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In the late 90s, when it first became possible to rip a CDs into MP3s, it was a revelation. Mix tapes had been a staple of my youth and now I could do the same with CDs. It was all very innocent and quite legal. But then I discovered Napster in 1999, where you could share your MP3s via the internet, the legality of which quickly led me into a sordid life of unspeakable crime: music piracy. Those were dangerous times. How badly did you want that Eminem song? Badly enough to risk fines in the thousands? Maybe even JAIL? My mom begged me to stop. My future was at stake.

To be fair, thousands of people were actually sued for sharing MP3s online. Artist’s got involved. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich became an outspoken opponent of online piracy. He was probably right, but he was also an out-of-touch douchebag. I also remember reading a “think-piece” by Courtney Love (!) where she displayed a remarkable lack for foresight with her claims that nobody would ever spend seven hours downloading an entire CD’s worth of music on MP3 when it can’t even properly emulate the tone of a warm guitar. I don’t know how I remember that so specifically, but it’s probably because she’s awful, too.

Anyway, it became really uncool to blame the fans for stealing music, and even though Napster basically shuttered, other file-sharing sites and technologies quickly took its place and all the futile suing seemed to stop. So then websites like Oink.cd and What.cd just brazenly opened up free-to-all BitTorrent sites that could download entire albums in seconds and all hell broke loose. The only way to stop it was to figure out a way to make listening to music easier than stealing it, and Spotify was born.

In the end, nobody who downloaded music went to jail. The unlucky few who were sued before people stopped caring paid a couple thousand to settle out of court. Lars Ulrich is still a douchbag and Courtney Love has done much stupider things since. Now I pay over $200 a year for a streaming music service and I cannot even tell if that’s a good deal or not because I don’t actually own any of it, but concert T-shirts are now $60 a pop and artists are still pissed off so nobody is a winner. Yay!