Napster

~ a brief life ~

Shawn Fanning was nineteen when he wrote Napster in his Northeastern University dorm. The first beta was released in June 1999. Within eighteen months, the program was the fastest-growing application in computing history, peaking at around 80 million users in February 2001; by July 2001 a court order had forced Napster to filter its index. By July 2002 the original Napster company was bankrupt. Three years and one month, dorm room to landfill.

And yet, no software in the last twenty-five years has caused as much economic disruption as Napster did. The recording industry's revenue peaked in 1999 at $14.6 billion and would not return to that level until 2021, twenty-two years later, after streaming finally rebuilt what file-sharing burned down. Napster did not survive its lawsuits; its ideas conquered the music industry anyway.

~ vital stats ~

~ what it was, technically ~

Napster's design was ingenious for the bandwidth of the time. It was not a true peer-to-peer system. The index was centralised, hosted on Napster's servers. You searched against their database, but the actual file transfer was direct, computer-to-computer. The architectural choice that made Napster fast was also the architectural choice that made it killable: shut down the central index, and the network falls apart.

This lesson would not be lost on Napster's successors. Kazaa, Gnutella, and eventually BitTorrent all moved to fully decentralised designs precisely because they had watched Napster die.

~ how it changed everything ~

Napster's three years live coincided exactly with the music industry's first contact with the internet. Several things happened simultaneously:

The album died: Napster let you download individual songs, and people did not download albums; they downloaded the song they wanted. The album as the unit of music consumption was over within twenty-four months. iTunes' a la carte song sales (launched 2003) only formalised what Napster had already done. The mp3 won: Until 1999 the digital format wars were not settled. WMA, AAC, and a dozen others competed. Napster's library was overwhelmingly mp3. mp3 became the de facto standard not by technical merit but by piracy weight. Music as a feature, not a product: Once a generation grew up assuming music was free, the recording industry's revenue model never recovered. Streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube) restored some of the value but at a fraction of the per-user revenue. The artist who would have made $200,000 selling an album in 1998 makes $4,000 in streaming royalties for the same listenership now.

~ the slow goodbye ~

The legal case that killed Napster was A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. The plaintiffs were the major labels. The decision (February 2001, 9th Circuit) held that Napster was contributorily and vicariously liable for its users' infringement. The injunction required Napster to filter copyrighted material from its index, and napster's filtering was technically incomplete, partly by design, partly because filtering an index of 80 million users' libraries in 2001 was hard. Within months the courts had ordered the service shut.

The most painful part: the labels were offered, repeatedly, the chance to license their catalogues to Napster. The service was willing. The price was being negotiated, and the labels chose litigation over licensing. By the time they reversed and tried to license to the corpse of Napster (Bertelsmann offered $50 million, then more) it was too late.

The coda: Bertelsmann bought Napster's brand out of bankruptcy, which is why it became a paid streaming service. The brand passed through several owners and is now part of MelodyVR. The current Napster, technically alive, has no relationship to the original beyond name and logo.

~ the void ~

A library bigger than any record store. At its peak, Napster's collective library was estimated at over 80 million tracks; more than every commercial catalogue combined at the time. Streaming services have, twenty years later, finally caught up to that scale, but they had to build it. Napster's was emergent.

The democratic music education. Napster taught a generation about music that radio would not play. Genres that never had distribution, Brazilian psychedelia, Iranian pop, 70s Turkish rock. Got their first international audiences through Napster's casual sharing.

The chat rooms. Napster had a built-in chat function while you downloaded. People talked about the music. Strangers became friends through a shared download queue. There is, again, no modern equivalent.

~ epitaphs ~

"i discovered every band i still listen to today through napster between 1999 and 2001. nirvana, pixies, joy division, throwing muses, slowdive. my taste was made by other people's libraries.", k.k. 42

"i remember leaving the computer on overnight to download metallica's black album over a 56k modem. it took twelve hours. metallica then sued napster, which felt personal." - o.ç. 44