Some that might interest folks here:
- Real Player - The inventors of streaming & the poster child for enshittification
- iRiver - perhaps the first major MP3 (and OGG!) player. DRM & iTunes not required.
- Napster - P2P for the early adopters
- KaZaA, Limewire & Bearshare - P2P for the masses. (And BTW the source of my user name: klu9 = KaZaA Lite User 9)
- MP3.com - At first indie artists uploading their own materials, then users uploading their own CDs
- Radio.Blog.Club - Embed an MP3 in your blog
- Grooveshark - Streaming all music
- Usenet - A shadow of its former self but still a bastion of binaries
Personally, got started with Audiogalaxy, went all in with Morpheus & KaZaA Lite. Loved Grooveshark, discovered so much there. Still have a few RMVB (Real Media Variable Bitrate) videos burned on DVD-Rs somewhere.
Still scratching my head as to why GrooveShark was forced to shut down, yet SoundCloud still exists and has ads/paid tiers for the same service of users uploading songs they don’t own.
I believe the smoking gun were emails showing that Grooveshark management told employees to upload music, fatally undermining the “safe harbour” defence of “we shouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of users if they upload copyrighted material”.