We’ve always swapped vinyl, cassette tapes and CDs and later recorded and burned music from friends who were the first to get the latest albums from our favourite artists. Then MP3 came along and Napster introduced a whole new meaning to how we shared.
A film by Alex Winter, Downloaded narrates the story of co-founders, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, who came up with the groundbreaking Internet start-up Napster that essentially ignited the digital revolution, changing forever the way we were to listen to music. At a time when the Internet was in its infancy, the Napster service was streets ahead in consumer experience marking an important moment in history, more than just sharing music, these guys introduced a new model for sharing media, planting the seed for what was to come in online peer and social interaction.
We’ve always swapped vinyl, cassette tapes and CDs and later recorded and burned music from friends who were the first to get the latest albums from our favourite artists. Then MP3 came along and Napster introduced a whole new meaning to how we shared.
A film by Alex Winter, Downloaded narrates the story of co-founders, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, who came up with the groundbreaking Internet start-up Napster that essentially ignited the digital revolution, changing forever the way we were to listen to music. At a time when the Internet was in its infancy, the Napster service was streets ahead in consumer experience marking an important moment in history, more than just sharing music, these guys introduced a new model for sharing media, planting the seed for what was to come in online peer and social interaction.
In 1999 when Napster went live, Parker said he had very clear ideas about the future of content distribution, in particular music distribution. Both passionate about their objective to give people access to the music they wanted, when they wanted it, especially coming from a generation where you can get basically anything you want instantly, Napster was all about accessibility and it changed the way we sourced and accessed music. Founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing site that emphasised sharing music files encoded in MP3 format, Fanning, who at 17 coded the software program for Napster, had no idea it was going to become the first large scale Internet community. It became a space where people with similar interests met to share their personal material and connect. Parker has said, “the idea of ownership is gone. So convenience and portability were the two most important things if you looked at the entire history of format changes.” The new model Napster provided for sharing media became superior to buying an album and it soon became clear the Internet was going to be the place where we store music.
No one knew whether something like Napster was legal or not. Filmmaker, White shows the cultural impact of Napster’s rise and fall, and includes all of the appropriate material from media to the music execs embroiled in the legal battle.
Parker says the technology wasn’t ready back in the days of Napster, with iTunes and Spotify today it is. Metallica and Dr Dre triggered the lawsuit that sank Napster, in a war on a generation, 60 million users were accused of sharing unauthorised MP3s owned by major record labels. As one label head put it, the labels and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) were used to dealing with infringement in the thousands, but this was piracy in the tens of millions: "There was no awareness that something like this was coming, all the content in one place. The labels were terrified and have always had control issues, they wanted to protect their business model by simply shutting this whole thing down as quickly as possible.”
The site was shut down in 2001 after the company's unsuccessful appeal of court orders arising from its ‘encouraging’ the illegal sharing of copyrighted material.
Just as the boys of Pirate Bay were targeted by Hollywood, record labels and the music industry targeted Napster. Taking in over $100 million in investment funding, the company never figured out how to monetize its services and it was driven into bankruptcy within three years. In their defense, Parker says: “We were just an index. We operated no differently than Google or Alta Vista, if you remember Alta Vista. We were no different than these search engines. The music never went through our servers. It was users sharing music with each other. And I don’t think they’ve really clarified this issue, because for the time being, you can find pirated stuff on Google all day long.”
Though they were never prosecuted – and this is simply a case of laws not in place at the time, Parker and Fanning were left in disarray and thousands of dollars in debt. What Napster did do at the time was prove that the existing business model of the music industry didn’t work anymore and how people used their site demonstrated that. Ultimately it has been the record companies that have lost out, many say the concept of music ownership is dead.
You may have come across Sean Parker later portrayed by Justin Timberlake in David Finch’s Academy Award-winning, The Social Network (a fab film, one I’ve watched many times) and Shawn Fanning who went on to be referenced as the supposedly thieving college roomie of Lyle, played by Seth Green in The Italian Job. Parker served as the president of Facebook and is now an executive at Spotify. Today his net worth is estimated at US$3.1 billion.
Downloaded is an easy, fascinating watch that leaves out the technical and legal jargon that would otherwise make it complicated. Because of this, the film is a more personal story about two curious kids who started a revolution almost overnight with their creation of new computer software. Both have made their mark on a ‘Napster-era’. Music began with studio distribution, then peer-to-peer sharing - the question now, what is next?
Screening Times:
20/11/2014 8:30pm
21/11/2014 8:10am
23/11/2014 5:10pm