The Music Revolution. Thanks, MP3!
I was just a naive 15 years old in the year 1998, when my older cousin introduced me to the best invention in computers after the Internet, the MP3. It was instant love, my goal was to use all my PC storage (4GBs) and fill it with music. I was ready to start, I got my first MP3s from my cousin: Nena 99 — Luftballoons, Depeche Mode — Just can’t get enough, and Boston — More than a feeling and a few others. An eclectic collection of music I know, but it was just the beginning.
To play my music I had to install an MP3 player, and I installed Winamp, my all-time favorite player.
Winamp was so cool, it had the slickest interface and it was the first media player that let you create playlists.
There were 3 ways to get mp3s back then, ripping your CDs to mp3, copying mp3s from your friends, or downloading them from the Internet. Of course, the first option was the easiest one, I converted all my CD library to mp3s, that’s how I got my first 1000 songs. But this method was not scalable, it took a lot of time to rip the CDs, and I didn’t have enough money to keep up with the latest hits from my favorite artists. So I had to go to my good friend the Internet to stay on top of the trends. There were few options back then to get music from the Internet, a couple of sites with files in their root directory. My weapon of choice, The Music Lover a site that no longer exists that had the Billboard Top 40 Hits updated every week. Not the best source for indie music, but it had all the MTV hits. It was good enough for me. That’s how I added a couple of 1000 new songs to my music library.
After some months a friend introduced me to Napster the first peer to peer file sharing app. Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning revolutionized the world 19 years ago with this service. Although the focus was music it gave birth to other P2P technologies that are booming today like the Blockchain and Bitcoin. Napster was amazing, sadly it only lasted for a couple of years due to copyright infringement. Some other services came up to the rescue (Limewire, eMule, Gnutella) but none of them were as good as Napster.
“Sean Parker: Well, I founded an internet company that let folks download and share music for free.
Amelia Ritter: Kind of like Napster?
Sean Parker: Exactly like Napster.
Amelia Ritter: What do you mean?
Sean Parker: I founded Napster.
Amelia Ritter: Sean Parker founded Napster.”
About 2 years later one of the last geniuses in human history, Steve Jobs, made paying for music cool 😎 again with the launch of the iTunes store. With iTunes my library kept growing, it had almost every song on the planet. Every song on iTunes had the best song compression settings and was the best app for organizing music. iTunes quickly became the most popular MP3 player, it had a clean UI that was simple and elegant, you can’t expect less from a product from Apple.
I had everything under control with iTunes, my library of more than 30k songs was in sync with all my devices, I had playlists for every genre, audience, and mood. I was on top of my game until Spotify came knocking my door. Spotify was a game-changer my library grew 100X, now I could stream every song in the world and the best part I didn’t run out of storage.
I have more than 200 playlists on Spotify. I have the app on my Mac, my smartphone, my car, my tv and now on my home speaker. I discover about 100 new songs every week.
Music is the answer, it has given meaning to my life. Thank you, MP3 for creating this revolution. I can’t wait to see what the future will bring us.
PS. A few other services that have been part of this history:
Shazam, YouTube, Vevo, Soundcloud, Musical.ly, Beats. Thank you!
Juanescorrea
