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Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

206 points by borism 15y ago

icebraining 15y ago
But the "evil" aspect of Napster wasn't that it was P2P: it was that it didn't return any money to the creators. No, it's because it forfeited the control the labels had over the music. They've showed again and again that they don't mind losing money to maintain that control.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  But they have already lost that power and are never going to get it back again.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    SOPA proves they don't agree with you, unfortunately.
    - ktizo 15y ago
      It doesn't really matter in the long run what they choose to believe, given that it is essentially just a game of coders vs lawyers that is being played out on a global computer network. All SOPA did was underline yet again how little they understand the actual technology involved.
- psychotik 15y ago
  P2P is just technology. Making it work so that the right people are compensated is hard. My startup is trying - http://www.gigaom.com/2012/03/05/audiogalaxy-personalized-p2p-radio/ http://www.gigaom.com/2012/03/05/audiogalaxy-personalized-p2.... This just launched a week or so ago - give it a shot!
  - icebraining 15y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion and I hope you'll succeed, but frankly I can't; assuming you're giving a cut of your income to the big labels, I'd be contributing to companies that actively lobby to destroy things I hold dear. Nowadays I only buy music that I'm reasonably sure it won't feed the RIAA.
jwblackwell 15y ago
I think it's a little unfair to make a comparison to something that is essentially illegal against something that is not. I know Spotify has it's flaws both in its business model and catalog but as someone who has used virtually every illegal filesharing method going in the past and has now been converted to Spotify I think they should be given a little more credit. It's not the fault of Spotify that the collection is limited. At least they are trying to move the music industry into the future - whether it will work or not who knows but I'm sure we will all look back in hindsight and see Spotify as the pioneer of whatever comes.
- icebraining 15y ago
  I think you're reading too much into it. The article just gives you a fact - Napster was in many ways better than Spotify is now. It doesn't blame the Spotify devs for it.
mds101 15y ago
So just because Napster had built in chat and a wider illegal catalogue it becomes better than Spotify eh? Also, why would I want to know the personality of some ramdom guy on the other side of my p2p connection? This is mostly a fluff piece with absolutely nothing new or interesting being said.
- jchrisa 15y ago
  I thought browsing other folks libraries was pretty cool. As an artist, I'd look myself up, and see what else those people listened to. Pretty neat and I've yet to come across anything similar. I haven't had to the time to investigate the other p2p music platforms since then, so probably others have that feature...
  - _delirium 15y ago
    I like that aspect of Soulseek. When someone shows up in the search results for some obscure track, you can see what else they listen to. The browsing interface also keeps their music organization, so it can be a pretty interesting way to browse if you run across a collector-type person with an organized-into-genre filesystem. You can also chat with them, and there are in addition IRC-style chat rooms for various genres and interests.
    - kreate 15y ago
      yes, soulseek was created by a former napster developer. it is very similar to napster.
  - mds101 15y ago
    I too appreciate being able to browse other people's collections. I was only ranting at the way the author chose to write that ('Insight into somebodies personality').
  - beaumartinez 15y ago
    I use Last.fm for that purpose. Check artist you like, find someone who gave them a shout, evaluate their music profile, optionally "friend" them, listen to their music.
Hyena 15y ago
The irony being that Spotify has a social strategy.
bitterfounder0 15y ago
My college used DC++ to internally share music, movies, tv shows, and porn. You could browse someones entire media collection. It gave you an overall sense for their taste in music and was a great way to find new bands. Reading about Napster reminded me how much I miss this feature. The article glosses over how slow Napster '99 was. I remember waiting a couple hours to download an album. Fast downloads are more important than social features. I do not miss Napster.
- e03179 15y ago
  RE: slow downloads thru Napster Of course, high speed internet is much more prevalent now in 2012 than it was in '99. Downloading an album in '99 sometimes meant you were downloading from PC's with only a 56k modem for connectivity.
  - bitterfounder0 15y ago
    Good point. It's not fair to associate Napster with slow download speeds. I would have loved to see how Napster evolved with broadband. Tragic they were shutdown.
    - tjoff 15y ago
      In countries such as Sweden that was already the case. I never downloaded anything on napster in 56k-speed unless I was really desperate. Broadband was common enough that limiting yourself to high-speed downloads didn't limit the supply, which was kind of obvious considering that those with broadband typically had many orders of magnitude larger libraries :p
- rmc 15y ago
  To be fair, this was the age of dial-up, not broadband.
  - Drbble 15y ago
    It was broadband (well, high speed LAN) on college campuses.
rmc 15y ago
It's interesting that it's more than a decade since Napster, and the music industry hasn't gone bust yet. It's almost like P2P cannot destroy the main music industry.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  Who'd have thought it?
- meatsock 15y ago
  no but the music industry can destroy the music industry, and they're doing a bang-up job of it. maybe a different way to think of it is: it's been more than a decade since napster and the music industry is just now beginning to get a clue.
  - Samuel_Michon 15y ago
    The iTunes Music Store has been around since 2003. It has been three years since all DRM has been removed and files are 256kbit/s AAC. Granted, this happened despite the music industry's efforts, it took a lot of pressure from Apple to get there. But still, I very much prefer the current situation over when Napster reigned. (Does noone remember the amount of garbage on Napster? The malware, the fake files, the low quality files? Not to speak of the terrible speeds -- many peers were still on dial-up...) With iTunes, you can find new music easily, download high quality files, and get the album art and liner notes. Downloading and purchasing is fast and safe. You get to pay a fair price and know that the rights holders are being compensated.
    - Aloisius 15y ago
      Actually, SNOCAP started selling DRM-free music on MySpace exclusively back before DRM-free music was a glimmer in Apple's eye. We were mostly doing indie music when we had all the major labels come to us and ask how they could sell music on MySpace and eventually negotiated deals for it to all be DRM-free. After that, it was relatively easy for Apple to go DRM-free (though oddly, they still refused to do it for some time after). * Note: Shawn Fanning and I founded SNOCAP after Napster blew up.
brianwhitman 15y ago
I disagree with this -- i was a very heavy Napster user in 99 and am a very heavy Spotify user (and, NB, they are a customer) today. Obviously it's a fun angle for a SXSW talk, but: - The "depth of catalog" is actually incorrect -- Spotify has far far more songs than Napster did (you can see in that screenshot even, most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available, and of course those are just total indexed, in reality almost 50% of downloads would not be available.) Yes, you could find niche stuff on Napster-- as a musician in 1999 I would make sure all my stuff was available, pre-release, demos, etc. But we have Soundcloud for that now, so... - The discovery on Napster was non-existent. You could browse through a users' collection, the same way you can browse through playlists today. But the only entry into anything was a search box that only looked at ID3v1 data and filenames. There's been amazing leaps and bounds in discovery since then, and it's very clear by the #s that it's what people wanted -- a guided (radio, playlist) experience over a wild west single song retrieval thing. - Napster was stupid bad at search. There obviously was no catalog resolution and the quality of the results was abysmal. I am pretty sure it was a substring match, for one, and then there was the bad metadata, fake songs, later on a huge spam / "SEO" problem. - Not going to get into speed, because it wasn't Napster's fault, but even back then it was far easier to get music elsewhere other than Napster if possible. Ratio FTP sites, hotline, and of course bubblecruft startups building customer bases by selling new CDs for $4. It was very clear at the time even that the distributed nature of Napster was a liability, not a promise, as all the single-server solutions were far more convenient and reliable. But this was not their fault and of course their success inspired everything after it.
- maukdaddy 15y ago
  Oh wow hotline, that brings back some memories. On a university network Napster was quite fast. I could routinely saturate my (for that time speedy) 10mbit connection, especially to other clients on Internet2. One other point to your argument is social. The ability to see what friends are listening to and create sharable playlists is obviously something that Napster did not provide.
  - link2009 15y ago
    You had Internet2 in '99?
nhangen 15y ago
The fatal flaw of Spotify, Rdio, and even Last.fm is that finding good music is just too much work. Too much social and too many clicks. I wish Pandora could buy one of these services and combine their discovery engine with the catalogues of the subscription services. Until then, I think I'll just keep buying music.
- Reebz 15y ago
  I can't agree more. I love Pandora for the guidance. WAH is available on Spotify, which is good (I used them before Spotify), but it's very niche indie discovery. I can't select a Temptations song and expect to be then offered up a Clarence Carter or Tower of Power hit. Only Pandora has those "skillz".
- psychotik 15y ago
  Hey, if you like discovery try Audiogalaxy Mixes - we just launched it a week or so ago [1]. We think it's better than Pandora (much larger catalog, smarter algos, more input types) - tell me if it's not. It's free on the web (no ads) with a free trial on mobile, after which we charge a small fee to cover licensing costs. If you email viraj@audiogalaxy.com with your account I'll comp you a free month. I'd love to know what you think. Here's a Mix I've made, for example: http://www.audiogalaxy.com/mix/87-Guitar%20Gods/ http://www.audiogalaxy.com/mix/87-Guitar%20Gods/? [1]http://www.geekwire.com/2012/audiogalaxy-music-service-reborn-approach http://www.geekwire.com/2012/audiogalaxy-music-service-rebor...
  - andybak 15y ago
    Ahhhh. Audiogalaxy. That brings back memories. It was amazing back in it's (less legitimate) days. It took over from Napster but improved on it in many ways.
    - psychotik 15y ago
      It's evolved and we're trying to re-create some of the same magic, with the same team. First step: http://gigaom.com/2012/03/05/audiogalaxy-personalized-p2p-radio/ http://gigaom.com/2012/03/05/audiogalaxy-personalized-p2p-ra...
ecocentrik 15y ago
I like Spotify and find it infinitely more useful for music discovery than Napster ever was. Sure it would be nice if they had a more comprehensive catalog but finding complete high quality recordings on Napster was always impossible. I dug around for weeks trying to complete an album at a decent bitrate. By comparison Spotify has figured out how to serve complete high quality music legally at a very reasonable price.
a15i 15y ago
don't you get it, he only wants some publicity time to time? the content of the news is not important, the important bit is that it gets circulated, which it sadly has been circulated here in hackernews. and so was that ruby gut called why or whatever, a few days ago in hackernews. sad but true: just like people in middle east are not culturally ready for democracy, people in advanced countries are not intelligent enough to not to create hype for free for random individuals.
xpose2000 15y ago
Napster was cool because it had live music and bootlegs that are often times very tough to find. A lot of napster was sifting through crap songs to find the good versions. Spotify and the others are cool because you can stream stuff while on your phone. And getting to the music you want to hear was more seamless and straightfoward. So in summary, almost, but not quite. Napster was also one of the first geek-tools to really hit mainstream, and boy was that weird.
- dasil003 15y ago
  You really nailed it with this comment. Napster is from another era when the thrill of discovery was much greater than it is now. Objectively maybe Napster isn't as great as all the nostalgia would have us believe. Maybe there are actually more songs on Spotify (probably not, but humor me). The thing is, back then, if you searched and didn't find today, it didn't mean you wouldn't find tomorrow. You never knew when you would find a gold mine of a collection that not only had what you were looking for but actually schooled you on a bunch of new stuff. Napster was a magical moment where the underground went mainstream for a split second before being snuffed out. Of course these type of (smaller) communities still exist online, and music fans are better off than they ever were, but Napster embodied a sea change that could only happen once.
funkah 15y ago
Cloud music services are too limited, and all they get you is not having to store your music on a device you carry around with you all the time anyway.
gaoshan 15y ago
I find more awesome music, quicker, with Spotify than I ever did with any other music tool. I especially like the apps for this: Pitchfork, Guardian, RollingStone, etc. This combined with checking out what my "friends" are listening to really is a great way to find good stuff.
invisible 15y ago
Absolutely a fluff piece. No mention of any other legal services that offer exactly what the author is writing about (namely Grooveshark).
- thematt 15y ago
  Grooveshark's legality is questionable at best.
  - invisible 15y ago
    Legality is following the letter of the law (e.g. DMCA), to which Grooveshark does and exceeds. Being praised and loved by all labels is what Spotify is doing (by paying out the ass in investor money).
- skeptical 15y ago
  Not exactly the same, but yes, grooveshark is the most similar thing to napster that we have these days. It is worth to mention how popular napster was compared to grooveshark, or even spotify for that matter. Napster was much more popular.
cantbecool 15y ago
The author didn't even clearly state how Napster '99 smokes Spotify. The only feature that I thought he stated was that Napster had a form of chat and how it could have potentially evolved into a social network.
joeycfan 15y ago
I always thought the Napster client was absolutely beautiful and perfect at it's job. I was gobsmacked when I learned it was the author's first project. Did they ever release the source code?
Aloisius 15y ago
It is really hard to compare Napster and Spotify as they are entirely different beasts. Let me just say that I built the Napster server, so I'm biased. I have also been a Spotify user for several years. For me, Spotify is a sub par experience because I don't know what I want and I have different music tastes than my friends. The only thing that makes Spotify useful for me is sites like http://sharemyplaylists.com/ http://sharemyplaylists.com/. I imagine for people who know exactly what they want and just treat it like a giant jukebox, it is a fantastic service. I am not one of those people. Napster for me, was about finding people as much as music. I was part of a community of people that were super stoked to talk about some new indie band. I would search, notice who had music I was looking for, send them a message and start talking. I met a lot of people in real life through Napster often at shows. I know others did as well since we received thank you letters and in a couple cases, wedding announcements. I think the community with its passion for music was what made Napster great, not the massive catalog. All I had to do was enter one of many indie channels and read for half a minute before I had three new things to listen to and a bunch of people to talk to them about. Not to discount the catalog, I will say that the catalog at Napster will possibly never be duplicated. There were a lot of back catalog works, a lot of pre-release works and a ton of bootlegs. Sure, the quality was sometimes poor, but then I used Napster as a tasting service and then, you know, bought the originals when I could. My hope is Spotify continues to improve and eventually becomes more community oriented or something else comes along and re-ignites the flame. Music is one of those things that is central to a lot of people's lives and you couldn't ask for a more passionate userbase.
- Mizza 15y ago
  Woah, you wrote the server for Napster?! That's awesome! Can you talk about that a bit? What was the underlying algorithm, what was the stack and how much data were you pushing at your max?
  - Aloisius 15y ago
    Which underlying algorithm? The search engine was built on a ternary tree with a custom merging algorithm. I honestly don't know if the merging algorithm has a name as it was something I came up with (literally) while sleeping one night. Because we mostly used ID3 tags and file names, it was completely unnecessary to use a stemming algorithm because if you typed in a misspelled search, given the size of our index, there was probably someone who tagged their file using the same misspelling. The network biasing code used BGP data combined from a number of looking glass servers to build a map of ip/prefix -> ASN number and ASN->ASN distances. It was then used to reorder search results based on network distance to users so they would bias towards their own networks and save ISPs money and speed transfers on broadband connections. Servers were linked through a fully meshed network. Each had presence information about every user on the network so that they could route IMs around. The chat system was semi-linked (fully linked on some servers, but we couldn't fully link the whole thing because the client had no administrative functions for chat). If we couldn't send the user back enough results for a search, the query was simply passed around the backend. The whole thing was written in C++. At its peak, there were about 2.3 million users online at any given time (80 million total users growing by a million every 4 days). The system would be indexing about 17.6 million files per second (and de-indexing about the same amount). The whole system pushed out about 2 Gbps of bandwidth in search results (which were tiny). Napster was one of the very first services to push past 10K connections on a Linux machine. At peak, I could get over 100K users on a single process (though I'd run out of memory indexing files on the tiny 2 GB machines and blow out the NIC sending search results). During normal operations, each server process had around 40K users on it and between 7-12 million files indexed. There were a bunch of side infrastructure things no one saw. Court mandated copyright filtering systems, recommender systems (most for play), load balancing servers, bot detection and sequestration systems, analytics reporting jobs, etc. Nowadays, I could probably fit all of Napster on one big machine. Heh.
comex 15y ago
> What a pity the large labels a decade ago didn't appreciate that Napster was a social network – just one built around music. Who knows, today it might be as big as you-know-who. Ping?
skeptical 15y ago
Natpster's 'catalog' was incomparably wider than any of today's music download services. For more than ten years, I've been telling p2p users that I never found anything that offers what napster did. The thing I dislike the most with spotify and the like is that they are finite and relatively static catalogs. Sure they have millions of tracks, but once you've hit a search with an empty result, that's pretty much it. In the old days, we would go to a record store and browse the current offer. To find a record store with interesting things was a whole science, and knowing the right place to buy records would mean being able to reach more interesting and rare stuff. Spotify (itunes, amazon, whatever) is like ONE big record store. A huge one, but it's still only one. Grooveshark is more interesting but it is legally threaten because of that. Even nowadays, if you head up to your local second hand store and dig through vinyls there are tons of stuff that won't even return a single google result. It is simply impossible for spotify and the like to solve this problem, they are broken by design. This doesn't apply only to music, it applies to pretty much everything. No matter how good your product is, you can't just put a hard constraint on people's personal experiences by offering them large catalog of experiences they can have. The book 'The Cave' by José Saramago nails this problem, it's well worth reading.
shingen 15y ago
I hadn't bothered to look at Spotify, in terms of using the service (I was familiar with the company et al). I've used iTunes with locally stored music for a really long time. So I went to spotify.com, read over their product and information. Checked out their plans. Decided I'd see what they can do with the Unlimited $4.99 plan. I went to sign up for Spotify. They required I use my Facebook account. Nope.
nitrogen 15y ago
For me the coolest thing about Napster was all the remixes people were making. You could search for "[anything] remix" (e.g. Tetris remix, Nintendo remix, Sesame Street remix, ...) and find something awesome that would never see the light of day in a label. Some of those remixes bled through into the later P2P systems. Napster was one of the first services to give the mainstream world a glimpse at the digital information utopia made possible by the Internet. The paternalistic distribution systems we have now are a mere shadow of what could be without the strangling influence of the media industry.
- ljf 15y ago
  they were excellent! but the remixes are still around (and new ones being made), they've just moved to YouTube now.

206 points by borism 15y ago

But the "evil" aspect of Napster wasn't that it was P2P: it was that it didn't return any money to the creators. No, it's because it forfeited the control the labels had over the music. They've showed again and again that they don't mind losing money to maintain that control.

tomjen3 15y ago
But they have already lost that power and are never going to get it back again.
- icebraining 15y ago
  SOPA proves they don't agree with you, unfortunately.
  - ktizo 15y ago
    It doesn't really matter in the long run what they choose to believe, given that it is essentially just a game of coders vs lawyers that is being played out on a global computer network. All SOPA did was underline yet again how little they understand the actual technology involved.
psychotik 15y ago
P2P is just technology. Making it work so that the right people are compensated is hard. My startup is trying - http://www.gigaom.com/2012/03/05/audiogalaxy-personalized-p2p-radio/ http://www.gigaom.com/2012/03/05/audiogalaxy-personalized-p2.... This just launched a week or so ago - give it a shot!
- icebraining 15y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion and I hope you'll succeed, but frankly I can't; assuming you're giving a cut of your income to the big labels, I'd be contributing to companies that actively lobby to destroy things I hold dear. Nowadays I only buy music that I'm reasonably sure it won't feed the RIAA.

jwblackwell 15y ago

I think it's a little unfair to make a comparison to something that is essentially illegal against something that is not. I know Spotify has it's flaws both in its business model and catalog but as someone who has used virtually every illegal filesharing method going in the past and has now been converted to Spotify I think they should be given a little more credit. It's not the fault of Spotify that the collection is limited. At least they are trying to move the music industry into the future - whether it will work or not who knows but I'm sure we will all look back in hindsight and see Spotify as the pioneer of whatever comes.

icebraining 15y ago
I think you're reading too much into it. The article just gives you a fact - Napster was in many ways better than Spotify is now. It doesn't blame the Spotify devs for it.

mds101 15y ago

So just because Napster had built in chat and a wider illegal catalogue it becomes better than Spotify eh? Also, why would I want to know the personality of some ramdom guy on the other side of my p2p connection? This is mostly a fluff piece with absolutely nothing new or interesting being said.

jchrisa 15y ago
I thought browsing other folks libraries was pretty cool. As an artist, I'd look myself up, and see what else those people listened to. Pretty neat and I've yet to come across anything similar. I haven't had to the time to investigate the other p2p music platforms since then, so probably others have that feature...
- _delirium 15y ago
  I like that aspect of Soulseek. When someone shows up in the search results for some obscure track, you can see what else they listen to. The browsing interface also keeps their music organization, so it can be a pretty interesting way to browse if you run across a collector-type person with an organized-into-genre filesystem. You can also chat with them, and there are in addition IRC-style chat rooms for various genres and interests.
  - kreate 15y ago
    yes, soulseek was created by a former napster developer. it is very similar to napster.
- mds101 15y ago
  I too appreciate being able to browse other people's collections. I was only ranting at the way the author chose to write that ('Insight into somebodies personality').
- beaumartinez 15y ago
  I use Last.fm for that purpose. Check artist you like, find someone who gave them a shout, evaluate their music profile, optionally "friend" them, listen to their music.

Hyena 15y ago

The irony being that Spotify has a social strategy.

bitterfounder0 15y ago

My college used DC++ to internally share music, movies, tv shows, and porn. You could browse someones entire media collection. It gave you an overall sense for their taste in music and was a great way to find new bands. Reading about Napster reminded me how much I miss this feature. The article glosses over how slow Napster '99 was. I remember waiting a couple hours to download an album. Fast downloads are more important than social features. I do not miss Napster.

e03179 15y ago
RE: slow downloads thru Napster Of course, high speed internet is much more prevalent now in 2012 than it was in '99. Downloading an album in '99 sometimes meant you were downloading from PC's with only a 56k modem for connectivity.
- bitterfounder0 15y ago
  Good point. It's not fair to associate Napster with slow download speeds. I would have loved to see how Napster evolved with broadband. Tragic they were shutdown.
  - tjoff 15y ago
    In countries such as Sweden that was already the case. I never downloaded anything on napster in 56k-speed unless I was really desperate. Broadband was common enough that limiting yourself to high-speed downloads didn't limit the supply, which was kind of obvious considering that those with broadband typically had many orders of magnitude larger libraries :p
rmc 15y ago
To be fair, this was the age of dial-up, not broadband.
- Drbble 15y ago
  It was broadband (well, high speed LAN) on college campuses.

rmc 15y ago

It's interesting that it's more than a decade since Napster, and the music industry hasn't gone bust yet. It's almost like P2P cannot destroy the main music industry.

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
Who'd have thought it?
meatsock 15y ago
no but the music industry can destroy the music industry, and they're doing a bang-up job of it. maybe a different way to think of it is: it's been more than a decade since napster and the music industry is just now beginning to get a clue.
- Samuel_Michon 15y ago
  The iTunes Music Store has been around since 2003. It has been three years since all DRM has been removed and files are 256kbit/s AAC. Granted, this happened despite the music industry's efforts, it took a lot of pressure from Apple to get there. But still, I very much prefer the current situation over when Napster reigned. (Does noone remember the amount of garbage on Napster? The malware, the fake files, the low quality files? Not to speak of the terrible speeds -- many peers were still on dial-up...) With iTunes, you can find new music easily, download high quality files, and get the album art and liner notes. Downloading and purchasing is fast and safe. You get to pay a fair price and know that the rights holders are being compensated.
  - Aloisius 15y ago
    Actually, SNOCAP started selling DRM-free music on MySpace exclusively back before DRM-free music was a glimmer in Apple's eye. We were mostly doing indie music when we had all the major labels come to us and ask how they could sell music on MySpace and eventually negotiated deals for it to all be DRM-free. After that, it was relatively easy for Apple to go DRM-free (though oddly, they still refused to do it for some time after). * Note: Shawn Fanning and I founded SNOCAP after Napster blew up.

brianwhitman 15y ago

I disagree with this -- i was a very heavy Napster user in 99 and am a very heavy Spotify user (and, NB, they are a customer) today. Obviously it's a fun angle for a SXSW talk, but: - The "depth of catalog" is actually incorrect -- Spotify has far far more songs than Napster did (you can see in that screenshot even, most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available, and of course those are just total indexed, in reality almost 50% of downloads would not be available.) Yes, you could find niche stuff on Napster-- as a musician in 1999 I would make sure all my stuff was available, pre-release, demos, etc. But we have Soundcloud for that now, so... - The discovery on Napster was non-existent. You could browse through a users' collection, the same way you can browse through playlists today. But the only entry into anything was a search box that only looked at ID3v1 data and filenames. There's been amazing leaps and bounds in discovery since then, and it's very clear by the #s that it's what people wanted -- a guided (radio, playlist) experience over a wild west single song retrieval thing. - Napster was stupid bad at search. There obviously was no catalog resolution and the quality of the results was abysmal. I am pretty sure it was a substring match, for one, and then there was the bad metadata, fake songs, later on a huge spam / "SEO" problem. - Not going to get into speed, because it wasn't Napster's fault, but even back then it was far easier to get music elsewhere other than Napster if possible. Ratio FTP sites, hotline, and of course bubblecruft startups building customer bases by selling new CDs for $4. It was very clear at the time even that the distributed nature of Napster was a liability, not a promise, as all the single-server solutions were far more convenient and reliable. But this was not their fault and of course their success inspired everything after it.

maukdaddy 15y ago
Oh wow hotline, that brings back some memories. On a university network Napster was quite fast. I could routinely saturate my (for that time speedy) 10mbit connection, especially to other clients on Internet2. One other point to your argument is social. The ability to see what friends are listening to and create sharable playlists is obviously something that Napster did not provide.
- link2009 15y ago
  You had Internet2 in '99?

nhangen 15y ago

The fatal flaw of Spotify, Rdio, and even Last.fm is that finding good music is just too much work. Too much social and too many clicks. I wish Pandora could buy one of these services and combine their discovery engine with the catalogues of the subscription services. Until then, I think I'll just keep buying music.

Reebz 15y ago
I can't agree more. I love Pandora for the guidance. WAH is available on Spotify, which is good (I used them before Spotify), but it's very niche indie discovery. I can't select a Temptations song and expect to be then offered up a Clarence Carter or Tower of Power hit. Only Pandora has those "skillz".
psychotik 15y ago
Hey, if you like discovery try Audiogalaxy Mixes - we just launched it a week or so ago [1]. We think it's better than Pandora (much larger catalog, smarter algos, more input types) - tell me if it's not. It's free on the web (no ads) with a free trial on mobile, after which we charge a small fee to cover licensing costs. If you email viraj@audiogalaxy.com with your account I'll comp you a free month. I'd love to know what you think. Here's a Mix I've made, for example: http://www.audiogalaxy.com/mix/87-Guitar%20Gods/ http://www.audiogalaxy.com/mix/87-Guitar%20Gods/? [1]http://www.geekwire.com/2012/audiogalaxy-music-service-reborn-approach http://www.geekwire.com/2012/audiogalaxy-music-service-rebor...
- andybak 15y ago
  Ahhhh. Audiogalaxy. That brings back memories. It was amazing back in it's (less legitimate) days. It took over from Napster but improved on it in many ways.
  - psychotik 15y ago
    It's evolved and we're trying to re-create some of the same magic, with the same team. First step: http://gigaom.com/2012/03/05/audiogalaxy-personalized-p2p-radio/ http://gigaom.com/2012/03/05/audiogalaxy-personalized-p2p-ra...

ecocentrik 15y ago

I like Spotify and find it infinitely more useful for music discovery than Napster ever was. Sure it would be nice if they had a more comprehensive catalog but finding complete high quality recordings on Napster was always impossible. I dug around for weeks trying to complete an album at a decent bitrate. By comparison Spotify has figured out how to serve complete high quality music legally at a very reasonable price.

a15i 15y ago

don't you get it, he only wants some publicity time to time? the content of the news is not important, the important bit is that it gets circulated, which it sadly has been circulated here in hackernews. and so was that ruby gut called why or whatever, a few days ago in hackernews. sad but true: just like people in middle east are not culturally ready for democracy, people in advanced countries are not intelligent enough to not to create hype for free for random individuals.

xpose2000 15y ago

Napster was cool because it had live music and bootlegs that are often times very tough to find. A lot of napster was sifting through crap songs to find the good versions. Spotify and the others are cool because you can stream stuff while on your phone. And getting to the music you want to hear was more seamless and straightfoward. So in summary, almost, but not quite. Napster was also one of the first geek-tools to really hit mainstream, and boy was that weird.

dasil003 15y ago
You really nailed it with this comment. Napster is from another era when the thrill of discovery was much greater than it is now. Objectively maybe Napster isn't as great as all the nostalgia would have us believe. Maybe there are actually more songs on Spotify (probably not, but humor me). The thing is, back then, if you searched and didn't find today, it didn't mean you wouldn't find tomorrow. You never knew when you would find a gold mine of a collection that not only had what you were looking for but actually schooled you on a bunch of new stuff. Napster was a magical moment where the underground went mainstream for a split second before being snuffed out. Of course these type of (smaller) communities still exist online, and music fans are better off than they ever were, but Napster embodied a sea change that could only happen once.

funkah 15y ago

Cloud music services are too limited, and all they get you is not having to store your music on a device you carry around with you all the time anyway.

gaoshan 15y ago

I find more awesome music, quicker, with Spotify than I ever did with any other music tool. I especially like the apps for this: Pitchfork, Guardian, RollingStone, etc. This combined with checking out what my "friends" are listening to really is a great way to find good stuff.

invisible 15y ago

Absolutely a fluff piece. No mention of any other legal services that offer exactly what the author is writing about (namely Grooveshark).

thematt 15y ago
Grooveshark's legality is questionable at best.
- invisible 15y ago
  Legality is following the letter of the law (e.g. DMCA), to which Grooveshark does and exceeds. Being praised and loved by all labels is what Spotify is doing (by paying out the ass in investor money).
skeptical 15y ago
Not exactly the same, but yes, grooveshark is the most similar thing to napster that we have these days. It is worth to mention how popular napster was compared to grooveshark, or even spotify for that matter. Napster was much more popular.

cantbecool 15y ago

The author didn't even clearly state how Napster '99 smokes Spotify. The only feature that I thought he stated was that Napster had a form of chat and how it could have potentially evolved into a social network.

joeycfan 15y ago

I always thought the Napster client was absolutely beautiful and perfect at it's job. I was gobsmacked when I learned it was the author's first project. Did they ever release the source code?

Aloisius 15y ago

It is really hard to compare Napster and Spotify as they are entirely different beasts. Let me just say that I built the Napster server, so I'm biased. I have also been a Spotify user for several years. For me, Spotify is a sub par experience because I don't know what I want and I have different music tastes than my friends. The only thing that makes Spotify useful for me is sites like http://sharemyplaylists.com/ http://sharemyplaylists.com/. I imagine for people who know exactly what they want and just treat it like a giant jukebox, it is a fantastic service. I am not one of those people. Napster for me, was about finding people as much as music. I was part of a community of people that were super stoked to talk about some new indie band. I would search, notice who had music I was looking for, send them a message and start talking. I met a lot of people in real life through Napster often at shows. I know others did as well since we received thank you letters and in a couple cases, wedding announcements. I think the community with its passion for music was what made Napster great, not the massive catalog. All I had to do was enter one of many indie channels and read for half a minute before I had three new things to listen to and a bunch of people to talk to them about. Not to discount the catalog, I will say that the catalog at Napster will possibly never be duplicated. There were a lot of back catalog works, a lot of pre-release works and a ton of bootlegs. Sure, the quality was sometimes poor, but then I used Napster as a tasting service and then, you know, bought the originals when I could. My hope is Spotify continues to improve and eventually becomes more community oriented or something else comes along and re-ignites the flame. Music is one of those things that is central to a lot of people's lives and you couldn't ask for a more passionate userbase.

Mizza 15y ago
Woah, you wrote the server for Napster?! That's awesome! Can you talk about that a bit? What was the underlying algorithm, what was the stack and how much data were you pushing at your max?
- Aloisius 15y ago
  Which underlying algorithm? The search engine was built on a ternary tree with a custom merging algorithm. I honestly don't know if the merging algorithm has a name as it was something I came up with (literally) while sleeping one night. Because we mostly used ID3 tags and file names, it was completely unnecessary to use a stemming algorithm because if you typed in a misspelled search, given the size of our index, there was probably someone who tagged their file using the same misspelling. The network biasing code used BGP data combined from a number of looking glass servers to build a map of ip/prefix -> ASN number and ASN->ASN distances. It was then used to reorder search results based on network distance to users so they would bias towards their own networks and save ISPs money and speed transfers on broadband connections. Servers were linked through a fully meshed network. Each had presence information about every user on the network so that they could route IMs around. The chat system was semi-linked (fully linked on some servers, but we couldn't fully link the whole thing because the client had no administrative functions for chat). If we couldn't send the user back enough results for a search, the query was simply passed around the backend. The whole thing was written in C++. At its peak, there were about 2.3 million users online at any given time (80 million total users growing by a million every 4 days). The system would be indexing about 17.6 million files per second (and de-indexing about the same amount). The whole system pushed out about 2 Gbps of bandwidth in search results (which were tiny). Napster was one of the very first services to push past 10K connections on a Linux machine. At peak, I could get over 100K users on a single process (though I'd run out of memory indexing files on the tiny 2 GB machines and blow out the NIC sending search results). During normal operations, each server process had around 40K users on it and between 7-12 million files indexed. There were a bunch of side infrastructure things no one saw. Court mandated copyright filtering systems, recommender systems (most for play), load balancing servers, bot detection and sequestration systems, analytics reporting jobs, etc. Nowadays, I could probably fit all of Napster on one big machine. Heh.

comex 15y ago

> What a pity the large labels a decade ago didn't appreciate that Napster was a social network – just one built around music. Who knows, today it might be as big as you-know-who. Ping?

skeptical 15y ago

Natpster's 'catalog' was incomparably wider than any of today's music download services. For more than ten years, I've been telling p2p users that I never found anything that offers what napster did. The thing I dislike the most with spotify and the like is that they are finite and relatively static catalogs. Sure they have millions of tracks, but once you've hit a search with an empty result, that's pretty much it. In the old days, we would go to a record store and browse the current offer. To find a record store with interesting things was a whole science, and knowing the right place to buy records would mean being able to reach more interesting and rare stuff. Spotify (itunes, amazon, whatever) is like ONE big record store. A huge one, but it's still only one. Grooveshark is more interesting but it is legally threaten because of that. Even nowadays, if you head up to your local second hand store and dig through vinyls there are tons of stuff that won't even return a single google result. It is simply impossible for spotify and the like to solve this problem, they are broken by design. This doesn't apply only to music, it applies to pretty much everything. No matter how good your product is, you can't just put a hard constraint on people's personal experiences by offering them large catalog of experiences they can have. The book 'The Cave' by José Saramago nails this problem, it's well worth reading.

shingen 15y ago

I hadn't bothered to look at Spotify, in terms of using the service (I was familiar with the company et al). I've used iTunes with locally stored music for a really long time. So I went to spotify.com, read over their product and information. Checked out their plans. Decided I'd see what they can do with the Unlimited $4.99 plan. I went to sign up for Spotify. They required I use my Facebook account. Nope.

nitrogen 15y ago

For me the coolest thing about Napster was all the remixes people were making. You could search for "[anything] remix" (e.g. Tetris remix, Nintendo remix, Sesame Street remix, ...) and find something awesome that would never see the light of day in a label. Some of those remixes bled through into the later P2P systems. Napster was one of the first services to give the mainstream world a glimpse at the digital information utopia made possible by the Internet. The paternalistic distribution systems we have now are a mere shadow of what could be without the strangling influence of the media industry.

ljf 15y ago
they were excellent! but the remixes are still around (and new ones being made), they've just moved to YouTube now.