The MP3 Era
1998–2001
My friend Eric told me the secret: use CNET’s shareware site and WinZip, and the internet is yours.
That was all I needed. I spent hours downloading free software and testing everything I could find. Utilities, media players, compression tools, FTP clients. The internet in the late ’90s was a vast, unlocked warehouse, and shareware was the crowbar. Every program opened up ten more possibilities. I didn’t know what I was building toward. I just knew I wanted all of it.
ICQ came first. I had a six-digit number, which meant I was one of the early ones. We were twenty-something and suddenly we could message strangers anywhere in the country — chat with people we’d never meet, never see, never know the real age or location of. A parent’s nightmare in 2026. In 1998 it was thrilling. It reminded me of the MUDs from my first UWGB days — text on a screen connecting me to invisible people, the internet as a vast anonymous campfire.
Then came Napster. Still on dial-up, still agonizingly slow, but now I could download music. Any music. Everything. I bought hard drives with the sole purpose of storing my hoards — mp3s, movies, games, software, anything that could be compressed and transferred over a phone line at 56 kilobits per second. We got a second phone line so the house phone could actually receive calls while I was online. I bought the best modem I could find to squeeze out precious kilobytes. I ran programs to keep my sessions alive. UOTrace helped me map the fastest packet routes. Every downloaded file was a small victory against the limitations of dial-up.
Winamp was the player. I tried every skin, every plugin, every visualization. The program was elegant in a way that nothing else in my digital life was — clean, customizable, and it just worked. But organizing the masses of mp3s was its own nightmare. Mistagged files. Wrong artist names. Duplicate albums in six different bit rates. I spent almost as much time sorting my collection as I did listening to it. I was also ripping everything the Brown County Library had on CD, building a music library from borrowed discs and a CD-ROM drive.
The mp3 collection had consequences beyond my headphones. Joel started a DJ company — because Joel commits fully to every idea he has. He bought the best equipment, because that was his way, and he recruited me as his DJ a few times. Not the talking DJ. Ryan, Joel’s friend, was the MC, the one working the crowd. I was the tech guy, queuing up songs on a laptop from my pirated library.
I joke that we were the first DJs to use mp3s. It may have been true in 1999.
One wedding, Ryan was doing his thing — building the energy, getting the crowd amped up for what we all thought was “Shout” by the Isley Brothers. He was good at this. The crowd was ready. I hit play. And out came “Shout” by Tears for Fears. Wrong song, same title. Mistagged mp3. The energy in the room did a hard left turn. We had a laugh over that one.
Joel’s parents were so nervous about our setup that they’d hired a real DJ as a backup — the guy stood behind us with his own equipment, watching, ready to take over if we collapsed. We never needed him. And when we finished, the DJ from the wedding reception in the next room came over to tell us we were blowing him away with our overpowered speakers. We didn’t know. We felt bad. But also — it was kind of cool. We proved that our overpowered, tenuous rig could work.
I never really stopped hoarding digital music. It slowed as streaming took over, but I still have thousands of those mp3s backed up somewhere. Just in case the internet goes down.