With the Internet in most homes, and with the proliferation of Wi-Fi, traditional home devices like receivers were increasingly offering Internet access for firmware updates, and access to audio streaming services. As the Internet has improved, giving us more bandwidth, the quality of the music streams has improved, offering us CD quality and beyond, but at a price. That was the beginning of the myriad offerings we have today. With growing success, Pandora and other services added ads between songs, or offered ad-free music for a fee. Pandora and its cousins were computer-based, so people listened on their desktops or laptops getting the music they liked as long as they had the Internet. It wasn’t quite the same as creating your own playlists out of your owned music library, but it was convenient if you had Internet access, and it often exposed you to music you might have never discovered on your own. Both services streamed music at fairly low quality and were based on algorithms that observed the kind of music or artists you liked and fed you more. Eventually, after much public pressure, Apple removed the copy protection from their downloads.Īround the same time, Pandora appeared, along with LastFM.
Rather than only downloading albums, you could buy music individual tracks. As storage sizes increased, people could carry their entire music collection on an iPod.Īll this ripping of music didn’t thrill the music publishers, or artists, so Apple opened the iTunes Store to allow people to buy anything in a protected format the music industry could live with. 2001 was also the year of the iPod, a hard disc music player that could take files ripped from a CD right on your computer. By 2001, Napster had millions of users, and the music industry began to rightfully worry.
#Itheater streaming free#
While Napster wasn’t a streaming service, it built a wide audience based on a highly compressed music file format, MP3 (320 kbps kilo-bits-per-second), and Napster offered a free peer-to-peer service where anyone could contribute ripped music files (from CD, vinyl or tape) and share them to friends or anonymously.
I’d put the beginning of the streaming age with the rise of Napster in the late 90’s.
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