Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker 25 years ago, Napster was a milestone in how the Internet could connect users and enable content sharing. One obstacle: it amounted to online piracy.
Remember Napster, the online network that let you download music for free? All it did was completely change the entertainment industry.
However, you may not remember its influence because the first version of Napster was relatively short-lived. Immediately after Napster launched on June 1, 1999, the record industry sued to shut it down.
In the months that followed, as Napster fought for its life in court, consumers continued to rip CDs and upload tracks to their computers and file-sharing networks so others could download them. Napster grew from 20 million users in 2000 to around 80 million users at its peak, the Guardian reported.
“Napster wasn't just a file-sharing service, it was the infinite digital jukebox. And it was free,” author Stephen Witt noted in the 2015 book “How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century.” . and the patient zero of piracy”.
As Saturday marks Napster's 25th anniversary, we look back at the creation of the controversial file-sharing service, the impact it had and where the brand stands today.
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Napster paved the way for streaming
After Napster shut down in July 2001, the company filed for bankruptcy and re-emerged as a subscription service in 2003 after being bought by software maker Roxio. By then Apple had opened the iTunes Store to consumers willing to pay for tracks and albums. Record industry lawyers were left fighting newer, harder-to-shut down illegal music-sharing networks.
But none captured the hype as much as the original Napster, which reset consumer expectations for music – and eventually movies and video games.
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Digital downloads and music streaming services — from Amazon Music and Apple Music to Deezer, Pandora, Spotify and Tidal — were all foreshadowed by Napster, says Ken Pohlmann, University of Miami professor emeritus, electrical engineer and author of “Principles of Digital Audio” .
“The same online distribution model paved the way for video streaming” and services like Netflix, he said.
What was Napster and what went wrong?
Shawn Fanning began working on what would become Napster as a freshman at Northeastern University in Boston. The Napster software, when downloaded and run on a personal computer, allowed users to search for millions of MP3 song files on other people's computers that also had the software. All users could download songs from each other's computers.
“It was something that just provided a better way … a more reliable way and a fun way for people to share music and see each other's music collection,” the Napster co-founder said in a BBC interviewfirst aired in 2011. Napster is named after Fanning's nickname earned as a result of his hairstyle.
In the wave, Fanning would appear on its cover Time magazine and Napster would give Cover of Newsweekvery.
But the record industry took a different view of Napster, disapproving of how the network allowed users to distribute music anonymously, which went beyond the standard “fair use” of sharing copyrighted works with friends if you weren't profiting.
“A safe haven for piracy,” is how the Recording Industry Association of America described Napster in its copyright infringement lawsuit filed in December 1999, as described in “All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster” by Joseph Menn.
The RIAA's lawsuit sought $100,000 for each copyrighted song shared over the network, or about $100 million, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
Metallica, Dr. Dre, more musicians had trouble with Napster
While some musicians supported Napster and wanted record labels to adopt a subscription service, other artists were more aggressive in voicing their concerns about Napster's evils.
Among them: rock band Metallica and record producer and rapper Dr. Dre who filed their own copyright infringement lawsuits soon after the RIAA sued on behalf of the labels.
In May 2000, Metallica handed over boxes of files citing more than 300,000 Napster users who had downloaded Metallica songs – including a demo version of the song “I Disappear” from the “Mission Impossible 2” soundtrack before it was made available for purchase.
“It all started when some guy put a song on the Internet that we hadn't finished mixing yet. And I wanted to know where it came from,” Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich told USA TODAY in 2003. “Things took a drastic turn. .From there it was never for the control, but I want to decide what to give.
While Ulrich and Metallica took a lot of flak from the media and fans for their stance, they certainly had a point. “File sharing is synonymous with music piracy,” Pohlmann said.
“Napster tapped into a subjugated sentiment that assumed the music industry ripped people off,” he said. “Some clients were too proud to turn the tables and uproot the industry. What they missed was the fact that they were stealing from the musicians too.”
Other artists were just as upset, if not front and center. Eminem had to go ahead with releasing the single, “The Real Slim Shady” from 2000's “The Marshall Mathers LP” after it was leaked via Napster. And the same thing happened with his 2002 album “The Eminem Show”.
“All that work, the days, the months, the hours I spent writing it, recording it, tweaking it… All the songs leaked out. It was like music should be free,” says Marshall “Eminem” Mathers in the upcoming two-part documentary “How Music Got Free,” premiering June 11-12 on Paramount+. He and LeBron James are among the executive producers.
“Then, it's like, okay, well, here's what you don't understand (about) that music should be free. I've got an engineer to pay,” he said. “There's an army of people working at Interscope (Records) who need their pay.”
So what happened to Napster?
A federal court disagreed with Napster's claim that users were simply changing their music in space because other users could download files they didn't previously own.
Napster paid $26 million to settle separate lawsuits filed by music publishers and songwriters but settled based on the court's ruling in the case filed by the record labels and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.
Meanwhile, the recording industry began suing music sharers and downloaders. In the end, about 17,000 were sued, “all just average people,” said Witt, who is also an executive producer on “How Music Got Free,” based on his 2015 book.
The Napster team wanted to make a deal with the record industry, Napster's co-founder Sean Parker told The New Yorker in 2014. “Napster was this cultural revolution, much more than a legal company ever was,” he said.
“There was this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Parker, who would go on to become the first chairman of Facebook, invest in Spotify and found The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.
“We said, 'If you shut down Napster, it's going to break and you've got a Whac-A-Mole problem on your hands, where you're fighting service after service and you're never going to get all these users back in one place.' And that's what happened,” Parker said.
USA TODAY could not reach Fanning and Parker for this story.
Napster started a “wave” of technological change
The Napster story remains a landmark among technology innovators, said “All the Rave” author Menn (now a reporter for the Washington Post). The Los Angeles Times in May.
“Uber and Airbnb took the same approach — deregulate taxis and hotels to give people something they want and grow so big that eventually you have politicians on your side,” Menn told the Times. “Napster created this whole wave of entrepreneurial anti-heroes.”
Looking back, Fanning told USA TODAY in 2009, “he was blown away by the high interest and the controversy. I wouldn't say I regret anything. It's easy in retrospect to look back at how such a complicated situation unfolded and how it might have been able to make better decisions, but overall, it was a great experience.”
At the time, Fanning had sold Rupture, a network for connecting video game players on different systems, to Electronic Arts. Fanning would go on to found Heliumwhich creates wireless networks for Internet-connected devices.
Echoes of Napster's odyssey can be found in current headlines with TikTok and Universal Music facing off – and Taylor Swift's music being pulled from the platform – before reaching an agreement in early May.
More recently, Sony Music warned AI developers not to use its content to train AI models.
Speaking about the music industry in 2009, Fanning said, “it's really hard to do something innovative. (You're) dealing with a lot of people who don't think about changing their business model.”
Is Napster still around today?
Napster still plays tunes, but as a subscription service now, although it has only a small fraction of the subscribers of mainstream competitors like Apple, Amazon, Spotify and YouTube Music.
Many still believe that the brand has been promised as it has changed hands several times, including existence owned by Best Buy in 2008 and folded into the Rhapsody music servicewhich acquired it in 2011.
It is currently owned by a private consortium headed by Hivemind Capital, an investment firm focused on digital media, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Hivemind acquired Napster in 2022 from virtual reality company MelodyVR.
Napster (napster.com) costs $10.99 per month ($14.99 per month for a family plan, you can try it in a 30-day free trial) with more than 110 million tracks from artists such as Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and the Beatles, many in lossless CD-like quality. You can download music to your Android or iOS device to listen on the go and transfer your music from other services for free. There are also thousands of videos available. The program also allows you to create playlists using AI.
Contributed by: Edna Gundersen and Reuters.
Follow Mike Snider on X and Threads: @mikesnider & mikegsnider.
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