Napster: the Day the Music Was Set Free

theodp writes "Before iTunes, Netflix, MySpace, Facebook, and the Kindle, 17-year-old Shawn Fanning and 18-year-old Sean Parker gave the world Napster. And it was very good. The Observer's Tom Lamont reports on VH1's soon-to-premiere Downloaded, a documentary that tells the story of the rise and fall of the file-sharing software that started the digital music revolution, and shares remembrances of how Napster rocked his world. 'I was 17,' writes Lamont, 'and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame (OMC's How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. I installed the software, searched Napster's vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive.' Sound familiar?"

Comments

Very good indeed

[gunnarbeutner]

Clearly proofreading very wasn't very good.

Screw you, Metallica!

[Anonymous Coward]

nc

Re:Napster on dial-up

[Tarlus]

Yeah, I had a sizeable collection of half-songs there for a while...

Re:Not exactly the first

[guttentag]

Dude, everyone knows Fanning stole Napster from Seth Green while he was napping...