Good ol' Napster. I loved Napster. It was a great way to sample new music. There is YouTube now, but it's not the same. Napster was better because it was actually people's music collection. It had music people actually listened to. With YouTube, I have to shuffle through Boyce Avenue....no offense to all you Boyce Avenue fans.
I still bought CDs during the Napster era because the quality of CDs were still much better. So for my favorite music, I went for the CD. Napster was sharing at 128, 256, or 320, which is good enough to listen but not really to show off in hi-def. Also, I enjoyed collecting music at the time. Today,we have lossless for the good stuff.
Do you still remember Filequest? Winamp? Sonique? Bearshare? Kazaa?
You know, I invented Napster, but my roommate stole it from me. He called it Napster because he stole it from me while I was napping!
I used Napster because I was a poor college student. I only bought CDs when it came to artists like Natalie Merchant, Tori Amos, Sarah McLaughling etc., because they helped me through the tough times of my college life (which is so far far away now it's like another life). I remember listening to their CDs on repeat. Other than that, it was just one song here and there from other artists and it wasn't worth getting the full CD....except for maybe songs like "Kiss the Rain" by Billy Myers. ITunes is my friend now and has been for a long time...althoug
h a lot of the songs I dl are not good quality so sometimes I feel ripped off. I noticed that the not-so-good-quality ones are from big artists like Mariah Carey. I dl-ed "Beautiful" and it was horrible...sta
tic-y and fuzzy. Thus, I don't dl famous or main stream artists very often.
I remember some of those download sights but I never used them. I was very loyal to Napster and having watched the documentary about it a couple months ago (I know, I'm late to the documentary stuff), it still hurts me how it was destroyed.
As for French music, I have a couple of CDs somewhere. I used to listen to French music and would search the CD stores for them. I was also into French movies and French cuisine one time. It was a phase.