The good old days

I was an early adopter of digital music downloads, long before it was a legit business, but also before Metallica and the RIAA started suing people. There was no easy way to download files over the dial-up internet, but a piece of software called Hotline did the trick. It was a client/server architecture, so you had to be connected to somebody’s server who offered music for download. I hope I’m not admitting to any wrongdoing here, but I ran a music-centric Hotline server for several years around the turn of the century. We built a fun community of music nerds who wanted to share, and I learned about a ridiculous amount of music I’d never heard before.

One of the interesting side effects of the technology we were using is that there wasn’t a great search function. Once you were connected to somebody’s server, you pretty much just had to browse around and see what was on offer. I think one of the reasons Napster reached critical mass and caused a reckoning in the music industry wasn’t that it was a particularly great technology, but that it was simple enough for casual fans to use. You could type in “David Bowie” and get a bunch of Bowie songs to download (along with a bunch that were mislabelled). Before napster, anyone could be a music pirate if they had enough know-how and interest. The napster revolution was just that it democratized the process for people who didn’t know how to use Hotline or search USEnet.

I shut the hotline server down when there was a non-zero chance of landing in a lawsuit. By then, the peer-to-peer revolution of napster and bittorrent had made downloading music easier and more anonymous. But it was an interesting period of my music-listening life and I have fond memories of it. The next week or so I’ll reminisce about a few of the many new sounds I was exposed to.