Oversharing: How Napster Nearly Killed the Music Industry
Twenty years ago, the idea of free music was so compelling that up to 80m users downloaded Napster and broke the law. The aftershocks are still being felt today.
By Eamonn Forde
June 1999, and the music industry is rolling in cash. Bloated by the vast profits of the CD business, which reached a high of £30.6bn that year, the future looks bright for the suits at the top. Sadly for them, in a dorm at Boston’s Northeastern university, a precocious coder is about to blow it all apart.
Napster, the brainchild of Shawn Fanning, linked computers and allowed users to access each other’s mp3 audio files. Fanning met an ambitious teen, Sean Parker, on the webchat channel w00w00, and together they triggered a series of events that brought the record business to its knees by making music discovery instant — but payment optional. It was not the first service of its kind, but it was the one that went viral. Four months after its June 1999 launch, 150,000 people had signed up. By February 2001, it peaked at a verified 26.4m users, with some estimates topping 80 million.
It wasn’t just some student project gone rogue. From the earliest days, it was built as a business. Shawn…
