When the internet was first devised, no one knew of its capabilities. It was like going from black and white to colour TV. Our lives would never be the same again after it was unleashed on the public.
One of the first industries to be caught out by the internet was music. When the internet made songs easier for people to get hold of, it scared them. And they wanted vengeance. This week The Beat Marches On to 11th June 2001 when the website Napster closed down.
Before Napster, it was a pain for people to download any song off the internet. It would take up most of your day for the process to complete and then it was only 50/50 whether the track would work. Even if it did the quality of the song was never the same quality as you would hear it on a CD. Unless of course, you would burn it to your computer from a CD.
One of the disgruntled downloaders at this time happened to be a roommate of Shawn Fanning at Northeastern College. The annoyance of the roommate gave him an idea. What if there was a better way to download music to your computer?
Right away Shawn started writing code to try and make downloading music easier. He thought of a way. If someone signed up for a service, the hard drive of the signee would be available to other people who have also signed up to the website, and vice versa. The new signee would be able to look at everyone else’s hard drive to see what music they had available. The process is called peer-to-peer sharing or P2P.
Fanning then put the idea in a coding chat room to see the thoughts of his peers. Most of the room laughed in his face but one person noticed and thought it was a great idea. When the product eventually goes live then millions of people will agree.
While Fanning was developing the software, the other guy who thought it was a good idea, Sean Rider, had jumped on board with the product and was pitching it to investors. The first time the pair met was minutes before the first investing pitch. The pair hit it off in person and raised around $50 million. This helped them get the servers they needed to connect each peer to another.
In May 1999 the Beta was launched. It was just to make sure all the bugs and the kinks were ironed out. At this time, it was all just ones and zeros, and no one was sure it could actually work. Luckily it did and by the time of the app’s official release in June 1999, it had 20,000 users all by word of mouth.
The way it was used was simple compared to previous websites. You sign up for it for free. No strings attached. You enter a username and password as you would for your Amazon or Netflix account and away you go. The beauty of Napster was that any of the songs downloaded was instant. In the time you could record one artist’s album from CD to tape, you could have their whole back catalogue. You could search by Artist, genre, song or album and it would give you every version that included the words that were typed. There was a social aspect to it all as well. Users could chat with each other about their favourite music and live recordings. It created bonds between users over the music.
By the end of 1999, it was estimated that 150,000 users had signed up for the service with a song catalogue of four million. The start-up was becoming the hottest thing in Silicon Valley. It was soon starting to get attention from the musical bigwigs.
Before the turn of the millennium the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), a representation of the record labels in America decided to deal with the pesky troublemakers like Napster and was starting to find out what all the hubbub was about with this new application. The head of the RIAA gathered a few record executives for a meeting on how they were going to stop the program. They weren’t overly concerned until they saw how easy it was to get hold of the latest chart hits.
The RIAA started legal proceedings which would be the start of a long legal battle that would tarnish the legacy of many that were involved in the mess. For the next 18 months musicians, label owners and anyone who was involved in music was asked their opinion.
When Metallica heard an unfinished version of ‘I Disappear’, a song recorded for the Mission Impossible two soundtrack, on the radio, they were bemused. They haven’t even submitted it to the record company yet. It was not even mixed properly. The radio station got a version that was leaked onto the site.
When the band got wind of what Napster was doing they were as mad as hell. The band represented by drummer Lars Ulrich, one of the founding members of the band along with singer and guitarist James Hetfield, sued the site in a very high-profile way. When the RIAA first sued many hadn’t noticed the lawsuit but when Lars and Metallica sued, they made sure that the whole world and their wife knew, which didn’t help the band’s case.
The PR from the lawsuit boosted Napster memberships. By the end of the month around 80 million users were registered. Especially with college/university students. It became so popular that some campuses had to block the website because the servers couldn’t handle the amounts students that were downloading music.
The argument ended up in front of the US Congress. Ulrich was on the side of the RIAA, obviously, but the Napster side had some musicians on their side too. Alanis Morrisette and Don Henley argued for the start-up. Morrisette claimed ‘For the majority of artists this so-called piracy works in artist’s favour’ and provided research that it increased live ticket sales and merchandise purchases.
It wasn’t just in Congress that musicians were voicing their opinions on the Napster situation, as well as Metallica suing, Rap legend Dr. Dre sued the site. Chuck D of Public Enemy wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times about the advantages of it. Snoop Dogg threatened to take a baseball bat to the user’s computer. Ex-Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel loved the idea so much that he wanted to create his own version of the site. He did and it failed. Creed got involved, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Wyclef Jean. It truly divided the opinion down the middle.
After the Metallica lawsuit, the two settled outside of court. Part of the settlement was to delete all of Metallica’s catalogue and any members of the site who had downloaded any of the band’s songs to be banned. Whether it was one song or a whole album. The number of fans who had songs in their libraries was 335,000.
The band found every Napster member who illegally downloaded one of the band’s songs and printed out the list for the company to use. Lars, in a king of the Assholes move, hand-delivered the list to the company’s headquarters. And of course, the world’s media gathered to witness the PR stunt.
The move angered the fans of Metallica. The boost that Napster got from the PR was the opposite for the band. Many fans stopped listening to them, smashed their albums and created websites just to abuse the band. Especially spokesperson Lars. This was a band that fought the hard way to become one of the biggest in the world, playing in little warehouses in San Francisco in front of twenty people in the early 1980s to selling out stadiums in the 1990s and beyond.
It was equally, if not more successful for the Napster team. Especially Shawn Fanning. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in October 2000 and was treated, well like a rockstar. He presented an award during the MTV Video Awards wore a Metallica T-shirt while in the process, and guess who was in the audience. Mr Lars Ulrich and the cameras went straight onto him.
In the end, $26 Million had to be paid by Napster to the RIAA and affiliates who were effectively the songwriters and the copyright holders. The result ended Napster. Like a troubled musician, it was a candle that burned bright for not very long. The app lasted almost two years.
Pretty much any streaming service you have right now is linked one way or another to the Napster phenomenon. Whether it’s Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify or Audible. Essentially Napster walked so the others could run.
Over the next decade, the music industry lost Billions of dollars. From peaking in 1999 at $14.6 Billion to $6.3 Billion in 2009. That’s over half of the profits in that time. But it didn’t have to be that way, It could easily be solved if one of the record labels brought the company rather than suing them. Even if the labels clubbed together to buy the app and turn it into something profitable for them but no, they fought Napster because of the power they had over distribution. Anyone could create a record label but to get the song out to the shops you had to go through the major record labels which is how they made most of their money. What Napster, and the future streaming websites, did was give the independent labels or just unsigned artists the power to release material by passing the labels and releasing through the sites.
The overall illegal downloading of MP3 trends didn’t stop with Napster. If anything, the trend increased. As soon as they found how to copy the code copycat websites were springing up. Limewire, Kazaa, BearShare, Musicnet, and Morpheus. The main aspect is they haven’t got a main office. Napster having a base of operations is one of the downfalls of the site because they were easier to locate. The new ones kept themselves hidden in the background and were harder to track for the RIAA.
This made them angry and to lash out they went after the users of Napster. They tried to sue any users in the US who had used the website. They were no longer the protector of rights, they now wanted to suck you dry just because they can. They only announced 1,500 lawsuits who were mostly students and famously haven’t got any money. Amazingly one of the lawsuits was against a 12-year-old girl who had to pay $2000 in a settlement. Some were fought for over a decade, but the majority were settlements, out of court. They took out their embarrassment on the fans, which is never a good thing.
In the end, putting music on the internet, the way we have it now was always going to happen. It was never an if but a when. According to the RIAA in a retrospective documentary by Bloomberg on YouTube they were looking for a way to distribute music legally. Fanning just beat them to the punch.
The music industry is such a huge money cow that they couldn’t see what the internet could become. We use the Internet for everything now. Not just music, but gaming, dating, friendship, research, television, and the absurdity for the bigwigs at the big five record labels, even when Napster had broken through, to fight them rather than work with them is why they lost so much money from then to now. Their greed is why the fans went there in the first place, not releasing singles and making you buy a full album for one song, with them laughing all the way to the bank. The stranglehold of them was always going to break and the greed blinded them. Chris Blackwell of Island Records knew, looking back on it in the documentary film Downloaded, he said that ‘It wasn’t anything to do with music, It is to do with the labels not adjusting to the internet’.
The Beat Marches On is a music blog written by Jimmy Whitehead. Jimmy has been blogging for six years specialising in Sports (especially American Football). If you want to follow Jimmy on Twitter: @Jimmy_W1987
The Beat Marches On has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/The-Beat-Goes-On-Blog-107727714415791 and a Twitter page: @TheBeatGoesOnB1
The websites used for research were
11 Facts About Napster | Mental Floss
The history of music streaming (mixdownmag.com.au)
Napster: the day the music was set free | Music | The Guardian
Total rewind: 10 key moments in the life of the cassette | Cassette tape | The Guardian
The Podcasts Business Wars: Napster vs. The Record Labels, and Spectacular Failures were also used for research
If you want to request a story for The Beat Marches On blog, you can contact jwhiteheadjournalism@gmail.com. We cannot guarantee that the story will be published but will be considered