Napster and the Digital Age of Music

Napster and the Digital Age of Media

Napster, despite it short life, revolutionized the way we consume music by bringing the music industry into the digital age. Napster would create the first peer-to-peer file sharing service; help promote the current standard norm file for music (MP3), lead to the death of the CD player by bringing in the age of the MP3 player, and finally its format, even after its death, would be a guide to ITunes, the current largest online music retailer . Napster would unleash and commence a digital revolution of the music industry that continues to live today.

Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker launched Napster almost sixteen years ago, not knowing they were about to change the way we share and listen to music. At the time, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker were just teenage developers. Their revolutionary program, Napster, was created from their idea to create an online platform where users could easily swap songs with no strings attached. This idea of a file sharing service came from the issue at the time, of people having trouble and difficulty finding and downloading music online. This simple idea, would lead to the first example of how Fanning and Parker revolutionized the industry by leading it into the new frontier, the digital age.

With Napster, Fanning and Parker had created the first peer-to-peer file sharing service. The peer-to-peer service allowed the consumer a simple way to download the specific content that they wanted, when they wanted it. From this idea, Napster would be the first service to recognize and take advantage of the internet’s potential for sharing files and people’s love for easily accessible content. Despite music artists not supporting their growth, peer-to-peer file sharing programs have grown and continue to be around today; including popular services like limewire and bitttorrent. With Fanning and Parker idea, Napster would lead to the necessary step toward getting the music industry to where it is today and...