When 18-year-old Shawn Fanning released his Napster file-sharing program on the Internet 10 years ago this month, little did he know he was unleashing a digital revolution that would continue today.
The teen simply saw a better way to share good music among friends. But within months, millions of people around the world were hooked.
Although the original Napster was buried long ago by a copyright-infringement lawsuit, the program hastened the Internet's role in becoming a primary conduit for digital entertainment. It also dragged traditional media companies into a new era of changing consumer habits.
"It definitely forced the major media companies to have to adapt to something that was clearly providing a better user experience than what they were offering," Fanning, now 28, said in an interview last week.
To be sure, Napster became popular because of the free music, which the courts eventually ruled was theft and, therefore, illegal. And Napster had dealt a devastating financial blow to the recording industry.
But analysts say today's Internet landscape — with millions of consumers downloading songs from the iTunes Music Store, watching videos on YouTube or Hulu and networking on social media sites such as Facebook — can be traced back to the day in early June of 1999 when Fanning made Napster available for wider distribution.
"It probably was the single most important event as far as media consumption on the Internet is concerned," said Phil Leigh, an Internet media analyst. "It was a real epiphany that computers were going to be more than just document-creation devices. They were going to be entertainment appliances as well."
Napster also introduced to the mainstream the idea of an "almost infinite library" of online digital content. "That was a concept that was never really imagined before," said Leigh, founder and senior analyst with Inside Digital Media Inc., a Florida media consultancy firm. "That was a radical shift in thinking from having to go to a Virgin superstore (to buy music) to having an almost infinite number of Virgin superstores at your desktop."
Napster helped change the mind-set of a generation that now sees digital forms of all media, from music to newspapers, as more convenient, said Mike McGuire, research director for Gartner Industries' Media Team.
"You can argue that everything that happened since has been a reaction to Napster," he said. "What did Napster give everyone in the world? It gave them a frictionless, convenient way to get content. Ten years later, at the heart of it, we're still wrestling with the physical-to-digital transition."
In 1999, music fans mainly listened to pre-recorded CDs on disc players. But for a groundswell of tech-savvy music fans, a new audio format had already taken hold — the digital MP3.
Fanning was a student at Northeastern University in Boston when he had the idea for a computer program that would make sharing MP3s easier by allowing users to see a directory of songs stored on other members' computers. After months writing the program, he released it to a group of about 150 friends and Internet Relay Chat acquaintances.
Napster's fame spread by word of mouth, and it soon had 10,000 to 15,000 users. But once the program was featured on Cnet's Download.com site, the number of users soared into the millions.
But the world's biggest record companies viewed Napster as a copyright "infringement machine" that allowed Internet users to steal songs from artists without paying. In December 1999, members of the Recording Industry Association of America filed a federal lawsuit to stop Napster Inc.
After a series of rulings that said Napster did indeed violate copyright laws, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2002.
But the court battles overshadowed other developments. Napster in its heyday also was cited as one reason consumers were getting high-speed Internet access. Since then, continued broadband adoption rates have paved the way for the success of popular online video sites such as YouTube and Hulu.
With the best-selling iPod, which debuted in 2001, and through the iTunes Music Store, which launched in 2003, Apple Inc. and CEO Steve Jobs capitalized on consumers' newfound freedom to control their media, said Gartner's McGuire. Another extension of that desire could be seen with other technologies such as digital video recorders and streaming video of baseball games online, he said.
"Again, it's adapt or die," said Fanning, now CEO of Rapture, a social network for video game players that he co-founded.
