How LimeWire ended the Napster music revolution
TL;DR
LimeWire marked the end of the mainstream free music era that began with Napster, as one of the last major file-sharing platforms. It highlights how online users commonly downloaded music illegally for years.
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Quick: tell me how old you are by telling me which app you used to download free music. Was it Napster? Kazaa? Usenet? Gnutella? WinMX? Morpheus? The Pirate Bay? Were you, I don't know, sending your friends songs on AIM or BBM? The possibilities are endless. For a decade or so, if you were online, you were probably stealing music.
For this episode of Version History, we're telling the story of one of the last big names in file sharing: LimeWire. If the era of mainstream access to free music (mostly on college campuses and other fast networks) starts with Napster, it almost certainly ends with LimeWire.
LimeWire was, in many ways, design …