Audiogalaxy
The file-sharing service music nerds still mourn: a website where you queued songs, a tiny program called Satellite that kept hunting for them while you were away, and forums that turned strangers into Italian-prog-rock experts. Audiogalaxy rose when Napster fell in 2001 and went dark on June 17, 2002, the day it settled with the record industry.
Audiogalaxy began in 1998 as The Borg Search, an index of FTP sites built by Michael Merhej while he was a computer science student at the University of Texas at Austin. From an office on West Sixth Street in Austin, the service grew into something stranger and better than a Napster clone. You searched on the website; the actual transfer was handled by Satellite, a small program that kept every search running for as long as it was open, so a track nobody was sharing at noon would quietly turn up at midnight. Downloads resumed where they broke, and whole albums came down with little effort.
What made it beloved was the community wrapped around the files. The site featured a different artist every day with a critique from the staff and a few MP3s to try, and the write-ups were archived, so a search often returned a beginner's guide alongside the songs. Chat forums grouped users by interest and splintered into tiny genre worlds, Italian progressive rock and Afrobeat among them. As Napster was filtered and then shut down over the course of 2001, Audiogalaxy became a major service, with perhaps half as many users as KaZaA and a far deeper catalog. Sam Hockley-Smith, writing for NPR in 2019, put it best: "Where Limewire and Napster were great decaying skyscrapers, Audiogalaxy was a sturdy shack in the woods."
The record industry noticed. Audiogalaxy kept a list of blocked songs, but a groups feature added in May 2001 let members pass tracks to one another, and the blocks were easy to route around. In late May 2002 the RIAA and the National Music Publishers' Association sued; on June 17, 2002, Audiogalaxy settled out of court, agreeing to a "filter-in" system in which rights holders had to consent before a song could be shared, and to pay a sum that was never made public. RIAA chief Hilary Rosen called it "a wake-up call to the other networks that facilitate unauthorized copying." Satellite went offline for good, and by September the homepage was a banner for Rhapsody, the streaming subscription from Listen.com.
Merhej relaunched the name in 2010 as a service for streaming your own music collection from home, Dropbox bought that company in December 2012, and the service shut down for the last time on January 31, 2013.
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