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.
Which meant people had to actively find & pay for a Usenet provider. Which they didn’t do when there were so many additional venues to discuss things online for free.
Honestly the barrier to entry of Usenet was always high, finding a working Usenet provider only made it slightly harder in a world where everything lives in your browser.