1969

Internet Developed.

1988

Leonardo Chiariglione establishes the ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Experts Group. MP3 is the audio compression format made for MPEG.

1989

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing.

1993

Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was founded by two California college student/musicians. It was an FTP site where people from all over the world could download music files via the Internet.

1995

Real Audio 1.0 is released, allowing users to listen to audio files.

1996

Liquid Audio is formed and is embraced by the world's five major labels because unlike the MP3 format, it inhibits pirating of music.

Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper develop Winamp, a popular program for playing digital audio on PCs.

1998

Michael Robertson founds MP3.com, which for a time becomes the world's most popular online music site.

Diamond Multimedia Systems released the world's first portable MP3 player. The Recording Industry Association of America filed to outlaw the release of the MP3 player but loses.

1999

Napster created by Shawn Fanning, a 19 year old Northeastern University student. His uncle, John Fanning, pushed to turn the program into a business, incurring the legal wrath of the recording industry.

Recording Industry Association of America sued Napster, seeking $100,000 per copyrighted song pirated.

2000

Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper released file-sharing program Gnutella. Unlike Napster, the program did not rely on a central server to distribute music and other files. AOL pulled the program, but not before it escaped onto the Internet. Many Gnutella clones soon sprouted.

Metallica filed copyright infringement suit against Napster, claiming the company was violating the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act. Later that same month rapper-producer Dr. Dre filed a $10 million suit against Napster.

Major recording labels filed a lawsuit against MP3Board, a website that linked to songs the industry terms "pirated music."

The Recording Industry Association of America filed a copyright suit against Scour, a Napster-like service.

2001

The number of home users of file-swapping applications other than Napster grew 492 percent from 1.2 million in March 2001 to 6.9 million in August 2001. Morpheus was the most popular with over 2 million unique users.