As former Rolling Stone journalist Steve Knopper wrote in his book Appetite For Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash Of The Record Industry In The Digital Age, the way the music industry dealt with Napster paved the way for a series of disastrous decisions the industry made as the sheer scale of the digital threat started to become clear.
So, the lure of free music proved just too enticing to fans, and the music industry was initially slow to respond to the looming crisis. People were paying a premium price for a CD which might contain only two or three songs they wanted. The 1990s gave birth to many classic albums, but not every LP was deep-pile quality from start to finish. The CD had become an enormously popular format almost one billion were sold in the US in 2000, and at around $16 an album, they weren’t exactly cheap. Napster came at the end of a decade of expansion and healthy profits in the global music industry. “For the first time this full history of recorded music was available online to everyone instantly.” “It was something that provided a better, more reliable and fun way for people to share music and see each other’s music collection,” Fanning told the BBC World Service. Together with Sean Parker, Fanning created a service that made music discovery almost instant and without cost. It was, essentially, a cataloguing system that searched your hard-drive, listed all the MP3 music files contained in it, and allowed those to be shared with and played by anyone else using the software. Napster was the brainchild of Shawn Fanning, a 19-year-old US computer hacker who had worked out a way to share music for free. But within a few short years it would spell the end of the gold rush record companies had enjoyed in the age of the CD, and change how music is consumed and even written. Napster didn’t exactly sound like something that would cause consternation in the boardrooms of record companies. On 1 June 1999, a piece of computer software was released that changed the way we listen to music forever.
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