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.