No wonder overtaxed servers would often conk out before you could download a single note. OK, hold on a minute. This makes it sound like Napster files are floating around in the ether, waiting for me to grab as they drift by. In reality, the two aren't very different. If I have one machine in my office running an HTTP server and the other running Napster, it makes no sense to say that the Napster files are somehow stored and served in a fundamentally different way.
Traffic moving over the Internet is in some ways similar to traffic moving over roads and highways.
When everyone is using roads to go to the same place, you can improve specific routes, with carpool lanes and rapid transit. Traffic management companies like Akamai and InterNAP are trying to optimize Internet traffic that is flowing to or from a common point, effectively building carpool lanes on the Internet. Now, the Internet is not quite like driving. The key differences are the machines that are serving the data, and the first few hops away from them on the network. So the real issue is the first few hops away from the serving machine.