Jordan Mendelson

Napster was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution.

Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999.

Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format.

As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement.

However, in 2000, Black Hole Media wrote a Macintosh client called Macster.

Macster was later bought by Napster and designated the official Mac Napster client ("Napster for the Mac"), at which point the Macster name was discontinued.

Even before the acquisition of Macster, the Macintosh community had a variety of independently developed Napster clients.

The most notable was the open source client called MacStar, released by Squirrel Software in early 2000, and Rapster, released by Overcaster Family in Brazil.

The release of MacStar's source code paved the way for third-party Napster clients across all computing platforms, giving users advertisement-free music distribution options.

Heavy metal band Metallica discovered a demo of their song "I Disappear" had been circulating across the network before it was released.

This led to it being played on several radio stations across the United States, which alerted Metallica to the fact that their entire back catalogue of studio material was also available.

On April 13, 2000, they filed a lawsuit against Napster.

A month later, rapper and producer Dr. Dre, who shared a litigator and legal firm with Metallica, filed a similar lawsuit after Napster refused his written request to remove his works from its service.

Separately, Metallica and Dr. Dre later delivered to Napster thousands of usernames of people who they believed were pirating their songs.

In 2000, Madonna's single "Music" was leaked out onto the web and Napster prior to its commercial release, causing widespread media coverage.

In 2000, the American musical recording company A&M Records along with several other recording companies, through the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), sued Napster (A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.) on grounds of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Napster was faced with the following allegations from the music industry:

Napster lost the case in the District Court but then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Although it was clear that Napster could have commercially significant non-infringing uses, the Ninth Circuit upheld the District Court's decision.

Immediately after, the District Court commanded Napster to keep track of the activities of its network and to restrict access to infringing material when informed of that material's location.

Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.

The P2P model employed by Napster involved a centralized database that indexed a complete list of all songs being shared from connected clients.

While effective, the service could not function without the central database, which was hosted by Napster and eventually forced to shutdown.

Following Napster's demise, alternative decentralized methods of P2P file-sharing emerged, including Gnutella, Freenet, FastTrack, and BitTorrent.

Napster's assets were eventually acquired by Roxio, and it re-emerged as an online music store commonly known as Napster 2.0.

In March 2001, Napster settled both suits, after being shut down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a separate lawsuit from several major record labels (see below).

Verified Napster use peaked with 26.4 million users worldwide in February 2001.

Napster wasn't able to comply and thus had to close down its service in July 2001.

Best Buy later purchased the service and merged it with its Rhapsody streaming service on December 1, 2011.

In 2016, the original branding was restored when Rhapsody was renamed Napster.

In 2022, the Napster streaming service was acquired by two Web3 companies, Hivemind and Algorand.

Napster was founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker.

Name inspired by Shawn's high school nickname "Nappy" for his signature Afro.

Although there were already networks that facilitated the distribution of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and Usenet, Napster specialized in MP3 files of music and a user-friendly interface.

At its peak, the Napster service had about 80 million registered users.

Napster made it relatively easy for music enthusiasts to download copies of songs that were otherwise difficult to obtain, such as older songs, unreleased recordings, studio recordings, and songs from concert bootleg recordings.

Napster paved the way for streaming media services and transformed music into a public good for a brief time.

High-speed networks in college dormitories became overloaded, with as much as 61% of external network traffic consisting of MP3 file transfers.

Many colleges blocked its use for this reason, even before concerns about liability for facilitating copyright violations on campus.

The service and software program began as Windows-only.