Like the birth of any great music movement, Napster rebelled against the norm. It started as a tiny startup in Hull, Massachusetts in early 1999, and instantaneously caught the world’s attention. 18-year-old Shawn Fanning brought his brainchild to the mainstream – so-called peer-to-peer technology — that gave anyone with a computer the ability to send files over a network.
Photo by Andrew Caballero Reynolds, Getty Images / Spencer Platt, Newsmakers, Getty Images / Source: Washington Post / Photo by Ramin Talaie, Corbis, Getty Images
What it also did was throw the Internet into a frenzy, which only proves just how powerful the web really is, in both creating and destroying things. Napster isn’t just a story of two teenagers who changed the music industry and Internet as we know it. It’s also a story of the birth of a movement and the death of the record industry. This is the story of how it all went down.