Happy Birthday MP3

[BomberPat]

Kazaa and then Limewire for me, I don't think I ever used Napster.

I never really used piracy as a replacement for buying albums, as I would still spend most of my cash in HMV every week anyway, but it got me a ton of weird bootlegs and obscurities, and really broadened my horizons through some of the stuff I stumbled across, because if you searched "Slayer", that would also give you "Tori Amos - Raining Blood (Slayer cover)". I discovered bands and artists I'd never otherwise know because they came up covering the stuff I was looking for, and then sometimes I would just search "cover" and see what came up. My brother was a massive Muse fan back then, and every time he searched for "Muse", some songs by Throwing Muses would show up, and eventually I just got curious and downloaded some, and it turned out I loved them.

Then, of course, there was all the shit that was famously mislabelled. System Of A Down - Legend Of Zelda, anyone? I'm sure I still know people who would swear blind that it's a genuine System song. Save Ferris' version of Come On Eileen was always listed as No Doubt. There's a parody Christmas song by Porn Orchard where they impersonate Tom Waits and Peter Murphy, which I downloaded on Limewire just credited as Tom Waits & Peter Murphy, and it took me well over ten years to find out what it really was. My favourite was that occasionally you'd get something labelled as "Type O Negative cover", that was just a track played at half-speed.

I used to almost obsessively make mix CDs, God knows how much money I spent on CD-Rs over the years. Either for the walkman, as presents (my brother and I kept up a tradition of making each other mixes for our birthday and Christmas for years), or to play in the common room at college if I got in there before anyone else, I must have had hundreds of the bloody things.

[hallicks]

Audiogalaxy was great, gutted when that went down. I remember trying to download the Ataris version of “Boys of summer” and it always being a version seeded by the record company so you only got the first 10 seconds before it went to audio garbage. Wankers.

Had a real HQ version of the Inspector Gadget theme tune from there that didn’t turn up on YT for absolutely ages. First bumped into Weird Al and those very early era-Arnie soundboard prank calls through here as well.

There was also quite a few 90’s specific anti-Microsoft/protest/parody songs from that time, which used to get attributed to Weird Al but were nothing to do with him. “Boot it up” by Bob Rivers:

 

[simonworden]

I was late onto the parade with MP3 to some extent as my parents are essentially Victorian when it comes to tech, we didn't have a PC until 2000, internet until 02 and broadband in 04 (that was the village not the parents though). I remember finding random websites with a few songs I liked at the time, Bodies by drowning pool being one and playing these 5 or 6 songs as background music while I ran Combat Flight Sim in a window, brilliant times for a 14 year old. 

Then came the marvel of learning how to burn CDs and I could bin my old cassette recordings. 

It wasn't until Uni where my house had a Lan set up and we could pinch songs from each others iTunes that my collection really started to pick up. About the same time I got my first MP3 player a little 128mb stick that I spent hours choosing the playlist on for any journeys through London.

I still bought CDs until about 2012 when I saw something interesting or dirty cheap. Now I barely download unless there's a song I can't find to stream. Often I find it on YouTube and create an MP3.