The Rise and Fall of Napster

Jedi Paramedic writes "Boston.com has an interesting story about the rise and fall of everyone's favorite file-swapping service. Also the subject of a new book by Joseph Menn, the story goes into great detail about the unfortunate-but-heroic Shawn Fanning and his reluctance to admit that his uncle, who in the end masterminded little more than the lining of his own pockets, had taken advantage of him. From getting screwed in the original 70/30 split with his uncle to his uncle's refusal to loosen his iron grip on the company even at the expense of its very being, the article (and the book) go a long way in chronicling the rise and fall of Napster, and crediting Shawn for not airing the family's dirty laundry. An interesting and well-written read."

Comments

Good technolgy, bad media

[Blaine Hilton]

Its too bad Napster had to do music sharing. The technology between P2P networks pionered by Napster was something though. This type of network along with open souce and GPL software, along with MD5 checksums could be a great combination.

Excuse my ignorance...

[dotgod]

Can anyone explane how Napster made money? AFAIR there were no ads on the site or in the client (save the cdnow link that was in later versions of napster). It obviously made some kind of money, however, because I remember hearing about how Shawn Fanning made a lot of money.

Re:Excuse my ignorance...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are excused.

What if the music industry had purchased napster and released their full catalogs for free but ripped at a low bit rate say 96kb and then offer a pay version for the same data but ripped at a 320kb rate. No one could have competed because they would of had the depth of inventory. Lost opportunities. They went the other way and crushed Napster and they totally lost it by not having something to pick up the slack. Where did they think that the Napster users were going to turn when an option (Kazaa, Bearshare, et al) arrived. Lost opportunities.

Re:Who is everyone?

[NanoGator]

"men. I would be WAY more than willing to shell out $20 a month to have AG running the way it used to. The fact that it was "set and forget" was the best thing going for it. I never liked Napster either, but AG did it right. Too bad the record companies are too stupid to see a VIABLE SOURCE OF INCOME when they see one. Dipshits. "

For $10 a month you could use Listen.com. As long as ya pay that, you have access to any song of their library. plus playlists etc. It's like a server-side MP3 locker, only they're all there. Click a song and you're listening to it within moments instead of having to wait for it to download. (then it caches so it's not like you go through that every time...)

Not a bad deal. It's not quite perfect in that you don't get to keep the compressed version and it's Windows only. Oh well, it's not for everybody. Still, $10 is less than one CD per month.

I'm thinking about writing up a review of it for Slashdot, but I'm concerned about whether there'd be any interest in it.

Re:sure...

[yellowstone]

[file sharing] was there before napster, especially on IRC, napster just brought it to the masses with a pretty interface.

Don't minimize the importance of mass popularity. Having the ability to do something (like share files across the internet) is one thing. Having it become popular across a large population, to the point it changes the way people think about intellectual property is quite different, and far more powerful.