FTP servers were easy...except for actually finding content on them where Napster was better. You literally described why Napster was better. FTP was only concerned with moving bytes. Napster added a search functionality on top of the moving bytes which is the thing most people actually wanted. Napster could have just been a fancy Archie front end and it would have been just about as popular.

FTP servers at that time for MP3s were ratio servers. You had to upload something in order to download and at a specific ratio of kb. Most wouldn't give you credit for uploading something they already had as well.

Finding the songs was no problem. I can remember some kind of web search engine. It was just too hard to get a collection going to even be able to download something though. I guess the idea was to rip your cd collection but that idea simply didn't occur to me at the time.

Napster took off because it was a free record store at a time when everyone was use to paying $13 an album in 2000 USD($23 adjusted for inflation).

Even easier if you used a nice client to access ftp. The notion that Napster was easier than FTP doesn't ring true to me, either.