Introduction
Between June 2000 and September 2001 I, like many other people around the world, became obsessed with the internet. Not in a geeky technophile way, although there was a good deal of geekiness in my obsession. There was a new (Or what I thought was new at the time) technology that was making it possible for me to find all those great old obscure songs I'd loved for as long as I could remember but were now deleted or not even ever released commercially.
This technology was MP3 and if you'd always wanted to find all those obscure TV theme tunes from your childhood and bootleg recordings there was only one place to go. It was called Napster. This is a brief history of the story of online music sharing so far...
The MP3 format (The name is derived from the MPEG, or Motion Pictures Experts Group format used for digital video encoding) was created in 1987 at the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, Germany. The institute's intention was to create a high quality digital encoding system for use in the recording and music industries. As John Alderman points out in his book Sonic Boom the music industry showed a distinct lack of interest in this new format. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was openly hostile to adopting MP3 in any way but, significantly, was not opposed to the technology itself. In a characteristically arrogant manner the RIAA believed that any major changes to the way music was produced and distributed would come from them, despite the interest in the new media revolution from other sectors of the entertainment industry.
To a large degree they were correct. While a few name musicians were using new technology to take their work in new directions, Peter Gabriel being a notable example, this was the late eighties. Few people had an internet connection, and if they did they were using it for email or business. The world wide web didn't exist yet and even the 'new media revolution' was beginning to look more like a minor uprising. There were people using the MP3 format to 'rip' music from CD's and store them on their computer hard drives. No doubt there were even a few with the technological know how to distribute these files, painfully slowly, over the internet but this was hardly a threat to the music industry. It had, after all, only relatively recently given the public Dire Straits on shiny new discs so what was to worry about? But in the ten years that would pass until the music industry would finally take notice of the changes that were taking place in the world around it several key advances happened in how the public used technology.
The first of these was the change in portable storage devices that computers used. Although floppy discs are still used today CD's rapidly replaced them as the format of choice. They're more versatile, stronger and hold up to 200 times more information. With the advent of writable CD's it must have seemed like the public was using the music industry�s own technology against it.
The advent of the world wide web was another key element in the eventual rise of the MP3 format. When people talk about the internet changing the world for so many it is usually the web they are referring to. Before its creation the internet was practically the sole haunt of academics or the terminally geeky, not the kind of people traditionally known for their music piracy tendencies. The world wide web brought the internet into peoples homes. It was pretty, it was new and, best of all, lots of it was free.
By the mid-90's sharing of music via MP3 files was commonplace on the internet. Swapping a song or two with a friend or somebody you'd met in a chatroom via email was easy if you knew how, although extremely slow. The music industry was aware of this but saw it for what it was, the online equivalent to taping a CD for a friend. Something to be frowned upon certainly but not a major new threat.
In early 1999 an 18 year old US college drop out would change all that.
Shawn Fanning was living in his uncle�s apartment when he came up with the idea of a program which would allow internet users to swap music with each other, no matter where they were in the world. Fanning wasn't much of a programmer so he kept it simple, basing his program on a search engine. Users would simply type in a song name or an artist and the information would be sent to a server, the server would do a search of every other user who was online and if they had the music it would be downloaded directly from their hard drive onto your computer. It was one of those ideas that was so simple it�s amazing nobody had thought of it before and by January 1999 Fanning had completed it. He called it after his high school nickname, the Napster.
By the end of 1999 Napster had 25 million users downloading several million music files a day. Napster Inc. founded by Fanning and his uncle was being valued at millions of dollars even though it has never made a profit and Fanning himself became one of the webs new entrepreneur poster boys. The phenomenal success of Napster took everyone by suprise, not least it's creator, but on Dec 7th the RIAA charged Napster Inc with copyright infringement with a trial set for May of the following year. The very success of Fanning's program simply drew attention to the illegal use it was being, almost exclusively, put to. Fanning and Napster Inc.'s executives would claim that 'file swapping' was not actually illegal. US copyright law says that copies of intellectual property made between private citizens on a non-profit basis do not constitute theft within 'reasonable parameters'. These parameters themselves became contentious when Napster's lawyers argued in court that there was nothing illegal about downloading a song from another private individual on a one-to-one basis. The RIAA countered that US law did not take into account the tens of millions of people who would have access to one solitary file available for download via Napster.
On July 13th 2000 Napster was ordered to close down its server, thus halting any file sharing between users, as a preliminary measure while the case was heard. Thirteen days later this was overturned and Napster was allowed to continue while it prepared an appeal. The irony was that all the publicity the case engendered brought even more people, curious about this MP3 thing, to Napster. Added to this was the fear of existing users that the service would soon be shut down for good the upshot being that many people adopted a 'get it while you can' attitude and downloaded as much music as possible while they still could.
The debate about the legal and moral implications of MP3 continued while the court case was prepared. Was this stealing by any other name? Or a new way of music distribution? If so, how were the artists going to be paid? Some argued that the music industry, still relatively young at around 100 years old, had been a passing fad (passing fads being something the industry knew well) whose days were numbered. Metallica, one of the most successful, and rich, bands in the world arrived at Napster HQ with a stack of boxes containing the names of 300,000 users who had traded their songs via the program. They demanded these people be barred from the service. Napster complied but it did considerable damage to the bands image. Many of those barred were Metallica fans trading unofficial bootlegs, not legitimate recordings, and the band were accused of screwing over their own fanbase.
Conversely, the group The Offspring claimed to have enjoyed enormous commercial success exactly because many new fans had come to them through first hearing their work via Napster. The band even undertook a tour sponsored by Napster Inc. Fanning himself appeared, to screams of audience recognition, on the years MTV Music Awards. Wearing a Metallica T-shirt he explained "It's not mine, a friend is sharing it with me".
By July 2001, with a userbase of around 60 million, the Napster story seemed to be over. The RIAA had won an injunction to close down the server until the company could ensure that no copyright material could be traded via the program. Napster agreed, but insisted it could only ensure '99% and some change' of copyright material would be filtered out. Anyone who was using the program around this time will remember the pain and frustration of going online and typing in an artists name to be met with a 'no files found' message, only to be followed by elation when it was realized that by mis-spelling the name slightly you would come up with hundreds of hits. Napster Inc. had been given a list, by the record companies, of all the artists to be filtered out but they had not taken into account the illiteracy of the users. Thus The Beatles became The Beetles and there was a new, popular beat combo on the scene by the name of Metalika.
In October the German media giant Bertelsmann (BMG) had formed an alliance with the ailing Napster with the intention of buying the company and forming a legal, pay version of the software. Many saw this as both the end of Napster, who were accused of selling out even though they had little choice given their unenviable legal position, and an unwise move on the part of Bertelsmann. Would anyone really pay to use a service they had previously used for nothing? Was Bertelsmann wise to plough $85 Million into a company that, despite its huge popularity, had not make a cent since it began? And anyway, by now there were some new kids on the block. Like so much technology, by the time Napster reached its peak in terms of popularity it was seriously outdated.
Nullsoft, the company responsible for the popular WinAmp music player had developed a program called Gnutella. Gnutella had a few differences from Napster. For one it wasn't a peer to peer (P2P), as Napster-alikes became known, system itself. It was more of a network, an infrastructure into which a P2P client could tap. This would absolve Nullsoft of any blame should they be accused of promoting piracy. Basically, to use Gnutella you would need software provided by somebody else.
There were two other major differences with the Gnutella network. The first was that, unlike Napster, there was no central server. Gnutella worked on the 6 degrees of separation theory (7 degree's actually!) in that all the users were connected directly to each other. When you went online your computer contacted 7 other Gnutella users, their computers did the same thing and so on. Napster was easy to disable because it only took one computer to be 'unplugged'. With Gnutella each user was, effectively, a server and Gnutella users quickly swelled to over 25 million.
The other main difference was the content being downloaded. Whereas Napster was exclusively a music file sharing program the Gnutella network could handle just about anything, providing you had a fast enough connection. Software, Simpsons episodes, porn and even the latest Hollywood movies (sometimes before they'd gone on release) were all easy available to anyone who had a Gnutella client. Nevertheless it was the music industry who shouted loudest.
Gnutella's only real disadvantage was the people behind it. Nullsoft was wholly owned by America OnLine (AOL), the worlds biggest internet service provider. AOL were beginning the talks which would eventually lead to a merger between themselves, TIME Inc. and Warner Communications. Time AOL Warner would go on to become the biggest entertainment provider in the world.
When AOL got wind of what its small subsidery company was up to it shut the project down. It was too late, however, as Gnutella had made its way, virus like, across the internet. And, due to its lack of a central server, it was unstoppable.
By March 2002, when it was again in court fighting copyright infringement claims, Napster was all but forgotten. It's users had moved on to other P2P systems such as Kazaa, AudioGalaxy and LimeWire. With Napster's userbase split none of these offered the range of music of their inspiration but what you could get was still free whereas Napster and Bertelsmann were still vainly planning a legal subscription service. For many MP3 was no longer the exciting, cutting edge technology of just the previous year. MP3 players, such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod were available in Dixons and faster internet connections meant that it was now just as easy to get the latest cinema blockbuster the way you'd downloaded the new Eminem single six months ago. The legal disputes might go on, but the public wasn't interested anymore. However, Gnutella meant that the industry may win the battle with Napster but it had surely lost the war.
In September 2002 the courts blocked the sale of Napster Inc. to Bertelsmann for $9 Million. This was the final nail in the coffin for the company. Shawn Fanning, still only 21, had quit the company the previous month and the rest of the staff were made redundant. AudioGalaxy, a similar P2P program to Napster was being sued by the RIAA and Aimster had closed down a few months before that. It must have seemed like a hollow victory for the RIAA however, knowing that the unstoppable Gnutella based systems such as Kazaa and Limewire enjoy around 2.5 million downloads of their software a week.
Realizing they needed to combat the threat of MP3 on a different front the music industry came up with a new plan. This involved encoding music on compact discs so that it was impossible to play them via a computer. This meant that it would not be possible to 'rip' the music and convert it to MP3. Ironically the first use of this technology was on a Bertelsmann release, a CD by Natalie Imbruglia. The disc provoked a storm of protest from buyers who found they could not play it via their computer drive and the CD was re-released in a new, non-protected version. Sony, who�d spent millions on their own copyright technology, were the next to try. They released a Celine Dion disc which, due to the way it was encoded, was not even permitted by law to carry the 'Compact Disc' logo. (CD's, by definition, have to play on computer hardware to qualify for the name.) Not only did the disc actually damage computer drives, especially iMacs, but the protection could be beaten by drawing around the disc
edge with a green marker pen. Sure enough Celine was an inexplicably popular download on P2P systems the week of the albums release.
No doubt the music industry will continue to attempt to develop ways to counter the internet distribution of its product. Just as certainly the more technologically savvy members of the online file-sharing community will find ways to scupper those plans, whether it involves green marker pens or something more sophisticated. The battle between the two sides will continue, as will the arguments around the various implications of getting your music, and increasingly all kinds of copyrighted material, for free. As for Shawn Fanning's creation, which might not have exactly started it all but was certainly the first to exploit the potential of a new medium, perhaps the message that visitors now find on its defunct website says it best.
"Napster was here".
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Richard Barbrook: How The Music Industry Blew It, Salon Magazine, New York, September 2002
John Alderman: Sonic Boom, Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music, Routledge, London, 2001
Scott Rosenberg: Revenge Of The File-Sharing Masses, Salon Magazine, New York, July 2001
Karl Taro Greenfeld: Meet The Napster-An Interview With Shawn Fanning, Time Magazine, New York, October 2000
Back To Main Page
Email Me!