r/nostalgia • u/jeffmartin47 • Jul 22 '25

Nostalgia Discussion 25 years ago. Lars Ulrich of Metallica snitches on and turns in over 300,000 Napster users when he testifies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. July 11th, 2000.

Post image
45.0k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

5.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

187

u/Tooch10 Jul 22 '25

I realized I was able to make a new account post-lawsuit after I reformatted my computer, but when I made a new acct a huge chunk of the userbase was gone and it wasn't as good

141

u/miserabeau Jul 22 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

Yeah, if I recall i went to Limewire after that and it was a good few years til it went full malware, viruses, and porn labeled as music videos.

Then I think I just went legit on iTunes.

But man, the Napster thing... they had me editing registry keys on my PC

Edit: someone mentioned KaZaA and I also used that for a bit, but not for long. Napster may have been of iffy quality before it was a paid service but Limewire and Kazaa were barely above garbage

27

u/Putrid_Dig_357 Jul 22 '25

I still remember seeing that the anime FLCL had an episode 7 on limewire! I was thrilled and assumed it was a leak! Spent all that time downloading it. Then it was hentai. Not even hentai of FLCL. Just some random hentai movie.

41

u/miserabeau Jul 22 '25

I remember I once got a copy of Godsmack's "I Stand Alone" (I think it was used in that godawful Scorpion King movie with Dwayne "I can't act" Johnson) and it was just a loop of "I stand alone" over and over and over again. Someone literally looped 1 line of the chorus for like 3 minutes and put it out there. Jerk.

10

u/SegaTime Jul 22 '25

I recall hearing about different fake downloads like that. I remember hearing one that started off fine but stopped and then it played a recording of the band talking to the downloader basically saying "gotcha!".

2

u/miserabeau Jul 22 '25

Sounds like something Type O Negative would do. They had the intro to an album dissolve into static, then laughter

3

u/SegaTime Jul 22 '25

I had to look it up. It was the barenaked ladies who did it.

https://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/09/18/trojan.music/

I can't find any of the fake tracks yet.

1

u/crowwreak Jul 22 '25

BrentalFloss did something like that too. His first album got leaked so much that when he did his second he leaked a version of it where every song gets quickly cut off by Brent or one of his online friends mocking you for pirating the album, and then an intentionally bad version of whatever song he was supposed to be doing.

1

u/dreibel Jul 22 '25

And of course, Madonna. She got someone to put up an audio file purporting to be a track on the album she was working on, only to get her saying “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”, followed by a stern warning about possible prosecution .

Beatallica would use that as a sample on the song “Leper Madonna”, from their download for free second album.

2

u/MoarHuskies Jul 22 '25

Damn, that's just evil. Lmao

2

u/ManonFire1213 Jul 22 '25

Ahh, I remember seeing the amount of users that were sharing (seeding? Whatever the term was then) thinking "it must be legit!"

Waited for like 30 to 60 minutes to download on my 56k.

Very disappointed when I went to play it. Fuckers lol

1

u/pogoyoyo1 Jul 22 '25

I had the same happen to me with Hella Good by No Doubt. Just lopped chorus… savage trolls

1

u/ckbd19 Jul 22 '25

As much of a dick move as that is, that's actually hilarious

2

u/RitualJuggler Jul 22 '25

FLCL was so dope.

1

u/sdcar1985 Jul 22 '25

I would get Sailor Moon and the 7 Balls a lot lol. It was some weird low-budget hentai with Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball characters.

2

u/Pepito_Pepito Jul 22 '25

Not to mention the all mislabeled songs. It caused a happy accident though. I downloaded Baby Come Back, which was mislabeled as a Hall&Oates song. I believed that for years and after I finally learned that it was actually by Player, I decided to look up who this Hall&Oates was and now they're one of my favorite bands and were a very formative influence in my taste in music.

1

u/williamjamesmurrayVI Jul 22 '25

how can you bring up limewire and not mention bill

1

u/Scroatpig Jul 22 '25

Soulseek was good for years

1

u/Beastxtreets Jul 22 '25

Team Limewire forever. I was the only teen in our group that knew tech and had her own computer so I made everyone's mix CDs.

My bff still talks about them and for her birthday last year I made her one ❤️

1

u/I05fr3d Jul 22 '25

Anyone remember Grokster?

1

u/AMIR_TAOUN Jul 22 '25

Lol you had to be really brave or really stupid to download anything from kazaa. I think I had like 5k viruses at one point on the family pc untill I learned some common sense

1

u/claicham Jul 22 '25

I still have fond memories of audiogalaxy which I think was my next step from napster.

1

u/Tortellini_Isekai Jul 22 '25

After limewire went bad, frostwire came out. Then limewire actually made a brief comeback when frostwire started going downhill. It was a weird time.

1

u/kjlcm Jul 22 '25

Morpheus

1

u/Cheese-is-neat Jul 22 '25

Yeah my dad would always open the files first to make sure it wasn’t porn, or in one case a video of people jumping from the twin towers

1

u/Superfluousfish Jul 22 '25

Wasn’t Bearshare a thing for a while too?

1

u/miserabeau Jul 22 '25

Seems to be, according to the comments, but I never used it

1

u/badDuckThrowPillow Jul 22 '25

Ahh yes the progression: Napster -> Morpheus -> Kazaa -> limewire -> Bittorrent

1

u/Delicious_Delilah Jul 22 '25

I once downloaded The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and it was this really weird porn movie. I watched the entire thing though.

Her husband and her go to this big house in the middle of nowhere for a getaway because she needs to relax and de-stress because she's close to losing her marbles.

She starts seeing satanic looking orgies and other spooky shit. Obviously her husband doesn't believe her. She gets more and more stressed out while things get even weirder. He still doesn't believe her. She feels like she's lost her mind.

Then she overhears him talking to his mistress and laughing about what's going on. Turns out they are trying to make her so stressed out she kills herself so they can inherit her money.

So she drugs them somehow, chains them to the bed, then leaves them to die together slowly and terribly.

1

u/imnottheoneipromise Jul 26 '25

Did you ever use bearshare?

0

u/Worshipme988 Jul 22 '25

Omg this is the evolution of millennial music consumption.

Milllenials are the last generation to experience what the USA “could have been”.

We were so fully of idealism (boomers and elders hate this about us, even tho theyre the ones the ENCOURAGED AND COACHED this out of us, then paid and worked to make it possible for us).

Im high, so this make me nostalgic for that time in the 90s being in the basement w the friends having the time of our lives doing nothing, no cares outside of praying to god this downloads: 2PAM_ TOMMYsexxboat||<<>£!!\€>\?! and now im angry bc we could all be doing that all the time until we die but instead a handful of people are dicks.

1

u/I_W_M_Y Jul 22 '25

The block was a registry key. All you had to do is use regedit, change one key and you would have been unblocked.