Some of our younger readers may not understand the ecstasy and agony of illegally downloading music on Napster. And that’s okay. But for some of us, the criminal offense was central to formative memories. I remember downloading deceptively titled tracks in my middle school Drama classroom, hovered over the desktop while my teacher got the Enya queued up for a movement exercise. We’d rarely see the download’s completion with the dial-up internet connection, but my friends and I would rally around the machine, rooting the process on as if it were a horse making its way around a track.
It’s been a while since we had actually thought about the now-defunct service – we’ve got Spotify and Apple Music to satisfy our music needs (at a much higher quality). The official Twitter account for the t-shirt professionals at @Homage changed that with one simple tweet. They asked followers to share the first songs they’d downloaded on Napster, and while many people offered up the actual songs, many millennials instead opted to make jokes about the era and the service’s idiosyncrasies. And boy did they take us down memory lane.
Napster is trending so we thought we’d hit you with this nostalgia! IYKYK.mp3
What was the song you remember downloading on Napster? pic.twitter.com/X6rkSxNPgY
— HOMAGE (@HOMAGE) December 29, 2021
