What it was. What replaced it.
Search box → 12,847 strangers' hard drives
- FOUNDERS
- Shawn Fanning · Sean Parker
- PEAK
- ~80M registered (2001)
- ANTHEM
- Metallica — "One" (the song that started the lawsuit)
Search box → one licensed catalog
Built in a Boston dorm room by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, Napster was the first piece of software to put the entire recorded history of popular music inside a single search box. For roughly two years, the world's record stores were a 56k connection away.
It was sued into oblivion by 2001, but the architectural and cultural shockwave reshaped everything that came after — iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, the very idea of streaming. Napster lost the lawsuit and won the future.
Defined peer-to-peer file sharing for an entire generation and forced the music industry into the digital era.
- ↗ Wikipedia: Napster
- ↗ A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.
- ↗ Wired: The Day Napster Died (2002)
- ↗ Internet Archive: Napster
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