Final Remarks

In retrospect, music culture between 1997 and 2001 represents a formative chapter for the way people experience, consume, and think about music. It is an interesting period in time to look at because of how quickly the web had come to be. This technological advancement outpaced the legal and institutional structures at the time, forcing the government and the music industry to approach this crisis in a new way. The web at the time may have been slow and fragmented, but we can still see its impact today. With forces like DMCA and music artists like Metallica fighting against pirated music at the time, it was easy to attack the very fans that didn’t understand the damage they were causing. Copyright debates, online community formation, and file sharing were not separate phenomena but interconnected forces shaping how music was experienced and remembered. Their everyday interactions with music such as, downloading songs, posting in music forums, and sharing files with friends collectively pushed the culture toward a digital future. What began as experimentation and curiosity within the web became a fundamental shift in how music was created, circulated, and understood at the turn of the millennium.