Napster: The App That Broke the Music Industry and Refused to Die

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At its peak, one piece of software consumed 61 percent of external internet traffic on university campus networks. Napster launched in June 1999, created by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker and named after Fanning's high school nickname. File sharing already existed on IRC, Usenet, and Hotline, but those tools were clunky and technical. Napster did one thing, MP3s, behind a simple search bar, and suddenly every dorm room had a free record store stocked with hits, bootlegs, and out of print rarities. It also had a fatal flaw: a central server that indexed every shared song.

This episode treats Napster's story as a biography: birth, a short and explosive life, legal execution, and a long zombie afterlife. The RIAA sued within six months, Metallica and Dr. Dre followed, and a court ruled that a company able to monitor its network was obliged to police it. By early July 2001 the network was dark. The brand then passed from Roxio to Best Buy to Rhapsody, on to virtual reality and Web3 owners, and finally to a 2026 shutdown of its music service in favor of an artificial intelligence relaunch.

• After a demo of I Disappear leaked, Metallica sued in April 2000, identified 335,000 users, and delivered close to 60,000 printed pages of names to Napster's headquarters.
• Radiohead's Kid A leaked three weeks before its October 2000 release, and the circulation is widely credited with driving sales instead of killing them.
• Verified usage reached 26.4 million in February 2001, the same month Napster offered the labels a $1 billion settlement over five years and was turned down.
• A judge blocked the $85 million sale to Bertelsmann over the divided loyalties of Napster's CEO, a former Bertelsmann executive. Roxio then bought the brand at auction for $5.3 million.
• Shutting down the central index gave rise to decentralized successors like Gnutella and BitTorrent, which left no single server to sue.