Napster: The 18 Months That Changed Music
A college student's side project let tens of millions of people share MP3s for free, and the music industry has never been the same.
By the InterStalgia history desk · November 14, 2026
In 1999 there was no easy, legal way to buy a single song online. Music came on CDs, an album at a time. Then on June 1, 1999, Shawn Fanning released a test version of a program called Napster, and within days hundreds of students at Northeastern University were trading music with it.
How it worked
Fanning built Napster with Sean Parker. The name came from Fanning's high school nickname. The program let users search the MP3 files sitting on other users' computers and download them directly, computer to computer. File sharing wasn't new, but Napster was specialized and easy. It was all MP3s, it had a friendly interface, and it was full of songs that were hard to find anywhere else: old tracks, live bootlegs and unreleased recordings.
College dorms were hit first. At some schools MP3 transfers made up as much as 61% of outside network traffic, and many colleges blocked Napster just to keep their networks running.
The lawsuits
In December 1999, A&M Records and other labels, through the Recording Industry Association of America, sued Napster for copyright infringement. In April 2000, Metallica sued after a demo of its song "I Disappear" spread on Napster before the official release. The band said it had found 335,000 people sharing its songs, and its lawyers delivered close to 60,000 pages of evidence. Dr. Dre filed a similar suit a month later. That June, Madonna's single "Music" leaked onto the service before it was released.
Not every artist was against it. Radiohead's album Kid A leaked on Napster three weeks before its release in October 2000, and the leak is credited with helping its sales. Chuck D of Public Enemy and Dave Matthews were among the musicians who supported the service.
Peak and shutdown
Napster use peaked in February 2001 with 26.4 million verified users worldwide, and some unofficial estimates put registered users as high as 80 million. That same month Napster offered the record labels $1 billion over five years to settle. The offer was turned down.
The courts ordered Napster to stop the sharing of copyrighted songs, and in July 2001 the original service shut down. The company filed for bankruptcy in June 2002. Its name was sold, relaunched as a paid subscription service and passed from owner to owner for years.
What it started
Napster lost in court, but it won the argument about how people wanted to get music: one song at a time, instantly, from a giant library. Less than two years after it shut down, Apple opened the iTunes Store with 99-cent songs, and streaming services followed later. The idea outlived the company that proved people wanted it.