The music industry sensed the looming revolution, but did everything to prevent it instead of making money from the new standard. It was the late 90's and the awareness of wrongdoing regarding file sharing was almost zero. With Napster, the stuff was just a mouse click away. French, even Russian hip-hop? Japanese punk rock? Turkish dance stuff? At the otherwise well-stocked record dealer in Bonn, it was always a cramp and in many cases unattainable. Because many CDs were simply not distributed in Germany. Suddenly I came across songs that I somehow heard on MTV but could never buy. How did that go? At that time, due to his parents' job, he already had broadband, although it wasn't really broad at the time - and Napster.Ī whole universe of free music opened up and the then new MP3 format made it possible. Eventually, the 56K modem came along and I attended a party where the host had even the most outlandish pieces readily available. Of course I created a GMX account, of course I was in the Unicum chat, of course my parents cursed me because of the phone bill, because 12 pfennigs went through the line for every online minute. It stayed like that for quite a while until I went online for the first time, it must have been around the end of 1997. Only: three songs filled the Win 3.11 hard drive, because nobody had heard of MP3 at the time. Even back then I toyed with the idea of copying my CDs onto my computer. For example, for game soundtracks, which were then in the CDA track of the CD-ROMs and could also be played on the CD player. This in turn had to be wired to the CD-ROM so that the entire megawatt-guzzling tower could function like a CD player at all. But you couldn't listen to CDs with it: I had to save up my Soundblaster first. The absolute novelty of the device: It had a CD-ROM drive. It was a 486 DX 33 with four megabytes of RAM and a 250-megabyte hard drive, a tower complete with a 14″ monitor, assembled back then by the friendly PC guy Fritzen in Bonn-Poppelsdorf. That was a lot of money for a poor student back then, and my relatives canceled Christmas and my birthday twice. I still remember my first audio experiments on my first "multimedia PC", which I bought back in 1994 as the designated successor to my Amiga 500 for 2.500 marks.
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