The ENTIRE Story of Napster Explained

Описание: In September 2002, the company behind Napster converted its bankruptcy filing from Chapter 11 reorganization to Chapter 7 liquidation. A service that had claimed 80 million registered accounts stopped existing as a functioning business roughly three and a half years after its first line of code was written.

It started with a 17-year-old college freshman's roommate complaining that half his MP3 links were dead. Shawn Fanning wrote the fix in a semester — then handed 70% of the company it became to the uncle who filed the paperwork. Napster went from 150,000 users to a peak of 26.4 million in under two years. Metallica's Lars Ulrich testified in front of the US Senate over it. The RIAA lawsuit that actually killed the company wasn't about money — it was one sentence from a federal judge: build a filter that works.

Napster never turned a profit in any of its three years. The name has since been sold five more times — Roxio, Best Buy, Rhapsody, MelodyVR, Infinite Reality — for more money combined than the original company was ever worth.

Where the record is contested, this video says so.

00:00 Chapter 7
01:05 Northeastern, and the dead links
02:22 The fastest growing software anyone had measured
03:48 Metallica's lawsuit
05:17 The suit that actually killed it
06:33 Build a filter that works
07:54 Bertelsmann's blocked buyout
09:19 Five more owners
10:42 What survived