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There were a range of different types of consumer behaviour in respect to accessing music online in 1998 and 1999. The e-commerce trend that had effected industry generally too appeared in music, and there were a range of retailers that sold CDs directly to the public via the internet. It was in this period too, prior to Napster, that downloading of music began to surge in popularity, moving from a niche interest to a nascent mainstream behaviour.

In respect to e-commerce, CDBaby and CDNow established themselves as leading online CD retail intermediaries. Whilst these businesses for the most part didn’t offer downloading, capitalising on both consumers familiarity and demand for CDs, as well as the newly established consumer PC capacity, these stores created infrastructure that allowed consumers to purchase CDs on the internet and have them delivered to their home. Highlighting still how adolescent commerce infrastructure on the internet was at this point, Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, who himself was a musician and previous user of IUMA, highlights that there was not paypal, so getting the buy it now button on his website was a major achievement (Sivers ##).

By 1997, IUMA had been around for a number of years, and offered users ability to access free music online from independent musicians. There were also a range of websites such as eMusic, Goodnoise, mp3.com as well as through the Winamp website that similarly allowed consumers to access and download music from independent musicians, or music from small labels which had licensed their music to these sites. There was not yet anyway to pay and download mainstream music owned by the major labels.

The long download times for individual music files, particularly using 56K modem where downloading a 49.41MB album could take more than 2 hours(Gillen 4 November 2000), at this point constrained consumer take up of downloading of music. Due to the performance constraints of the internet, whilst it was possible to download music from the internet using PCs, burning CDs was a much more popular consumer behaviour in 1997 and early 1998. However, in 1998, even with the technical limitations of downloading, widespread interest in mp3 first emerged: "A largely underground phenomenon in 1997, the controversial MP3 file-compression format burst from obscurity last year [1998]” (Reece 9 January 1999). By May 1999, ‘mp3’ had become the second most popular search term on the internet (Dyson 1 May 1999) continuing to grow. In a matter of months, by October 1999 it had eclipsed all other terms to be the most searched term on the internet, with mp3 now "more popular than sex” (Jones and Sul 14 October 1999). The speed of uptake of the format, and the manner it emerged from obscurity led Michael Robertson of mp3.com to highlight that this shift was the most significant development in digital music of the time: “The real story is that MP3 has incredibly quickly evolved into a full-blown mainstream movement” (Robertson, in Strauss 5 April 1999).

Attempting to capitalise on the growing interest in mp3, there were a range of websites that focussed specifically on helping users find mp3 files. Scour.net, mp3meta and Mp3.lycos were leading mp3 file search engine and indexes (PC Computing 1 July 1999). Lycos, one of the leading search engines of the time, established a separate webpage specifically dedicated to mp3 files. Mp3.lycos allowed users to search for individual mp3 files by song name or artist title, with Mp3.lycos retrieving and compiling a list of websites where these files could be found. The directory was very popular, with search results for individual files offering links to tens to hundreds of websites that contained the particular file the user was searching for (Hoye 29 March 1999). Often though, the search results were unreliable, offering links that would be broken or expired for individual files, making for a frustrating user experience. Shawn Fanning soon would cite this unreliability as a motivator for Napster which was still yet to be conceived (Aydar 28 September 2005).

Figure ##: Mp3 Lycos Mp3 search:http://www.amiga.org.ru/websurf/mp3lycos.jpg

Not only was accessing music online becoming a popular activity, but adding to this, sharing of mp3 files soon followed. With many users having large libraries of mp3 files on their hard drives from CD ripping and mp3 encoding software, soon references emerged in early 1999 that described the increasingly common activity of music sharing. One way was relatively innoucously, via email: "Thousands of teenagers now routinely e-mail music to their friends”(Rawsthorn 13 January 1999), but for more advanced computer users, particularly those users in college withaccessto broadbandinternetconnections in their dorms, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) groups offered capacity to share pirated software, music and movies. In 1998 Jeff Levy was one such college student attheUniversity of Oregon. He was a user of a IRC channel called Warez being particularly active in a sub group called ISO Traders. Levy was also soon to be the first person prosecuted for illegal file sharing under the newNet Act.

Music now more popular than sex: (Jones and Sul 14 October 1999)