The first pirated MP3 - The Silicon Underground<br>Home » Retro Computing » The first pirated MP3<br>Dave Farquhar Retro Computing August 10, 2026August 10, 2026 0 Comment<br>MP3 piracy was born August 10, 1996. That day, a pirate using the handle of Netfrack released a copy of Metallica’s Until it Sleeps for free download on IRC, an Internet protocol intended for chat, not file sharing. It’s appropriate that the first pirated MP3 was a Metallica song, given Metallica’s litigious attitude toward MP3s just a few short years later.

This NFO file distributed by Compress Da Music in 1996 promoted the first pirated MP3 in the fall of 1996.How MP3 changed audio<br>In 1994, Fraunhofer Institute started giving away an encoder that compressed music into the then-new MP3 format, a much more compact format than the more conventional formats like WAV or IFF. The executable, called L3Enc, soon fell into the hands of people like Netfrack.<br>With greater compression came greater overhead, but bandwidth was scarce and storage was expensive, so before MP3, people just didn’t store music on computers very much. When they did, it was typically limited to short clips. A minute of audio in WAV format took 10 megabytes on disk, compared to half a megabyte in MP3 format encoded at 64 kilobits per second. And at 56K dialup speeds, a minute of audio encoded at 64 kbps took a little over a minute to download. In WAV format, a minute of audio would take 25 minutes to download. CPUs were getting faster too. A Pentium CPU could decode an MP3 and have power left to perform other tasks. And a 1 gigabyte hard drive had enough room left over to store around 500 songs after you installed Windows and a few essential apps.<br>To commercialize the format, Fraunhofer started producing an MP3 player as well. They charged money for that, if you wanted to listen to more than 20 songs. But that wasn’t Netfrack’s problem. Other pirates could solve that, and they did. Of course, other MP3 players soon followed. These also cost money, because the publishers owed Fraunhofer a royalty.<br>When the patent expired and MP3 became free for all, Fraunhofer pulled some shenanigans, declaring the format dead, in an effort to direct people to use its newer, still-encumbered format.<br>Netfrack and Compress Da Audio<br>Pirates used handles, a practice borrowed from the days of CB radio, and organized themselves into groups. The groups sometimes had rivalries. Their releases would be accompanied with elaborate ASCII artwork promoting the group and release.<br>Some of Netfrack’s groupmates were more prolific, releasing more titles. But Netfrack was first.<br>The first MP3 leaked wasn’t even a new release. Metallica’s Load album was two months old at the time. But MP3 was still so new and novel that for a time, pirates could get by with releasing material that was already available in stores. In time, the pirate music scene would shift to leaking material before anyone could buy it, and that caught the FBI’s attention once it reached a large enough scale.<br>Metallica may or may not have been aware of the release at the time. But as MP3 piracy grew, Metallica of course became very vocal about it. Metallica (in)famously sued Napster on April 13, 2000, the first highly publicized instance of an artist directly suing a P2P software company. This was separate from A&M Records’ lawsuit on behalf of the RIAA.<br>What early piracy was like<br>Pirating files over IRC was clunky at best, involving communicating with bots that were using a specification called DCC, or Direct Client Communication.<br>Transferring files over Usenet was a bit less clunky, but you had to have access to a Usenet server. That usually cost money. You also had to know Usenet existed. So in 1996, there was no shortage of people willing to put up with pirating files over IRC. I don’t think there’s any way to prove one method was more common than the other in the early days.<br>But for whatever it’s worth, uuencode and uudecode, the tools used to swap files over Usenet, had been around since 1980. IRC wasn’t invented until 1988.<br>The right way to pirate MP3 files, in theory<br>The conventional way to share files in 1996 over the Internet would have been to use FTP, a protocol whose name literally stood for file transfer protocol. The problem was, FTP servers cost money to operate. You needed a fast Internet connection and a fast server to host it. The people who had access to such things were rarely willing to risk their jobs hosting pirated files. Notice I said rarely. Not never.<br>You see, I once knew this guy named Max who was running some kind of an illicit FTP server on the college campus where we both worked. When I caught him, he knew he had some time to cover his tracks. By the time I obtained permission to hack into his server to find out what he was doing, he had wiped every trace of the "you know, just ‘stuff'" he’d been hosting.<br>Guys like Max are hard to come by and unreliable. So if you were an Internet pirate in those early days, you got a...