More than 335,000 names. That was the length of the list Metallica handed to Napster in 2000, demanding that every one of those users be blocked, and Napster did it. By then the program was less than a year old.
A dropout’s file browser
Shawn Fanning, a dropout from Boston’s Northeastern University, launched Napster in June 1999 after a late-night talk with Sean Parker about how hard it was to find the music they wanted online, Kerrang! recounted. He named it after his own nickname. By Fanning’s own later account, it began as a way for friends to share files and chat, “to build communities around different types of music.”
Technically it was little more than a stripped-down file browser giving access to MP3 files on connected machines, and every user’s own files were open to download in return. When it went live that summer, millions of tracks were reachable almost overnight, and the user count was doubling every few weeks. At the time, most music was still bought on CD. The record business had dealt with VHS and cassettes before, but those were slow to copy. Napster offered near-instant distribution to millions over infrastructure that already existed.
The lawsuits
The Recording Industry Association of America sued for copyright infringement at the start of 2000. Its general counsel, Cary Sherman, said Napster was “about facilitating piracy, and trying to build a business on the backs of artists and copyright owners.” The manager Ron Stone went further: “It is the single most insidious website I’ve ever seen.”
Then Metallica filed its own suit on April 13, 2000, in the Northern District of California. Dr. Dre followed with a similar complaint a few weeks later. Metallica’s complaint named some of the universities whose networks had been used to access files, including Yale and the University of Southern California. Napster settled with Metallica and Dr. Dre in July 2001. Drummer Lars Ulrich told Billboard the fight had never been about sharing as such. “The problem we had with Napster was that they never asked us or other artists if we wanted to participate in their business,” he said.
Arguments about the commercial damage ran both ways. Some claimed the free sampling would lift sales, but a study using SoundScan data found that, while overall CD sales rose significantly, purchases bottomed out at stores near college campuses.
What came after
The courts shut the original service down, and CNET reported it closed in September 2001. Fanning began working on his next company, Snocap, the day after. Napster never earned a dime itself, as CNET put it, yet it upended a huge industry. The name was sold to a new company selling licensed music by subscription, with no peer-to-peer technology.
The legal fight kept going without it. In June 2005 the US Supreme Court decided unanimously that services like Grokster could be held liable if people used them to steal copyrighted works, and Grokster agreed to pay the record industry $50 million. By then Apple and others had built legal download businesses, but CNET found the old problem unsolved. Album sales were 30 percent below their level in the year Napster launched, and 10 times as many songs were downloaded from file-sharing services as were bought from paid ones such as iTunes.
Sources
- Metallica vs. Napster: The lawsuit that redefined how we listen to music (Kerrang!, by Sam Law)
- Putting the Napster genie back in the bottle (CNET)
