Napster was a peer-to-peer file-sharing program that allowed its users to download and upload (predominantly music) files using software on their computers.
Napster’s initial failure can be attributed to its protracted legal struggle with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and individual music artists. There was a temporary suspension in 2001 because of the ongoing legal challenges.
Over the succeeding decades, the company’s ownership changed hands several times. Napster was purchased by Algorand and Hivemind in May 2022 with the intention of relaunching it as a web3 platform with its own token.
What is Napster?
Napster was a P2P file-sharing program that allowed users to share and download files from one another via a downloadable client.
In 1999, when Napster was conceived, it was difficult to track down MP3s because of broken linkages.
Napster users were able to avoid copyright violations by storing their music locally on their computers rather than on the service’s servers.
Next, the user’s computer would communicate with Napster’s “central index server,” where the latter could learn about the user’s media collection. In response, Napster would add those files to its “kind of search engine” index, making them accessible to users. It would be equivalent to downloading a file from another user’s computer.
Napster could be used by anyone with a desktop computer and an active internet connection. The MP3 file could then be played on any device capable of playing audio.
Napster users could share more than just music; they could also share documents like spreadsheets and presentations.
Like Spotify, Napster has evolved into a dedicated audio streaming platform where users may listen to and download music. The next chapter will explain how that happened.
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Origin
Napster’s co-creators are Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. At first, Fanning envisioned Napster as a decentralized P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing network. Between June 1999 and July 2001, the service was available. Its technology made it simple for users to transfer MP3s to other members. [5] Despite the court ruling that put an end to the original Napster service, the brand lives on thanks to the bankruptcy sale of the company’s assets.
History
Although other file-sharing applications such as Hotline, IRC, and USENET existed before Napster, Napster was an industry pioneer because it focused solely on MP3 audio files.
At first, Napster was frequented by those who wanted to listen to rare or previously unreleased music or to live event bootlegs. Downloads of every piece of music were totally gratis. Users made their own compilation albums by downloading music onto CDs or other recordable media without having to pay any royalties to the original artists, songwriters, or record labels.
Network congestion was a result of Napster’s popularity. Some studies have shown that MP3 downloads and file transfers account for as much as 80% of all network traffic on college campuses, prompting the institution’s IT department to limit access to the file-sharing service Napster.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) also accused Napster of piracy and filed various injunctions and lawsuits against the service. The landmark lawsuit that ultimately determined Napster’s fate was A&M Records, Inc. vs. Napster, Inc. As a result, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded the plaintiff’s copyrights were infringed by Napster. Napster was fined $26 million for failing to pay copyright holders and litigants.
A $10 million advance against licensing royalties was also paid in February 2001. Upon receiving a preliminary injunction in March 2001 mandating the removal of all plaintiff sound recordings, Napster immediately suspended its operation. Napster’s free service became a premium subscription to pay off outstanding fees. For $121 million, electronics giant Best Buy bought music sharing service Napster in 2008.
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Getting Music Off the Internet
Difficult and unreliable, pre-Napster file sharing was called “an enormous pain in the ass” in the movie Downloaded. Having, as Winter puts it, “buddies willing to spend 14 hours attempting to get a Butthole Surfers song from the internet. Also, it wouldn’t work. And give it another shot they would. Plus, that wouldn’t work.”
In around 1998, a user going by the handle “Napster” said in an online chatroom that he was developing software to address the issue. Using this method, people could listen to music stored on one other’s hard drives in MP3 format. (The MP3, developed in the mid-1990s, quickly became the standard for digital audio in the nascent internet age and has mostly retained that position ever since.)
Snide remarks were made in the online chat. Share? What possible motivation might there be for doing that? Even so, the notion appealed to Sean Parker, a burgeoning entrepreneur. He was lanky for his age (18), had red hair that was always gelled, and looked down whenever he spoke.
It was at this point that Parker proposed they work together and that he formally introduced himself to “Napster,” as Shawn Fanning. Fanning was a year younger, a glum Massachusetts teen who’d shaved his head to get rid of the curls that gave him the nickname “nappy” because of the way they looked.
Naturally, the name Napster spread to the program Fanning was developing at the time. By the spring of 1999, Fanning had completed his work after spending months developing it on a borrowed computer in his uncle’s Massachusetts workplace and sleeping in a utility closet nearby.
Meanwhile, Parker had cajoled $50,000 from investors, and the couple packed up and headed for California. The Napster team consisted entirely of online chatroom buddies, who were hired shortly before the service’s May 1999 debut. By October, 4 million copies of the album had been sold. More than 20 million people were part of the Napster group by March of 2000 when I had already taken a small portion of those 4 million.
Quick! Get to a computer!
One weekend in February of 2001 had an eerie similarity to the latter days of ancient Rome. A judge in a US court had sided with the RIAA in a breach-of-copyright action, and Napster had been forced to begin charging for its services or shut down.
vividly recall the sense of urgency I had as the free music promotion counted down its final 48 hours, and I found myself trying to recall songs I was at least mildly interested in (Pure Shores, Bound 4 Da Reload), but had not yet downloaded (Wild Wild West, Mi Chico Latino). Was there any chance that something like it will arise again?
Currently, I have far more songs stored as discrete files on my hard disc than I do on CDs. To put it bluntly, I had not been using the service as shrewdly as, say, Winter, who had used it to compile an encyclopedic music library. In that crazy month of February, when he was in his mid-30s, he recalled firing up various computers in an effort to glean any last Coltrane rarities he was missing.
As a result of my approach constantly being more of a hazy supermarket sweep, I have amassed an interesting collection of random items that don’t seem to have any real place in the world. Although I was of an age when I should have had a profound experience listening to Blood on the Tracks, I only searched out one Dylan song—The Man in Me—after hearing it used effectively in a movie.
Sometimes I’d get a version of Creep by the Cure when I ordered Radiohead, and I remember thinking, “Hey, this Robert Smith sounds OK,” but generally my exposure to new music was limited. Since work might be downloaded at any time, no connection was ever made. As a nomad, I had no money to put down.
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Selfishly, I’m Glad Napster Faded
when it finally happened. The once-smooth experience of downloading music was inevitably marred by the subsequent rise of imitation software. I had already moved away for college and been acquainted with a local record store by the time Napster shut down its services. The employees there were very effective at persuading naive customers like me that the new Belle & Sebastian album was worth the money.
A few years later, I realized just how ubiquitous Napster was among a certain subset of the millennial population. I burned a CD with songs I had purchased legally and some older ones I had downloaded from Napster and listened to them on the long drive across California.
There were three of us from the United States in the car, and when Steppenwolf’s classic road-trip hymn, Magic Carpet Ride, came on, we all sang along, even when a mechanical blip interrupted the chorus. Incredulity all around. We all got to know Steppenwolf, blip and all, years earlier when we downloaded the same faulty MP3 from computers thousands of miles apart.
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