I love how no one mentions that the great success business Spotify got all their starting music from the mp3 warez scene.
Early Spotify songs still had the meta data from those files, including misspelled song names and years of issue.
Yes, That’s why I run a Plex server, totally. Morons.
Not sure if serious. 😑
Anyway, before forums, there was a network of servers hosting discussions and to some extent file sharing.
The modern version of Usenet is pretty focused on file sharing and mostly so on paid servers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#:~:text=Usenet is a set of,which is potentially widely distributed.