https://marco.org/2009/03/09/butthole-surfers-pepper-electriclarryland
Butthole Surfers — Pepper (Electriclarryland, 1996)
This was the first MP3 I ever downloaded (the second was Bullet With Butterfly Wings, followed by Blister In The Sun).
It was the fall of 1996 and I was still on a 486 with Windows 3.11. WinAmp only ran on Windows 95, so I had to play it with WinPlay. The 486 was too slow to play an MP3 at full quality in real time, so I had to play it at 22kHz mono. And I could only keep a few MP3s because I didn’t have a lot of free space on my 400 MB hard drive. (But that was OK… it took too long to download over my 33.6 modem with my friend’s AOL account anyway.)
MP3s really exploded among geeks in the summer of 1997. As such, most geeks’ first MP3 artists included The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish. (And I think these artists benefited significantly from this timing.)
What were yours, and when?