Ten years ago this month, an undergraduate in Boston created a program that, one could argue, reshaped not just the music industry, but the way people consume media in the digital age as a whole: Napster, which got its start in Shawn Fanning’s Northeastern University dorm room and brought the idea of the “celestial jukebox” into Internet-connected homes across the country. The years since have seen increased download speeds, flurries of lawsuits, plummeting music-industry profits, and more sophisticated ways to share music with others quickly–so much that it’s sort of hard to remember, and even appreciate, the sometimes-laborious process of finding a song. Take a trip back to that more innocent era with the San Francisco Chronicle, which yesterday looked over the company’s meteoric ascent, and how the promise of a lawsuit eventually led to its grinding into bankruptcy and bastardization:
Fanning was a student at Northeastern University in Boston when he had the idea for a computer program that would make sharing MP3s easier by allowing users to see a directory of songs stored on other members’ computers. He called it Napster, stemming from a nickname he once received for his nappy haircut. After months writing the program, he released it to a group of about 150 friends and Internet Relay Chat acquaintances.
Napster’s fame spread by word of mouth, and it soon had 10,000 to 15,000 users. But once the program was featured on Cnet’s Download.com site, the number of users soared into the millions.
But the world’s biggest record companies viewed Napster as a copyright “infringement machine” that allowed Internet users to steal songs from artists without paying. In December 1999, members of the Recording Industry Association of America filed a federal lawsuit to stop Napster Inc., by then a startup firm located in San Mateo and later in Redwood City.
At its peak, more than 60 million people worldwide used Napster. In one free-music frenzy, users downloaded 2.79 billion songs in February 2001, just before a series of rulings by U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel and a federal appellate court in San Francisco that the program did violate copyright laws and had to be shut down.
The company filed for bankruptcy in 2002. The name and logo were bought out of bankruptcy by the online music subscription service that now is a subsidiary of consumer electronics retailer Best Buy Co. Inc.
To stoke your memories even more, here’s a screen shot of the old days (well, the Windows version anyway):
So now that the retro-ness is out of the way: What was the first song you got from the service, and when did you start using it? I got to it kind of late, if memory serves me correctly–not until my . And the first song I snagged was “Girl You Turn Me On” by the beloved-by-me hard-rock outfit L.A. Guns, who had just recruited former Love/Hate yelper Jizzy Pearl into their fold who were self-releasing their albums. Which meant that the album containing said track, Shrinking Violet, was too “obscure” for your garden-variety mall stores, and not cool enough for the indie emporia that I also haunted back in that day. In retrospect, it’s kind of a perfect straw-man example as far as the “the Internet is helping people get what they want, man!” argument goes, although I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t snag “… Baby One More Time” while I was out in the file-sharing wilds, too.
Assessing Napster - 10 Years Later [SFGate]
[Pic via evolt]
LOLzing at “Smooth”. You will not escape the juggernaut that is Santana & Rob Thomas!!!!!
I started using it around July of 1999, some guy I worked with told me about it because he wanted me to check out some Method Man song. The first thing I downloaded was Alkaline Trio’s Goddamnit…don’t know which song specifically was first. I miss those days.
Someone told me there were live versions of Dream Theater songs. I was in. Then I quit, because I’m lame and do things like obey the law.
I grabbed a few live Dweezil Zappa tracks, but found it near impossible to find anything worthwhile beyond that without an inordinate amount of effort (and downloading lots of improperly named tracks that ended up not being what they claimed).
I don’t remember what the first song I ever downloaded, it was probably some late 90’s alt-rock track I saw on MTV when I was still in high school. Or maybe it was Metallica.
@revmatty: ahhh, but those snags generally evened out- especially the lack of worthwhile music. I think the first thing I found was a song by the pie tasters, I can’t remember which- but 99 was my first year of college, and between napster and the online version of the all music guide, my whole world changed.
Napster was a thing of beauty for a while. It was all there- right there!
I don’t think I was ever a Napster user (although I can’t account for the time betwen using Lycos’ search engine/FTP sites and Kazaa). I remember being in college and downloading every mp3 I could find, whether they were songs I thought of randomly or novelty songs from commercials. That was long before I had my first iPod, so I don’t know why I felt I needed so much music on my harddrive, but I had somewhere just south of 1000 mp3s at any given time during the P2P days.
As I recall, I got into it pretty early on. Summer 1999 I think, probably July. The first song I downloaded was Nirvana’s “Sappy.” I then proceeded to download just about every Nirvana b-side and outtake known at the time. Good times.
Not completely sure, but I think that “Paparazzi” by Xzibit was a song I enjoyed immensely at that time.
Foo Fighters’ cover of “Down in the Park” and Will Smith songs (”Crusin’” and some other garbage) were in heavy rotation on WinAmp.
God, I have no idea. I know we (my roommate and I) used it to find a lot of early Aphex Twin, like the Powerpill - Pacman stuff, and a mashup of “Born Slippy” vs “Is There Anybody Out There” with the “Brown Acid” dialogue from Woodstock mixed in. I kinda doubt that was actually Aphex, though.
I actually KNOW this one! OOH! OOH! Pick me teacher! PICK ME!
It was “I Saved The World Today” by the Eurythmics.
It was Christmas 1999, and I had just bought myself my first desktop, with Windows ME. I also got cable internet for the first time. My first act Christmas morning (once i got the computer set up) was to download napster, which I had enviously watched all my friends use on their computers in college for the last couple of years.
I know this wasn’t the first song I downloaded, because for the first couple of weeks I was on Napster I looked for it obsessively but only found another user with it when I’d been online (on dialup, still!) for a while:
It was the long (basically, 12″) version of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”, the one with the rare extra verse.
I know, lame, but I’m a Gabriel fan, and in 14 years of CD-buying to that point I’d found it remarkably difficult to find this version. So much so that I began to suspect I’d dreamed up the whole, “I want to stand and stare again…” verse, which isn’t on So or the common domestic single or heard on the radio, ever. I’d been searching record-store bins for years for it. Between 1986 and 2000, I don’t think I’d heard it at all; that verse was like a distant teenage memory to me.
It impressed me that tracking it down on Napster “only” took me a couple of weeks — which in this age of torrenting and Rapidshare I wouldn’t stand for, but in 2000 was a revelation.
Such a great question. I can’t remember my first Napster experience. However, I do recall those being my Q Magazine reading days. Any reference to a band I hadn’t heard of had me querying them in Napster. Found some cool stuff that way and dived headlong into Brit pop for a while.
I do remember how incredible Napster seemed - it seemed like I could pretty much type in anything and find it. And, contrary to the claim that “illegal downloading” hurts artists, my spending increased and remains as such. I’ve been exposed to many great artists whom I would have missed, otherwise.
While “first” is a hard one, the Dismemberment Plan, Super Furry Animals and Built to Spill were all very early. Before Napster, though, there was the venerable Scour, from which I downloaded “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Dr. Worm”, which were my true entry point into music thievery. I still bought a lot of records until 2005 though!
Really not sure but probably some rare Cure track. I also remember being very happy to find a near-FLAC level mp3 of Burt Ward’s atrocious version of “Orange Colored Sky,” produced with malice aforethought by Frank Zappa. (I’m not kidding about this.)
Something off Rage Against the Machine’s “The Battle of Los Angeles.” Likely “Guerilla Radio,” but maybe “Testify.”
I recall “Medicine” by Orbit and a nearly eight minute version of Daft Punk’s “One More Time”.
I’m 97% sure it was “Sheep Go to Heaven” by Cake.
Ha. Probably something by Gay Dad, maybe their little-heard second album. I also remember spending a lot of time looking for covers. I got an entire CD’s worth of versions of “Paint it Black” (U2, REM, Dream Theater, etc. etc.). Also lots of mis-labeled songs (they say it’s Toad the Wet Sprocket, but it’s really Wakeland, etc. etc.)