Free MP3 Music Downloads, A History

You probably download MP3 music for free using programs like Kazaa and BearShare. Or you could be the kind of person who gets software and other paid applications through torrents. With new features, peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing is now as ubiquitous as Internet browsers themselves.

File sharing as a practice has been around for ages. Older readers may remember the days of the Sneakernet when people had to physically transfer data, or those of the humble floppy disk, which carried only 0.1% of the capacity of today’s USB drives. Modern P2P technology – the same one that gives you free MP3 music downloads – is just a new update to an old idea.

The Predecessors of P2P

It was FTP, developed in the early 1980’s, that was the first predecessor of modern P2P sharing. FTP relied on a central server, from where all the other users got their data. This is similar to the webhosting practices of today. FTP is still in widespread use today in the form of file hosting sites like Rapid Share and Media Fire.

The idea of sharing MP3s was a concept raised soon after MP3s emerged in the 1990’s. In 1998, Michael Robertson opened the doors to MP3.com, the first recorded site that dealt with – among others – free MP3s. Copyright issues, however, forced the foundling site to quickly close shop.

Napster’s New Approach

Server-based file sharing like FTP posed many problems to users. Download and upload speeds, for example, were very slow, especially as more people competed to simultaneously access data in a single container. The solution was simple: instead of making everyone scrabble at the mouth of the cookie jar, let them just get cookies from one another’s plates to make things quicker.

Then-18-year old Shawn Fanning unveiled Napster, the world’s first P2P sharing client, in June 1999. It was the first one to use the new sharing model where users on a network could get files from one another instead of having everyone grab at a single source. Like MP3.com, however, piracy- and copyright-related issues forced Napster to quickly shut down.

Going into Gnutella

Napster combined some old and some new features. Like the previous technology, there was a central server for storing data. At the same time, it also relied on people to share files with one another. A couple of years after Fanning, Justin Frankel released Gnutella, the first sharing network to be 100% decentralized. Without having to consult any central server, Gnutella just about eliminated all the download speed barriers present in Napster.

But with all the legal issues surrounding P2P sharing, the market is now seeing the emergence of hybrid systems where you can download MP3 music for free and at a premium. This system, implemented by programs like BearShare, has so far been an agreeable middle ground between the free-sharing community and the commercial music sector.