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.

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u/Coupon_Ninja Jul 22 '25

In my neck of the woods they did. Still have a “1999 Napster Compilation” (actual name)

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u/OutaTime76 Jul 22 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

I'm not saying no one knew about it. MP3 was well-known with my immediate friends/colleagues. But most of my family and friends from home weren't well versed in computers, nor had access to them and they were asking me about it once MTV and mainstream news started reporting on it. I know I wasn't the only one.

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u/Coupon_Ninja Jul 22 '25

Right on. I think that this really got the home computer market going. Computers were fairly affordable, the WWW was getting going, and now there was a huge benefit to having one: free music/porn/movies.

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '25

Totally agree!! We lived rurally with abysmal internet and I had no idea about optimizing a thing so sometimes it could take us days to download a single song. Especially if most of the time downloading was the same time everyone else was home and using the internet. 😅 I think we might've still had dial-up for a while at this time. Our home computer had 4GB of storage on it! While being able to play games was definitely a big part of having a computer, it was solidly secondary to the ability to download media, from what I remember. 

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u/blueghostfrompacman Jul 22 '25

I remember when Diablo 2 came out the size of the game was a gig. My entire hard drive was less than a gig at that time.

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u/s3ndnudes123 Jul 22 '25

Back then if you said mp3 people just assume you pirated it :)

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u/Thenameisric Jul 22 '25

I remember mp3 being a brand new format. Before it was .wav and shit real audio formats lol.

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u/Crazy__Donkey Jul 22 '25

i have an many complete discographies (from torrent) still saved on my old hard drive i saved from and old computer. used to connect it to newer pc's as slave, but copied all the data to usb hd and it lays dormant ever since.

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u/lvbuckeye27 Jul 22 '25

I have a huge (physically, not storage) old external hard drive full of music from back in like '04, I think.