Michael Merhej @ Audiogalaxy: The Music Lover Who Pissed Off the Recording Industry

<p>Unless you’ve only just gotten onto the Internet in the last few years, you’ve surely heard of Napster. In the late 90s, Napster launched an online file sharing service where anyone could download mp3 files from other people for free, and it was wildly popular before getting sued out of existence by the major record labels who obviously weren’t happy about the idea of people downloading their content for free.</p><p>But Napster wasn’t the first music sharing service. Years before Napster, a student at the University of Texas named Michael Merhej launched an FTP search engine — called the Borg Search Engine — on a physics department server. At the time, posting music files online was already common, but finding them was difficult. Lots of hardcore music afficionados hated having their options restricted by whatever Top 40 the recording industry was promoting. Those music lovers flocked to Michael’s FTP search engine.</p><p>Within a couple years, it had become so popular that Michael moved he search engine onto its own commercial servers and began monetizing with advertisements, changing the name to Audiogalaxy in the process.</p><p>Yes, a little later, Napster would come along and popularize file sharing to the masses. By that point, Audiogalaxy already had a bigger catalog, and, while people looking for popular music tracks stuck to Napster, anyone who wanted more options chose Audiogalaxy, turning it into the second most popular file sharing service in the world.</p><p>For a complete transcript of the episode, <a href="https://latonas.com/blog/web-masters-episode-23-michael-merhej/">click here</a>.</p>