GeoCities, wow that was a long time ago. I remember how it played a big part in the history of MP3. Pull up a chair, motherfuckers...
Back when MP3 just became a "thing", it was super cool but there was basically no centralized place to get them. Google may have existed at the time in its infancy. But it was not the powerhouse that it would soon become. The main search engines were AltaVista, NorthernLight, and maybe a few others. They all had their limitations, and there was no such thing as a search engine having the reach that Google would have.
So back then you could search for MP3s with no problem. But if you wanted search results anywhere close to the level that Google would become, you had to use a metasearch engine. And even then, finding actual usable MP3s that were ripped and encoded by someone who knew what they were doing, was very few and far between.
Eventually, along comes a site called The Outer Limits. I forget the exact domain. But this site hosted MP3s and was pretty much the only place on the internet they could readily be gotten. Bookmark that site, and anyone was set for a free-for-all.
This site soon became pretty much the biggest site on the internet, and the guy running the site was kicked off of host after host. And this was only because the site's bandwidth would sooner or later cripple any host the guy put his site on.
It had nothing to do with record companies. There was no DMCA. As far as the RIAA and record companies were concerned, they had basically no understanding of computers whatsoever. Much less, any understanding of the internet or what MP3 even was.
So either that guy, or him in collaboration with fans of his original site, got the idea to make dozens of GeoCities sites and host all the MP3s that way. And it worked well for a while, until GeoCities itself began to get crippled by the bandwidth and hotlinking.
I think GeoCities may have shut down many of the pages. But they knew it wasn't a solution, as anyone could make hundreds more GeoCities pages in a short amount of time. So GeoCities came up with bandwidth limitations, storage limitations, file type limitations (even if the extension was changed), and made it impossible to hotlink files hosted on their servers.
So the guy eventually put a final announcement on his main GeoCities site, saying he can no longer host MP3s. But gave out his secret of where he got all the ones he'd been hosting. Users were instructed to go to a mysterious new site called Napster.
And the rest is history.
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