Napster Let Anyone Download Any Song for Free. Metallica Personally Ended That.
For about two years, every song ever recorded was free, instant, and one search bar away. Napster launched on June 1, 1999, built by an 18-year-old college freshman who thought sharing MP3s should be as easy as saving a file, and by early 2000 it had roughly 80 million users doing exactly that. The music industry did not find this charming. It took a federal appeals court and a very angry drummer to shut it off.
An 18-Year-Old Solved Piracy's UX Problem
Shawn Fanning built Napster with Sean Parker while he was supposed to be attending Northeastern University, and the pitch was almost insultingly simple: a searchable index of everyone else's MP3 folder, connected peer-to-peer, no server storing the actual files. It wasn't the first way to pirate music, but it was the first way that didn't require knowing what an FTP server was. Usage went from a dorm-room project to tens of millions of people in under a year, which is roughly the speed at which a business model becomes a legal liability.
The Labels Sued. So Did Metallica, Personally.
The major labels' case, A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., reached the Ninth Circuit, which ruled on February 12, 2001 that Napster was liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, upholding an injunction from the year before. But the more memorable plaintiff was Metallica, whose drummer Lars Ulrich filed a separate suit in March 2000 seeking upward of $10 million and personally delivered a list of roughly 335,000 Napster usernames the band wanted banned for trading their songs. Napster banned them. Ulrich's stated grievance was almost quaint by internet standards: nobody had asked the band's permission before turning their catalog into a public utility.
Free, Then Gone, Then a Subscription
Unable to comply with a court-ordered filtering system fast enough to keep operating, Napster shut its network down in July 2001 and filed for bankruptcy the following year. Metallica and producer Dr. Dre settled with the company that same July, on the condition that Napster keep blocking unlicensed tracks — with an understanding that some of their music might return once Napster became a paying, licensed service. The free version lasted about two years. The idea it proved — that people would rather stream music than own it — outlived the company by roughly two decades and now pays for itself, monthly, forever.
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