We were teenagers on Napster and Limewire

How we changed the industry and ourselves one download at a time.

I don't remember who told me about Napster or how I found out. I didn’t plan to stop buying CDs. I didn’t expect to become a Counting Crows fan. But one day I found myself sitting at the PC in our back room, illegally downloading music and finding it to be the best thing in the world.

I don’t remember deciding to steal music. I’m not sure I even knew it was stealing. I never mentioned to my parents that when they went to bed I was quietly taking part in the very end of the music industry as we know it.

Here’s how I became a fan of Counting Crows. I searched “Oasis covers” into Napster and there was Adam Duritz singing “Live Forever”. I thought it sounded cool and so different to what I knew, so then I downloaded another song of theirs, ‘Round Here’, the acoustic Storytellers version. I knew on that very first listen that I had a new all time favourite song and to this day it hasn’t changed.

Yes I broke the law, but I purchased tickets to thirty of their gigs and countless t-shirts and still bought the band’s CDs anyway so hopefully there’s no chance of me being arrested now.

When we downloaded songs on Napster, we didn’t mean to make a statement. We didn’t mean to change the world. We were just finding cool music.

Turns out my wife and I like a lot of the same tunes. She likes those famous early 2000s songs by Vertical Horizon, Incubus, Jimmy Eat World and co. The difference is that she - being American - heard them on the radio, whereas I found them on Napster. To be into alt pop rock in the UK, you had to find the music some place other than the radio. When you found your music, you found your people, and then went to see a gig at the London Astoria with 2000 of your closest friends. You didn’t realise there were millions of people like you in another country, you thought what you were into was niche.

CDs didn’t die the minute file sharing came about. It took a lot of years. At some point I moved from Napster to Limewire and continued my thieving, which sounds like a bad thing but my music tastes were expanding. I didn’t have to buy a whole Bryan Adams record (who wants that?) But if I liked one live version of ‘Summer of 69’ I could grab it. That was how I got into Springsteen. I wasn’t stealing the album tracks, I was downloading rare bootlegs that someone had recorded in Sweden or someplace and those were the tracks that really got me.

I have a theory that we all become who we really are when we’re seventeen. Luckily for me, file sharing came along to give me all the music that would carry me through the rest of my life.

But I didn’t know that when I started.

I don’t even remember realising I was listening to music differently. It was just what we did.

To the musicians whose CD royalties we stole, I’m sorry. But without Napster, I would never have found you. Once I did I bought your merch and got obsessed with all the weird, bad-quality-audio bootlegs, and I think we’re all the better for it.

The sad part about all this is that we ended up with Spotify. I remember when they first turned up, you could actually download the mp3s if you paid for it. But before long, it became the simple subscription service we know it as now. You’re renting streamed music and you no longer own anything.

And you don’t discover tracks like you did on Napster because the whole thing is algorithm based.

Napster and Limewire and the other similar sites that I no longer remember may have been illegal and disgraceful and the end of music as we know it, but they had soul. They somehow led us to the very music we’d live with forever.