Celebrate the Revolution!

It's been nearly ten years since Napster came online. June 1999 changed the world in no small way.
Mp3's were allready available but most people had never heard of them. Downloading was allready there, with mp3.com as the hubstar, but most people didn't bother, and most musicians were oblivious to what was going on.

Back in the late nineties I was turned on to the anti-copyright movement, and felt strongly for taking down the record industry. I still do.
Back then I thought we were going to do this by recording and trading cd's. CD-r was the biggest thing since tape. It was swiftly surpassed. Napster came along and the record industry was shaking in its parasitic knees. We all remember the trials and Lars Ulrich and all that. The record industry thought they had won, but they overlooked two very important details:
We now knew it could be done. Music (and other electronic media) could be traded without the middle man. We knew it could be done easily too.
The other thing more and more people started realizing was that the record companies weren't there for the artists, but for their own sake. The record companies exploited the artists and after Napster more and more of them started releasing their music online in one form or another. Now, ten years later, they all do it - or they don't get played.

While I personally had released mp3's on the internet, for free, as early as 1998 I didn't really see the onset of the revolution that was going on around me. Not that I was in any way alone about that. Hardly anyone had come to realize the opportunity we had been presented as musicians. Even IUMA.com, by far the best music site on the internet to date, had to close down because of lacking interest from sponsors. I, and many with me, still saw burning cd's and creating elaborate profesional looking jewel cases as the way to bring down the record industry - or just spreading their music. Man oh man were we wrong.

The ongoing trial against Pirate Bay in sweden is the newest in a long line of attempts to retain control of our media consumption, by the faceless corporations. Their opponents are mere kids, but are certainly no longer portrayed as a bunch of delinquents, or "cyber terrorist hackers", by the media. Nope. The populace is surprisingly sympathetic to taking the rights away from the corporations and giving it to us: the listeners and musicians.

The last ten years have been nothing short of a real electronic revolution. We now control the horizontal and the vertical, not Them. The can actually go fuck themselves and consider getting a new job. They corporations wont go away for many years, not even the dinosaur record labels, but they are obsolete and it's more evident by the day. Even if they should win this trial it would be a pyrrhic victory at best. Downloading and distributing free content can't be stopped.

Thank you Napster! We will never forget!