Kazaa

» see kazaa.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

napster died in mid-2001 after losing the lawsuits filed by the recording industry. the audience for free mp3 sharing did not die. it just moved to the next thing. that next thing was kazaa, made by niklas zennström and janus friis, the same two guys who would later make skype.

kazaa launched in march 2001 and grew fast. by 2003 it had about 60 million users and was the most-downloaded software on the internet for a brief period. it ran on a peer-to-peer network called fasttrack. limewire and bearshare ran on a similar network called gnutella. all three apps did basically the same thing: search for a song, find it on someone else's computer, download it.

i used kazaa heavily from 2002 to 2004. before kazaa i had used napster a little, then audiogalaxy briefly. kazaa was where you got music in 2002 to 2003. limewire took over for me around 2004 because limewire's spyware was less obnoxious. by 2005 the legal pressure on all of these was making them feel risky and i was buying songs from itunes for the first time.

~ the record ~

~ how it actually worked ~

kazaa, limewire, and bearshare all worked the same way. you installed the app. you opened it. you typed the name of a song you wanted. the app searched a peer-to-peer network for files matching that name. it returned a list of users who had the file. you double-clicked the search result. the file started downloading from one or more of those users.

the system was decentralized. there was no central server holding the songs. each user's computer was both a client and a server. when you downloaded a song, it went into your shared folder by default, which meant other users could download it from you. this was the recursive trick that made the network work. it was also the legal vulnerability that let the music industry sue end users for "distribution."

the file quality varied. some files were perfect rips. some were terrible. some were mislabeled, where the song you thought you were getting was actually something else, or had a recording of someone yelling halfway through. you learned to check file sizes. a 3MB mp3 was probably a 128kbps rip of a normal song. a 12MB mp3 was probably better quality, or it was a wrongly-labeled long file.

~ the spyware ~

kazaa is famous for bundling spyware. when you installed kazaa, you also installed a package called brilliant digital that ran in the background, served ads, and used your computer's spare resources for things you did not consent to. there were also browser hijackers and other small malware components.

people knew this. people installed kazaa anyway because nothing else had as many songs. there was a forked version called kazaa lite, which was made by removing the spyware components from the official installer. kazaa lite was distributed in a legal gray zone of its own. sharman networks would occasionally try to shut down kazaa lite distributors. usually unsuccessfully.

limewire and bearshare both also bundled various amounts of spyware. there was a brief period where every popular file-sharing app for windows was a vector for malware. the cleanup people had to do on their parents' computers in 2003 was almost always related to one of these apps.

~ the lawsuits ~

the music industry sued aggressively. the most consequential case was MGM v Grokster, decided by the supreme court in june 2005. grokster was a smaller competitor in the same space. the ruling was that any file-sharing service that "induced" users to commit copyright infringement could be held liable, even if the service was technically decentralized. this was a direct attack on the kazaa-limewire-bearshare model.

after grokster, the legal pressure on all of these services intensified. bearshare settled in 2006 and was rebranded as a different product. kazaa settled with the music industry the same year for 100 million dollars and pivoted to a legal subscription service that nobody wanted. limewire kept fighting longer but a federal judge ordered it shut down in october 2010. the official kazaa shutdown finally came in august 2012.

~ what we lost ~

the discovery experience. kazaa was full of mislabeled, weird, half-recorded, never-released, and bootleg material. you would download a song you wanted and end up with three other songs you had never heard, in the same folder, recorded at someone's concert by someone else. some of those discoveries were better than the original song. modern streaming services do not have this. spotify has playlists. it does not have the chaotic-discovery quality of trawling kazaa search results.

the early 2000s music collection. people built genuinely large mp3 collections from kazaa downloads. those collections, mostly stored on personal hard drives, were a private archive of music history. when a hard drive died, that archive died with it. very few people backed up their mp3 collections. cumulatively, a lot of music history (especially obscure local releases that were never properly distributed online) is now harder to find than it was in 2003.

the moral grayness. kazaa felt clearly illegal but commonly done. it was a small criminal act every teenager and university student in europe was committing daily. that creates a specific cultural texture that streaming has erased. spotify is legal. nothing about it feels like you are getting away with anything. kazaa always felt like you were getting away with something. that was part of the appeal.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »