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Napster was an American peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. As the software became popular, the company encountered ...
- Shawn Fanning Got The Idea For Napster While in College.
- Shawn Fanning Met Napster Co-Founder Sean Parker in A Chat Room.
- Napster Quickly Gained Millions of users.
- Shawn Fanning Soon Made The Cover of Time Magazine.
- Napster Was A Dream For Music Lovers, But Not For Music Sellers.
- Metallica Really, Really Hated Napster.
- Other Musicians Were Divided on Napster.
- Lawsuits Eventually Shut Napster down.
- Napster Left Its Mark.
- Both Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker Left Napster (and Briefly Reunited in 2011).
The concept for Napster first came to 18-year-old creator Shawn Fanning while he was still enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston in 1998. He would listen to his roommatecomplain about the difficulties of downloading music online, and Fanning imagined the solution could be a program that allowed users to share files directly without involvin...
Before it was a world-changing app, "Napster" was the screen name Fanning used in hacker chat rooms. The moniker came from the "nappy" texture of his hair, even though his signature look was a buzzcut topped with a baseball cap. It was under this username that Fanning met an aspiring entrepreneur named Sean Parker, one of the few who didn’t scoff a...
It didn’t take long for Napster to attract users. By the fall of 1999, word of mouth helped Napster’s catalog of downloadable songs reach 4 million, with 150,000 registered users. By the summer of 2000, 20 million users were logged on, and about 14,000 songs were being downloaded every minute. The service peaked at an estimated 80 million users and...
On October 2, 2000, the now 19-year-old coder was heralded as a pioneer in computing by TIME magazine. The cover storydeclared that Napster "already ranks among the greatest Internet applications ever, up there with e-mail and instant messaging."
As Fanning explained to the BBC World Service, "[Napster] was something that provided a better, more reliable and fun way for people to share music and see each other’s music collection. For the first time this full history of recorded music was available online to everyone instantly." Record labels, on the other hand, were all in on selling CDs, a...
Metallica would not be the first to file a copyright lawsuit against Napster. (That came from A&M.) They wouldn’t be the only musicians to sue. (Dr. Dre did, too.) They wouldn’t even be the most powerful. (The Recording Industry Association of America represented severalmajor media companies in a joint effort.) But the legendary heavy-metal band go...
Joining Metallica among Napster’s detractors were Trent Reznor, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Creed frontman Scott Stapp, who argued, "My music is like my home. Napster is sneaking in the back door and robbing me blind." Other artists were more open to the service. Chuck D wrote an op-ed for The New York Timesproclaiming, "We should think of [Napster] as...
While Napster was enjoying massive popularity, it faced a wave of lawsuits that drained its coffers through legal fees and damages. The argument was essentially whether or not Napster was to blame for users sharing copyrighted materials. Napster argued they were not at fault because their servers did not host music files, as they were shared direct...
Though the record labels initially bristled at Napster, the industry eventually shifted because of it, diversifying into digital marketplaces, subscription music services, and the ability to buy a single song instead of a whole album. Looking back, some experts have argued the music industry would have been better served by embracing the lessons Na...
Sean Parker was ousted from Napster in 2000 after a company e-mail was exposed in which he acknowledged users were sharing "pirated music." This was pointedly not the impression Napster’s legal team was trying to paint in the courts, arguing the co-founders’ intentions were fair use and sharing, not piracy. Still, he rebounded by investing in emerg...
Sep 15, 2023 · Napster was the peer-to-peer file sharing service from the late 90s, that famously went up against Metallica (and lost). Where it is today, might surprise you. ... Most people in that era had dial ...
Sep 5, 2013 · One person he turns to for help is Jordan Ritter, a 20-year-old security programmer who goes by the name “Nocarrier.” Jordan Ritter (Napster founding architect): Interesting story there. The ...
Mar 16, 2013 · A film about Napster, one of the original music file-sharing services, gets its world premiere at SXSW festival in Texas. Fifteen years since the teenagers set up the site in their bedrooms, Emma ...
Sep 6, 2010 · At 19, Sean Parker helped create Napster. At 24, he was founding president of Facebook. At 30, he’s the hard-partying, press-shy genius of social networking, a budding billionaire, and about to ...
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Sep 28, 2020 · The latest episode of GRAMMY.com's History Of video series traces Napster's explosion of popularity to its demise... and return. GRAMMYs/Sep 29, 2020 - 02:29 am. Napster was the independent peer-to-peer sharing network that shook the music industry around the turn of the millennium. Relive the company's controversial rise and fall, from small ...
