On my 16th birthday, the girl I was dating at the time made me a mixtape. Mixtapes are fail-safe gifts, hers even more so considering she had better music taste and was much cooler than me (and probably still is). On that CD, between some Fueled by Ramen deep cuts and, naturally, Butch Walker’s "Mixtape", was a song I’d come to cherish over the years, not so much for the connection to the person who made me the mixtape but to the feeling of existing in that Autumn. The song was "Overdue" by the Get Up Kids, though it wasn’t something she ripped from her CD collection. It was a 128 kbps mp3 very clearly ripped from the early days of YouTube. I’ve kept that same file with me for nearly a decade, its muffled, watery compression migrating from iPod to computer to phone over the years.

For a certain point on the timeline of music discovery, quality wasn’t a defining factor. In the dawn of mp3 players, the big draw was the amount of music you could carry with you. "Your entire library in your pocket" is how Steve Jobs put it when he introduced the iPod in 2001. When filesharing subsequently exploded, there were no rules. Low bit-rate mp3s colored the experience of music discovery in the early 21st century. While often Limewire, Kazaa, or Napster would allow you to sort search results by bit rate, it was an afterthought. Piracy was always about convenience over quality, and especially considering the original iPod had only 5 gigabytes of hard drive space, listeners wanted to bring as many songs along with them as possible. 128 kbps used to be the baseline, and iTunes still labels it as "Good Quality" in their import settings; saying that on most modern music piracy enclaves would get you laughed off the forums.

-=-=-=-I’ve come to love these awful quality files. In most cases, listening to their lossless versions just doesn’t sound right to me. My 128 kbps version of Mario’s "Let Me Love You" still has the intro skit from the music video attached, hearing the song without it is jarring. With each layer of compression you can practically hear the thousands of others who shared and copied the same mp3, like a destructive digital fingerprint. Songs ripped from CDs, uploaded to streaming sites, shared via P2P, and burned back to a CD mixtape have incredible amounts of distortion, something akin to today’s over-compressed Instagram memes. Those memes (the author of the linked article calls them "shitpics") carry the signifiers of their virality, a byproduct of a missing repost option on Instagram and its users ingenuity to circumvent that barrier to share another photo of Kermit sipping the tea.

There’s a brilliant quote in an old Blogariddms podcast post that describes the joy of listening to an old mp3 of poor quality. Justifying the inclusion of a beat-up sounding track, they declare: "Tracks like the insane, taut Ruff Sqwad anthem 'R U Double F' … a 64 kbps straight-off-Limewire, never-released work of genius. It's an mp3 dubplate, and the grooves have been battered into submission by repeated compression (we've included many low-bitrate tracks in this mix, because for us fucked-up sounding mp3s were a massive part of listening to music from this era)."

I’ve got dozens of tracks like these on my computer still. A 58 kbps copy of Kyuss’ "Supa Scoopa and Mighty Scoop" that sounds like it’s being played through a payphone. A bootlegged CD of Hendrix demos transcoded up from somewhere to 128 kbps. And for a good majority of so-called lo-fi music, or the delta blues and folk music I grew up on, tape hiss and surface noise are necessary affectations that enhance the mood of the piece. There’s a certain point where the desire for flawless sound is outweighed by your nostalgia for hearing it in a familiar way. It explains the near universal admiration for a crackling vinyl record, or the recent fascination with VHS distortion.