Did you ever use Bluetooth to share music back in the day?

[radiofan]

I remember this method of sharing being hugely popular from the early to mid 2000s (although bitrates of tracks had to be lowered in many cases due to the fact that smartphones had much less storage than they do today). Did anyone use Bluetooth to send/receive music during the early days of file sharing?

[xNxRxGx]

smartphones? 2000-2005?

[radiofan]

So I was primarily thinking of phones that ran on the Symbian operating system - these were hugely popular (the Nokia N95 springs to mind, but the N70 was released in 2005 and was a popular model too).

[xNxRxGx]

So I was primarily thinking of phones that ran on the Symbian operating system - these were hugely popular (the Nokia N95 springs to mind, but the N70 was released in 2005 and was a popular model too).

yea i figured lol...symbian yup...N series mhm and no i never had one of those higher class "semi-smartphones" back then with decent storage lol

i dont recall any of my friends who had them using them for sharing mp3s tho

on my lower class phone there was def no point in having couple tracks of poor audio quality on poor speakers
like, i think i had 32Mb card

[radiofan]

So - the Nokia N95 had the best stereo speakers that I've ever heard on a phone (I'd argue even better than the first set of stereo speakers that were introduced by Apple on the iPhone 7 in 2016). Symbian was a great OS - well before it's time, I think...

[ElevationOP8]

I never really got bluetooth tbh

I think at one time I remembered it being associated with a Blackberry, or those pdas with stylus. If I remember well enough, when laptops were just starting to become more popular (I think when bluetooth was starting to be recognised), they weren't considered practical yet for laptops until some time later, and never being practical for desktops. Nowadays everything is bluetooth connected, printers, portable devices, sharing between devices.

Bluetooth depends on the speed of the device's capabilities, or the bluetooth component itself - or both? I couldn't remember seeing people sharing mp3s with bluetooth, wasn't that a thing with pictures and other documents like that?

[radiofan]

Sharing audio via Bluetooth was definitely a thing at some point; certainly in the early to mid 2000s tracks that were shared were of much lower quality, presumably because people would much rather fill up their phones with 20 tracks at 96Kbps than they would with 10 tracks at 160. Was quite amazing back in the day to be able to sit in the same room with a bunch of people and share audio!

[ElevationOP8]

Sharing audio via Bluetooth was definitely a thing at some point;

Was it something you use to do?
If you were around mates that were as interested in music as you were, then doing this might be something you would've been doing as least for a bit.

If mp3s were low quality for size compression, I don't think it's because it was for this sort of thing, that's an internet running on dial-up sort of thing wasn't it? Ofcourse they had limits on bitrate for storage purposes since DVDs were yet to be utilised for this and computers never carried multiple GBs storage capacity until some time later on, but you must have been on the road all the time to be using your phone for this all of the time as they were limited in storage for sure. Talk about having only 1-5 songs max.

People had mp3 players and the rest, but they never had this transfer ability, so did people really use their phones to share cbr kbit rates lower than 192?

If you did it then, or if it was a big thing back then, why isn't it happening more now when phones carry more and are better suited for it?

[radiofan]

Ha - all very good questions. So -some answers:

I was into this method of music sharing for a bit; I'm a fan of better quality, though, so at the time I was using Symbian (with a 2 GB card to expand my storage) I was storing MP3s at 320Kbps from my own personal collection; this meant as a result that I wasn't able to share as much, because the phones that people were using at the time didn't have as much storage available. This also ties into your other question; as you say, it's entirely possible that dial-up was a large factor in terms of low bitrates (certainly in the early to mid 2000s). Even in 2009, though (which is the last memory I have of people sharing audio in this way - but I'm sure it still takes place) there were still low-quality files being shared; it was common to see tracks at 64Kbps CBR. Those extra minutes of audio add up, though; you could fit so many more tracks on a device (assuming, of course, that quality wasn't a big issue for you). In terms of hard disks in computers at that time - drives of over 100 GB were certainly around during the latter years of the 2000s; storing tracks on smartphones was popular in educational settings (which is where my experience of file sharing using this method of data transfer took place). MP3 players in lots of cases offered more data storage, but without the convenience of Bluetooth; you'd need to connect them to a computer via a physical USB cable, which is what made smartphones so much more practical for file sharing. That, and the other benefits that Bluetooth brought (e.g. sharing your phone's internet connection with your laptop).

Your last question is an interesting one; my presumption is that multiple factors are at play here, including media being much more accessible now (via streaming services), and internet connectivity also being much more accessible (4G wasn't even a thing during the early days of smartphones). That, coupled with the fact that in iOS, for example, it's not physically possible to share audio via Bluetooth by simply browsing your device's filesystem and choosing the option to send any file that you like (iOS/iPadOS now include the Files app, but it's not as straightforward as simply copying data to your device and it appearing there). So, a mix of things - but logically it would make sense if this method of sharing had increased (rather than decreased) with the capacities of devices that we're now seeing... if you'd told me that a smartphone would ship with 128 GB of flash storage back in 2005, I'd have been amazed!

[ElevationOP8]

Storage in those days meant everything when it came to how big the playlist was, and how conveniently it was shared around. Mp3s became popular using methods ofwhich you described, but there are much more also.

I'd agree that there is a lot of things different today then there was going on back then.
Services for streaming, aswell as things like Youtube (started only in 2005), has been a game changer when it comes to accessing and sharing music, and there are also tons of sharing services around to carry out the same job, just like that which are used here and all of which only started being used actively more around the same time.
Not only that, I would consider that sharing also takes place not just from person to person - in person, but over a wider group of people outside one on one - and if they meet up, and say "yeah sure I'd like that tune on my device" - instead of doing hook-ups - it's more link drops, or social media portals etc. as most artists promote their music directly on the internet or have a personalised website - meaning a person just needs to know titles and then let the web do the rest.
So this question takes one back to a time where the internet was less communicative on a social/personal/peripheral level than it is now.
I bet you could get so dynamic to complete the answer to these questions of why or why not Bluetooth, or how was Bluethooth...? There are many things that one has to remember with music production aswell, not just how it was distributed and promoted from the artist level and labels to the consumers and geeks making movement. I think that there is even something that could be said about these people which helped spread music to more people than it perhaps otherwise would've not reached, but that is a debate I remember which the artists didn't agree the same.

For the sake of this topic, the best answer is probably concerning the device's capabilities, regarding file size limits as of the times, but also - mp3s were more popular as a music trend amoungst people, don't forget - as it was very well suited for the purpose it was used for, back at this time when these other factors were unavoidable. Nowadays, FLAC/WAV can be shared amongst heavy collectors easily, and they are available on web retail, or from the artist themselves.


I never used a phone for this purpose personally, especially back then, preferring to use the comfort of my PC to find music as you would find and get it online, which 3G services wern't even a big thing in the first half of the 2000s. This was also when ed2k, p2p and torrents were buzzin' and sharing individual tracks happened. But then because so many werne't released, too many radio set-cuts went around, and sceners as we are despise it.

Phones generally were associated with two things when it came to music 1) ringtones; 2) banners - most common phones were calculator b+w.

You must have been a trendy flashing around your "Symbian" getting in and out of your Mercedes Benz and going on trips with your friends also with such things who just happened to share music around, one putting their 96kbps MP3 on loud speaker like the cool kids while thinking to yourselves "we're ahead of our times".