A Brief History of Filesharing: From Napster to Legal Music Downloads

The Birth and Ascent of the (in)famous Peer-to-peer Revolution

Back in the good ol' days when music was a commodity purveyed by those privileged members of the recording industry elite, CDs were expensive and cumbersome, but basically unavoidable. Lacking both the sentimentality of vinyl records and the affordability of cassette tapes, they were often packaged with a generous amount of "filler" songs to pad the one or two marketable singles, and seemed to have no distinct advantages, save one: each track was an exact, digital replica of the original. In the years before the advent of broadband connections and mammoth hard drives, this advantage went relatively unnoticed. But as online technology improved and it became easier to transfer large amounts of data via the Internet, enterprising individuals discovered that CDs, as a digital media form, were tailor-made for the wired world.

Suddenly that "revolution" the Beatles had sung of decades earlier seemed closer at hand than anyone had expected. It came with the explosion of peer-to-peer (or P2P) applications which allowed listeners, for the first time, to exercise their own control over what songs were and were not worth paying for. And it came not with a whimper, but a really loud bang.

Enter Napster, stage left. Cobbled together by a scruffy-haired high school dropout named Shawn Fanning in the summer of 1999, the open-source software was originally intended as a clandestine experiment among 30 or so of his friends, but word of mouth proved stronger than secrecy, and by the end of its first week Napster had been downloaded by as many as 15,000 users. Characterized by the now-legendary Alien With Headphones logo, the program allowed users to swap media files - specifically music tracks - via a centralized server.