The Internets

The brief era of Napster lasted only from June 1999 to July 2001, but it had a profound and well documented impact on the music industry.  He was only an occasional Napster user himself, but downloaded a lot of music during this period and later from Usenet MP3 groups.  He felt justified in the free downloading, as did a lot of Napster users, in that he had already once purchased a lot of the music he was downloading in either LP or cassette version, or both.  But with time he got used to obtaining music for free and just downloaded because it was out there and available to be had.

Much of this was before he had access to high-speed cable modems, and he remembers that the very first album he downloaded in its entirety, Steely Dan's 2000 comeback album Two Against Nature, took him an entire weekend on a 128k dial-up modem, starting on Friday evening and not finishing until late on Sunday. By the way, he was fairly disappointed by that album.

But things got better.  It almost took arm-twisting on his part, but he finally got his cable provider, Charter Communication, to set him up with a high-speed connection, and at the same time, more and more music was being uploaded to the newsgroups.  Soon, he was recreating not only his entire LP collection from the past 30 years - rock, jazz, blues, and various other genres - but also filling in all of the blanks in the collection until he had nearly everything that had been released by the artists he liked, including box sets, reissues, remixes, B-sides, etc.

One of the consequences of all of this downloading was that he was spending so much time looking backward into the past, downloading recordings from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, that he wasn't paying much attention to what was being recorded right then.  He had even started to download albums from artists and trends the had missed over the previous decades - electronic house music, Indonesian trance music, lounge, Malian afro-beat, etc. - which even further distanced him from the music of 2000.  Eventually, his hard drive was virtually overflowing with MP3s to the point where he had to upgrade computers on a couple of occasions just for more storage space, and he burned more CDs than he could ever hope to even listen to in one lifetime.  He still has whole storage boxes of CDs that he still hasn't yet heard and is unlikely to ever play. 

He had owned a few of Medeski, Martin & Wood's groove-based jazz albums before the downloading had begun, but they were one of the bands that he kept finding posted to both the jazz and the rock boards and he downloaded everything by them that he could find.  It being such an acquisitive and eclectic year for him, that no artist, album, or song stands out to him as the "sound of 2000," but in recognition of the amount of MMW he downloaded that year, here's The Dropper.

For what it's worth, the 2000 Music Midtown lineup included Speech form Arrested Development, Bob Weir & Ratdog, Collective Soul, Creed, Guster, Jeff Healey, Johnny Hyde, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Kitty Snyder, Koko Taylor, Meshell Ndegeocello, moe., Nas, Our Lady Peace, Sevendust, Southern Culture On The Skids, Susan Tedeschi, The Allman Brothers, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Tinsley Ellis, Travis, and Ultrababyfat, but once again, he didn't go.  He was still dead inside.