intersection between physical media and internet piracy. In Russia. I don't remember anyone swapping music on physical media often (we did swap computer games on CDs tho, that's how I first experienced GTA Vice City), but in high school we had a better thing for music: VKontakte. It's the Russian Facebook, except it had, and to some extent still has, an enormous catalog of streamable MP3s. You have your personal playlist on your profile where you add music you find in the search or upload your own files. You can also post music to people's walls. As VKontakte was such an enormous part of everyone's life back then, everyone you knew IRL was on your friends list, and then some. And you could flip through their music (subject to privacy settings, but most had it open for everyone or for friends) and discover something amazing. People would often point to their VK playlist when asked "what kinds of music do you listen"; I still do sometimes. Ah, and of course the human-ness of all that — some people would edit the title and artist fields of their uploaded tracks to say something personal. This one is mostly gone though because VK started doing talking to recording companies a while ago and replaced all mp3s for which there is a licensed version with one. IIRC Spotify has a somewhat similar feature where anyone can create a public playlist. You can even follow people. It does have some of the same properties, but it's not quite the same thing because it's a separate app. The social features in Spotify feel like an afterthought. The separate social graph doesn't help either.