Napster was the beginning, but by no means the end of the digital revolution. It then tried to turn the service into a subscription model, but the lure of free music was too much. Music sales tumbled as result. What Napster did more than anything, Knopper says, was to correctly identify that the future of music was online, and not in racks of metal and plastic. That lengthy waiting period almost destroyed the business, until streaming came to the rescue years later. Napster, weighed down with legal bills, struggled to survive; in June it filed for bankruptcy and its assets were later liquidated.
The Napster name was eventually taken by music provider Rhapsody, who now trade internationally under the Napster name. But in its wake came YouTube, iTunes and Spotify, digital-only environments that changed the way we consumed music. Importantly, all of them — either through subscription, adverts or licensing — deliver money back to the music labels. Would the music industry have had to survive a less damaging decade if it had embraced Napster instead of seeing it as an enemy?
Maybe the lesson here is the record business always wins in the end. But they sure made it unnecessarily hard for themselves for a long time.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. University Park, Pa. But the switch to Ruckus has also generated a number of questions regarding how students can best preserve and continue to use tracks and playlists they've built via Napster, and other music services.
Penn State has recently compiled a list of tips on how to preserve former playlists and perform track conversions quickly and easily. E-mail them to yourself, so you'll always have them. Choose "Send Playlist Please note, the playlist won't play tracks, rather just serve as a list of what songs were included on it. Once you have the e-mailed copy of your list, you can use it to know which tracks to re-download using Ruckus. For users who would like to have a list of all of the tracks included in their Napster library, please follow these instructions:.
Once those tracks are highlighted, right click on them and choose "Send Track s " then fill out the form that pops-up, using a single e-mail address or multiple e-mail addresses , where you can keep the list for later reference. The service only existed as a peer-to-peer file sharing service from June to July , but it caught on like wildfire. The internet was far less commonly used in , but at its zenith, Napster still had about 70 million users globally by comparison, Spotify has about million today , after 13 years in operation.
Napster gave users access to more than 4 million songs ; at some universities, traffic from Napster accounted for about half the total bandwidth. Downloaded files from Napster sometimes brought computer viruses with them, but many, like myself, were willing to take on the risk. Though a few artists, like Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy , defended Napster for making music more accessible, most of the music industry hated it because its popularity meant they were losing money.
The 20th century music industry was predicated on the idea of selling physical recordings of music—records, tapes, or CDs live performances were a secondary source of income. Napster was a company with a popular software in search of a revenue model, one it would never get the chance to find.
Napster was eventually shut down in due to lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the US music industry.
A US court found Napster was facilitating the illegal transfer of copyrighted music, and was told that unless it was able to stop that activity on its site, it would have to shutdown. They are now used by a small, but profitable, music streaming service owned by the media company RealNetworks, but the product is unrelated to the original Napster.
But peer-to-peer music sharing did not just disappear. The global music industry would fight the softwares through the s.
From the abyss, Spotify appeared. Daniel Ek, the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, has said that Spotify, launched in , is a direct byproduct of his love for Napster, and his desire to create a similar experience for users.
He would avoid the trap that Napster fell into by getting music labels to agree to have their songs on his platform.
At least this is the story Ek tells. The authors of the book Spotify Teardown , an academic examination of rise of Spotify, say something very different happened.
The book, written by a group of Swedish media studies professors, historians, and programmers, contends that Spotify was simply an opportunistic application of a technology that Ek developed, rather than effort to save the music industry.
Ek, who had been the CEO of the piracy platform uTorrent, founded Spotify with his friend, another entrepreneur named Martin Lorentzon. Both—Ek at 23 and Lorentzon 37—were already millionaires from the sales of previous businesses. The name Spotify had no particular meaning, and was not associated with music. In , when Spotify first publicly tested its software, it allowed users to stream songs downloaded from The Pirate Bay, a service for unlicensed downloads.
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