802 Plays

marco:

Butthole Surfers — Pepper (Electriclarryland, 1996)

This was the first MP3 I ever downloaded (the second was Bullet With Butterfly Wings, followed by Blister In The Sun).

It was the fall of 1996 and I was still on a 486 with Windows 3.11. WinAmp only ran on Windows 95, so I had to play it with WinPlay. The 486 was too slow to play an MP3 at full quality in real time, so I had to play it at 22kHz mono. And I could only keep a few MP3s because I didn’t have a lot of free space on my 400 MB hard drive. (But that was OK… it took too long to download over my 33.6 modem with my friend’s AOL account anyway.)

MP3s really exploded among geeks in the summer of 1997. As such, most geeks’ first MP3 artists included The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish. (And I think these artists benefited significantly from this timing.)

What were yours, and when?

I can’t pinpoint the year I first downloaded MP3s, but it was on a dial up connection with the sweet new US Robotics 56k modem and I had to use FTP sites for the most part and everything else was direct HTTP link, which was pretty nice.

The first music I downloaded were mostly Weezer B-sides, Matthew Good Band, and Beastie Boys songs.

Source: marco

31 notes

  1. nevyn reblogged this from marco and added:
    I can’t remember which...one, but one that...remember...
  2. hagwaar reblogged this from marco and added:
    “Reel Big Fish“-labeled songs...disk. Mostly - as...realized...
  3. straightouttastafford reblogged this from marco and added:
    can’t pinpoint...first downloaded MP3s, but it...dial up...
  4. airgordon reblogged this from offnotesnotesnotes and added:
    Dr. Dre - Forgot About Dre, because a friend had gleefully reproduced Eminem’s swearing binge in the middle of the song...
  5. jeffgiddens reblogged this from marco and added:
    1996, straight from an HTML link on...Geocities site, but it just had links
  6. bwall05 reblogged this from offnotesnotesnotes
  7. kevin reblogged this from marco and added:
    [Summer 1999] My...Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which...took...
  8. answers reblogged this from squashedcomments and added:
    Of course you remember it. I downloaded them on your computer. And yours was actually fast enough to play them in real...
  9. squashedcomments reblogged this from marco and added:
    Oh, wow. I remember that—and...had were, not coincidentally, this and
  10. offnotesnotesnotes reblogged this from marco and added:
    Woulda been like...taste for band fansites and Blur chatrooms during a couple of weeks at...
  11. winstonwolfe reblogged this from marco and added:
    Fantastic Monday morning song
  12. marco posted this