Napster

Shawn Fanning a former college student founded Napster at the age of 19. Napster was one of the first file sharing services that had a large impact on P2P sharing of music, pictures, videos and other files and paved the way for other programs of a similar nature such as; Kazaa, Limewire, imesh and BearShare. The popularity of Napster and its huge influence over the music industry and the repercussions from this have made it a legendary icon. More than 80 million people had accessed songs from Napster's huge library of music in 2000, causing panic in the record industry suffering huge sales losses and eventually leading to the closing down of Napster in July 2001.

Examples of the turmoil that Napster created for the music industry and artists are seen below:
Heavy metal band Metallica discovered that a demo of their song ‘I Disappear’ had been circulating across the Napster network, even before it was released. This eventually led to the song being played on several radio stations across America and brought to Metallica’s attention that their entire back catalogue of studio material was also available. The band responded in 2000 by filing a lawsuit against the service offered by Napster. A month later, rapper Dr. Dre shared a litigator and legal firm with Metallica, and filed a similar lawsuit after Napster wouldn't remove his works from their service, even after he issued a written request. Separately, both Metallica and Dr. Dre later delivered thousands of usernames to Napster who they believed were pirating their songs.

Napster has since been reopened as a legal download site much like i-tunes.

Statistics

Here are a number of important statistics relating to music and the internet:

• 67% of the UK online population has tried some sort of digital activity
• Over half have downloaded music and 8% have downloaded a podcast.
• 54% of the online population downloads music (32.6m).
• 43% of the online population owns an iPod or MP3 player (26m).
• Of those who have downloaded a podcast most, 61 %, listen to them at home.
• 38% listen on their PCs and 46% on their iPods/MP3 players.
• Paid for podcasting is unpopular, 71% said they would not pay to download; however the remaining 29% said they would pay up to a £1.
• This is well on its way to reaching the mass market with 54% of the online population downloading music.
• Barriers preventing the remaining 46% from downloading are lack of knowledge, knowing which sites to use and not owning an MP3 player.
• The top two sites for downloading music are iTunes and Limewire, and half of music downloaders do not pay for any music that they download.
• However, 46% of music downloaders say that they spend the same amount on non-digital formats than they did before they started downloading, and 21% say that they actually spend more.
• 43% of music downloaders say that free downloads have encouraged them to buy more music than they did; only 35% believe that illegal downloading or file sharing is wrong.

Feedback on research #1

Pete, you have made a start, however now you need to find significantly more articles on the music industry.

What is happening at the moment with EMI and DRM? How has the internet changed the way that we consume music? Interact with bands? Some examples? Promote music? Why are ipods so successful?

Use the handbook to guide your research.