A federal judge has issued an injunction that basically forced LimeWire to shutdown. I’m not sure who’s been using LimeWire for the last couple years but this is a big deal for a generation of music fans. Now LimeWire is far from the first and far from the most popular file-sharing site but it was the last big one. There are plenty of torrents still around but the biggest site to download music from is iTunes. That’s right, they’ve got us (well some of us) back to buying music again. Imagine if they figured this shit out 10 years ago. How much money would the record industry’ve saved?

I remember it was 1999 and Public Enemy was set to drop There’s a Poison Going On… but this was a different type of release. This was gonna be through the internet only. No CD, no record, no any other type of hard copy. Chuck D thought this was the future and people though he was crazy. Record executives balked at the idea saying people will always want something intangible, something they can hold onto. Other bands at the time were releasing downloadable versions of their albums but they still released CDs and CDs overwhelmingly outsold downloads. PE’s album flopping also didn’t help Chuck D’s case (though to be fair, this was far from Public Enemy’s prime). But he saw what was going on. Everyone now had a computer, hard drives were getting bigger, computers were coming with burners, and people were storing more music on their computers giving themselves their own personal jukebox. Chuck D saw the irrelevance of the middleman but record companies still thought the whole downloading thing was foolish, just a side bar to what they really do. Then Napster came out and shit hit the fan. It spread across North America faster than Chlamydia through a small town.

The thing with Napster was that it started innocently enough in that it was supposed to be a way to share rare music that you couldn’t get in stores like a live track ore something from a discontinued album. But the thing with the music in the late 90s was that it sucked. There were so many one hit wonders and albums from artists who were awesome but their records only had a some or two tracks that were good. People were tired of shelling out $15-20 for one or two fucking songs and this was a way to rectify it. Most of us didn’t even feel that bad that they were ‘stealing’ music. Record companies had been ripping us off for so long that it was time to get even. And sure the thought that artists not getting paid for their work did cross our minds ’til we found out how much they get paid per record and that it was close to nothing and we went back to not caring. See most artists make their money through touring and merchandise, that is unless you own your own record label. Starting with Metallica then Dr. Dre and Madonna, artists who owned their own record label seemed to be the most vocal about this new wave of music piracy. A lot of shit was said, feeling were broken, and many of these artists came off like rich whiny douche-bags who wanted to blame fans instead of figure out a solution. A little note to any entrepreneurs out there, don’t shit all over your customers. Unless that’s the specific service you’re providing, they won’t like it.

So Napster was shutdown but there grew a great divide between artists/record labels and fans. Fans found a new way that they want to listen to music. But artists and record label even after the whole Napster ordeal didn’t want to give it to them. The thing with downloading music is that you don’t have to download the whole album and this rubbed artists and record labels the wrong way. Artists felt that they were creating albums not songs. The whole album told a story. You wouldn’t just buy the courtroom scene from A Few Good Men, you buy the movie and this shouldn’t be different. Record labels were pissed cause they knew the scam was over. They had decades of getting people to spend $15-20 on a whole album when (even if the whole album was good) they really only wanted a song or two.

Throughout history, technology has dictated how we listen to music. This was the new technology. In the 50s and early 60s it was all about the single. People listened to music on 45s cause that was the technology. Artist wouldn’t sit around for months and years at a time to record an album but would have short recording sessions every couple months and release their new work.

Skip ahead to the mid 60s and LPs began to gain in popularity over their smaller cousins so instead of releasing LPs that were basically a “Best Of” for an artist for that year’s single, they would write and record an entire album.

Skip ahead to the early 80s and the explosion of cassettes. Now cassettes were around in the 60s and 70s but the sound quality’s pretty piss-poor compared to vinyl so it never took off but then Sony introduced the Walkman. This gave people the ability to be mobile with their music and tapes became huge. Also in the 80s, the CD was born and sounded much better than tapes but it didn’t really become the next standard ’til the 90s when they figured out how to stop a Discman from skipping. What cassettes and CDs have in common is that they both have the ability to play an album and they were both portable.

Skip ahead to the end of the 90s and the early 2000s and the explosion on MP3s. After Napster there were still sites like KaZaA, LimeWire. And BitTorrent where you could get music for free and then came the iPod. That’s what this whole shift was missing, a portable way to take your MP3s with you. Now there were options like an MP3 Discman and a mini disc player but they never took off (at least not in North America, mini disc players were huge in Japan). It still wasn’t bringing your music library with you in the palm of your hand. I remember my buddy Jordan coming to school listing to music on something that looked like a Walkman. I was giving him shit for it then he explained what it was and my jaw dropped. A couple months later I started noticing more and more of them then the iPod exploded. Just about everyone had one. Now Apple was far from the first to make one and the MP3 player Jordan had wasn’t an iPod but they struck a cord. It was by far the best looking, by far the best marketed, and while there were better players, it was still pretty damn good and everyone gravitated to it. And the thing with the iPod is that you need iTunes to use it and in 2003 they opened the iTunes music store. You don’t need to buy you’re music from iTunes to put in on your iPod, but the option’s there and they made it easy. You don’t have to worry about a corrupt file or even about the quality of the file and it took a couple more years but it got people buying music again now for a buck a song instead of $15-20. There are other companies where you can legally download music like Rhapsody or the legal version of Napster but Apple got most people to do what we should’ve been doing all along and given the music industry a format to sell music that they should’ve figured out almost a decade earlier.