February 24, 2013

Napster: The Day the Music Was Set Free

Tom Lamont, Guardian


AP Photo

In the first weeks of 2000 the founders of Napster were in their office above a bank in San Mateo, California, considering dizzying numbers. Figures scrawled on a whiteboard told how many people around the world had installed their file-sharing application and were using it to download music from each other's computers. As recounted in Downloaded – a documentary soon to premiere at the SXSW film festival, telling the story of a piece of software that came and went and whipped up a new digital music industry in its slip – Napster had 20 million users at the time. Some way from San Mateo, in suburban London I had just become one myself.

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TAGGED: music, MP3, Napster

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