Free Music for Everyone (Until the Lawyers Showed Up)

Napster launched in June 1999 and died in July 2001, and in those two years it did more damage to the music industry's business model than any technology since the cassette tape. Shawn Fanning, a 19-year-old college dropout, built a peer-to-peer file sharing network that let anyone with an internet connection download any song ever recorded for free. By February 2001, it had 80 million registered users. The music industry responded the way industries always respond to existential threats: with lawyers. Metallica sued. Dr. Dre sued. The RIAA sued. A judge ordered Napster to stop facilitating copyright infringement, and the service was effectively dead by mid-2001. But the damage was done. Napster had taught an entire generation that music was free, and no amount of litigation could unteach that lesson. The industry spent the next decade suing individual downloaders — college kids, grandmothers, dead people — in a PR catastrophe that solved nothing. It took Apple and iTunes to offer a legal alternative, and then Spotify to finally build the model that stuck. Napster lost the battle and won the war. Every streaming service that exists today is a direct descendant of a teenager's dorm room project.