Comment by dijksterhuis

Spotify and Netflix happened.

file sharing became far less popular and ubiquitous as a result of their popularity.

they tweaked the model — originally users download a temporary copy from central servers instead of p2p, then later to users rent licensed copies of media instead of pirated copies.

i’m tired of seeing this as an argument on HN — that because something didn’t hit 100% that implies it was a failure and not worth doing or something.

the fact that a limited subset of people still do filesharing is not evidence that the napster case had no effect.

(spotify didn’t exactly start out squeaky clean with how they built out their repertoire iirc).

(apologies for early edits. i just woke up.)