Next up in our social platform retrospective: Napster! TikTok may currently be the place where up-and-coming musicians are finding their audience and where labels like Universal have banned their artists from sharing music. But rewind a couple decades and there was one indisputable home of music on the internet: Napster. Only one problem: it was probably all illegal.

~~~

Ah, to be 19 again. It's a time of possibilities, insecurities, of worrying about what adulthood is really going to be like. On the other hand, if you're Shawn Fanning or Sean Parker, your worries at 19 were a little bigger. As in, "multimillion-dollar legal battles with the entire music industry" bigger. And all because of a piece of software that let you listen to and download music from all across the internet...without paying the artists. What could go wrong?

Ray teaches Rob about how a crazy idea on an Internet chat forum grew into the software start-up Napster; how Ray can trace his love of Monty Python to the early days of digital music downloads; how the music industry was forced to reckon with the reality that physical media had become a relic of the past; why pissing off Lars Ulrich is a bad idea; and why Napster's brief and shining moment in the world of online music streaming was the beginning of a trend that completely changed the way the world listens to music.

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TEAM

Ray Hebel

Robert W. Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Gabe Crawford

Natalie DeSavia

ARTICLES

The Guardian

Time

Vanity FairEPISODE CLIPS

Napster Documentary 'Downloaded' | Part One

Monty Python Dead Parrot

Pop Corn

Metallica Lars Ulrich testifies to Senate Judiciary Committee July 11, 2000 - FULL OPENING STATEMENT

Dave Mustaine talking about Lars Ulrich & Napster (2021)

Lars Ulrich Reflects On "Metallica Vs Napster"

Court Orders Napster Shutdown

Napster Documentary: Culture of Free | Retro Report | The New York Times

Bad Boys (Theme From Cops)

ADDITIONAL MUSIC & SOUND EFFECTS

"Happy Bee"

• Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

• Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Additional Sound Effects from Final Cut Pro, iLife, and Logic Pro