Napster Goes Porn, Adonnam Will Survive
In Mid 2001 I wrote the above sentence for a project for the first Tirana Biennale. With that sentence I meant that the end of the Napster’s era was coming, while the file sharing would have been still on. “Napster goes porn” referred to the fact that Napster was about to be shutdown, while at the same time some porn websites were advertising themselves as the “Napster of Porn”. At that time, music companies forced the napster server’s maintainer to filter all the downloads, stopping those containing copyrighted material but some guys invented a very smart way to bypass the guard software that was supposed to ban any request for copyrighted material. Instead of listing their songs in a standard way using the rock stars real names (madonna), they took out the last letter of each name and put it at the beginning so that madonna was listed as adonnam. In this way they were able to bypass the filters for a while .
So saying “Adonnam Will Survive” was a way to anticipate what it really happened.
File sharing is still on.
Then a very curious fact happened some years later. It was spring 2003 and Madonna injected in P2P networks a fake song containing her voice reading the sentence: “”What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” (in reaction to the fact that many people were downloading and sharing her songs for free. – you can listen to it below). After a while, on 2003-04-19,
madonna.com official website was defaced by some hackers, who substituted the original home page, with a very low-res new version containing 5 links to madonna’s songs and the sentence: This is what the fuck I think I’m doing…”
Below some more info from Curlio.com
2003-04-19 12:03:50 Madonna.com
The official madonna site has been hacked by some hackers today. This is most likely a response of a hacker to Madonna’s try to beat pirates and them getting the wrong mp3’s instead. The hacker put 5 songs of madonna on the site which people would be able to download if they would visit the site, and as long as the site hasn’t been
restored. At the top of the page it says: “This is what the * I think I’m doing…” which is of course the response to the question of madonna in her fake mp3’s where she says “What the * do you think you’re doing?”. As soon as there is an official word from a spokesman we will of course let you know. Thanks to Andabata for submitting this news-tip. update:
Now ( approx 21:00 CET ) madonna.com discovered they were hacked and brought their own server down.
