Pre-iTunes.

3 min readOct 25, 2016

Pre-iTunes.

So, in 1999, I helped to release a song that became a top 10 hit.

Also, in 1999, we released a song that was to be the most misattributed song on the internet*

We got Napstered. If you were into file-sharing in 1999, or the other early 2000’s, there is a good chance you had/have a song called “Better Days (And the Bottom Drops Out)”, or “I’ve Seen Better Days (And the Bottom Drops Out)”- by either Sublime or Sugar Ray, though neither of those artists has ever recorded it.

Ah yes, the early days of computers and music.

B.i., Before iTunes.

Media Players. CD Rippers and Ripping Software.

At some point, some people mislabelled the artist before they uploaded it to whichever sharing website they were using at the time. Napster, Limewire, Bittorrent, whatever. Or maybe they submitted it to the CDDB database early on, that’s possible, too.

We had no idea this was happening, of course. We were confused. Kids would turn to each other when we played the song, you could see them saying “I thought this was Sugar Ray?!” to each other. Especially odd when we were playing before Sugar Ray, which we did a number of times. CD signings were bound to have a kid or two say “You guys sound like Sublime/Sugar Ray” and what can one do, but shrug and say “I guess, a little? I don’t know”.

Everybody hears what they want to hear, I thought. At that time, I guessed those artists sounded enough like us to account for it. the Sublime thing struck me as odd, though. When Beck’s “Where It’s At” caught fire on radio, a lot of our friends in Atlanta thought it was us. Go figure.

So today, 18 years later, if you search for “I’ve Seen Better” and hit return you get these kind of results.