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.
Man, I loved my iRiver. Even though it had dogshit storage, the ability to record songs off the radio was so worth it.
It’s so weird seeing their name out in the wild. I’ve never met anyone who’s heard of them. I had a couple of their mp3 players and they were fantastic!