So I have this halfbaked idea to post at all my blogs... 'simulpost' was the term I'd codged up for it. Posting basically the same message at all my sites b/c I rather like to avoid linking them together directly.

Wanted to remember another long-since-forgotten music sharing "site" that was more an app, really. Napster gets all the press now. I even have a shirt from their original, pre-sell-out, days. I like a quote I read someplace that says "before napster was carpet-bombed by the RIAA."

Accurate. Telling. Same thing that happened to AudioGalaxy.

I remember millions of users lost without napster, even though most of us had already figured out how to use the app with the 'opennap' servers and keep on sharing. The issue was that new content seemed harder to find.

That didn't last long, however, b/c AudioGalaxy filled the void for a little while.

I stumbled across it from sites that would be called mp3blogs today but existed before that term. Boom Selection and what became GYBO, mainly. Mashup DJs and euro mixers posted their performances online. There were long lists of links on each of the scene's main pages.

I remember reading and leeching and listening for hours at a time...my head spinning that someone else somewhere had thought of mashing THOSE two/few tracks together...besides just me. It was a sudden realisation that I was far from alone when music sloshed around inside my head and mixed together.

AudioGalaxy in the months just after napster's demise became fiercely popular and maxed out my new DSL connection like nothing else. (After all, I began using Napster on dial-up...when a 50 minute album took all night and sometimes users would logoff in the middle of a DL and you'd have to retry it from someone else. All of this, of course, was before multi-source downloads came to napster. lol)

I ended up leeching gigs of stuff from AG in the gap after napster went buh-bye and before the same dinosaur came back with doom spelled out for AudioGalaxy.

I know I could goog it or smack up the wikipedia, but I thought I'd just post/share what I carry around in my own brainmeats for a change.

DJ JB, DJ Qbert, Invisibl Skratch Piklz, Kid Koala, Negativland, DJ Shadow, DJ Spooky, DJ Food, all kinds of KLF and JAMs craziness, breezeblocks and mastermixes, Go Home Productions, freelance hellraiser, cheekyboy, and tons of instrumentals and pellas.

I remember discovering something called 'Deltron 3030' when looking for Kid Koala. The whole album was right there for the leeching at a decent bitrate - track titles the same with every user. I jumped on it and still like it so much I wish they'd make another album.

A minor point that the RIAA would kill to keep from admitting...after downloading Deltron 3030 free, I bought it on CD, vinyl, and two 12 inch singles, as well as sharing it with a friend who liked it so much he bought a ticket when they came to town. I still kick myself for missing it - even though I have downloaded a boot of that performance since then... :P

Just for clarity's sake, this was long before Danger Mouse's 'The Grey Album' or djbc's 'the Beastles' made mashups into headline news stories in print, on teevee and the radio. I even have interviews with freelance hellraiser and other mashup-centric DJs on british radio shows.

I even have a defective copy (tear in the topside/medium of the 3rd CDr) of Boom Selection's 3CDr set of mashup history I ordered directly from the site back when it still existed. Much of the files I already had, but it was a wide-ranging scene encompassing everyone from noobs using tape decks to pros who did regular DJ sets at European clubs.

So why did I post this? I don't know. Reading someone's blog and noticing the obligatory mention of napster, I feel the rest of what was happening at the time has been smoothed over when it's still relevant.

Maybe I was just missing one of the other names of the napster era. In an era when more and more audio posts on the various places around the internet where you find them - are being made high-bitrate or lossless. And I'm not complaining. As more and more people become familiar with lossless formats, it just pushes the places selling lossy shit to step up their game.

It's been fun over the years watching computers first struggle to be able to encode mp3s _AT ALL_ and then the explosion of trading them catch the attention of the appropriate outdated old white money to come in and try to squash sharing mob-style - in the courts.

The best part isn't just the musical/cultural education we've shared with each other in the doing of all this music trading and sharing.

The best part might just be the open/free pro-file-sharing mindset, philosophy and movement surrounding it all that has shown no signs of slowing down ever since.