Napster Documentary: Culture of Free | Retro Report | The New York Times 

Ah, Napster in 2000 . . . spending 30 minutes to download a 2:30 song with a 56K modem and then it gets cut of with 5% remaining because my mom tries to make a phone call.

there's a rumor going around that even today you can still get copyrighted media for free off the internet

When Shawn Fanning wore the Metallica t-shirt to the MTV Awards, that was one of the hardest anyone trolled anyone ever.

"You have a generation of people now who expect their music for free." Yea it's called the radio (patented 1896).

Meanwhile a guy named Steve Jobs was like how do we make money on all this theft.. boom... The ipod

You can't stop what's coming. You either evolve or go extinct.

The greedy bastards in the entertainment industry shot themselves in the foot by suing Napster. Many people only became aware of Napster's existence because of the lawsuits launched and the media hysteria surrounding it. The entertainment industry should have hired Shawn Fanning and his colleagues who worked on this file sharing technology to build an iTunes-style program they could use to sell music to consumers. FFS.

To me, Napster was the pinnacle of music access and discoverability. Being able to find new music by seeing what other people have on their machine was amazing and introduced me to so much new music that was impossible to find anywhere else.

Napster, imo, was nothing more than a market place correction in response to the tightly controlled business model devised by the music industry. It was very profitable to sell an album to a customer who only wanted one track but it was a reviled system by the consumer. In such an environment within a free market system a correction is going to come from somewhere.

Ah, Napster. Watching the progress bar for about 20 minutes as a 4 MB MP3 downloaded, then playing it in all its 128 kbps goodness. Such fond memories. After Napster came FrostWire. Those were the days.

Limewire what upppppp

I love the early 2000's !! Internet looked more friendly back then and it was still decentralized, not owned by monopolies

$18 for a CD with one good song in 1990s. With inflation factored in, that's like buying one good song today for $35. Record companies ARE the pirates.

I spent over a year of my life on Napster downloading 1500 songs that you can now listen to for free on RU-vid. I'm so glad I lived through those years.

those were the days. 22mins to dl a 5mb song. letting dial up run all night and wake up to new music.

I stopped feeling sorry for the music industry when they started suing kids and single moms for downloading a few songs. The last guy was right. It's the responsibility of the industry to figure out how to add enough value that people are willing to open up their wallets for it.

Long live Napster

I miss sitting in my college bedroom downloading music, good times.

Because of napster I was able to find music that never was heard on the radio or even socially known. Even well know artistes have some songs in the vault that never got released but thanks to napters and other downloading sites you could hear it.

I'm 41 and literally do not remember the last time I paid for music. I think the last time I paid for music was a CD by 311 in the early 2000s.

BTW, talk of Napster.... anyone remember KaZaa?? I was on that heavy. LOL

Now that I'm an adult with a full-time job and disposable income; I do not mind paying a reasonable amount of money for music that I enjoy. The problem is that when I was younger I didn't have $15-20 to spend on every single that I enjoyed via the CD medium. Ironically, I actually nowadays buy CDs on eBay for the superior quality and offline storage instead of buying through a service like iTunes. Most of the time it's actually much cheaper to buy the CD, so it's a win-win.

It has been a difficult mating season for Bird Person

Such arrogant entitlement from the music industry, thinking they could screw over the consumer for all eternity without backlash. Respect is something you have to earn & not handed over without any reputable effort, how can they honestly think such constrained laws would be fair in the eye of the public. Greed made corporations unable to resonate with youth over and over again, remember audio cassettes?

Napster might be the most innovative computer program ever created... Even moreso than Facebook, Twitter or Snap Chat... I remember the 1st time I ever used Napster, back in late 2000, I was a freshman in highschool and I was blown away. The fact that the first song I ever downloaded, Crazy Town-Butterfly (It was the year 2000, cut me some slack lol), took 45+ minutes to download it didn't matter lol

My most sincerest condolences to the multi-million dollar popstars who couldn't get their second yacht or their solid gold Porche. The poor babies :'(

I just noticed that "Napster" anagrams to "parents".

“Who knows 5 years from now if anyone’s gonna be buying music anymore.” I can tell you from 5 years later - that’s a hard no😂

Napster: exists Lars ulrich: imma stop you right there

Napster is what got me into music from Europe, that you couldn't find in the stores. I loved Napster, except that it took literally hours to download the songs and burn them to a CD.

They admit it! They admit only 1 song on CDs is actually good. I knew it!

I remember downloading songs in summer of 2000. So awesome.

Greedy corporate suits thought suing Napster would solve things, but instead blew the lid of the jar. Let's hear it for Pandora, new Napster and Spotify!!!!

oh my gosh this brings back such memories. 1999 2000 I was m middle school and high school and and totally downloaded tons of s***. I remember watching flash videos about Metallica bitching about Napster it was never the same after after them I started using Limewire

I wish the internet would back track to the Napster days. No censorship on the platform and any program, video or music was easily downloadable and searchable. These were the days programs like Adobe were single purchase (no monthly fees) and any sort of video was available without ANY sort of oversite or censorship.

I miss Tower Records....even though I haven't paid for music in over 18 years. But I liked walking around in there.....

Ahh. Downloading music for free whenever I wanted to. I was in high school during Napster's peak in popularity. Those were the days. 😎

The coolest thing about napster was you can message with the user at the end of one of the ip's. Was a cool way to connect with one with similar music taste.

Raps about stealing. Gets mad when music gets downloading illegally.

This really takes me back. I also stopped being a fan of Metallica at that time because they did a 180 and just cared about $$$. Napster helped make the need for download speed more relevent.

If you were a hardcore CD collector in the late '90's like I was & got tons of imports and rarities, and wanted a complete discography of your favorite band, there was always those elusive tracks that were impossible to get. Napster had you covered. Invariably, someone, somewhere, had those missing rarities. Even if it was in Europe and it took hours. It was a good time to be a compleatist!

What Hank Barry said was true for me. I had the massive collection of CDs I bought for one song because it was on the charts but before Napster I had stopped that. I had started to define what I liked and didn't like outside of what I was told I should like. When I got to Napster I was able to listen to songs from artists around the world. I didn't just look for music I didn't have, I'd look for users with similar music collections. Then I'd check out what else they were listening to and I want. I was also spending more money on CDs but I wasn't spending that money in my local stores anymore. My mother got tired of my complicated shopping, I did a lot of international money orders in those days, and tried to convince me that the brick and mortar option was just as good. I got dragged to a store where I had to think of a band I liked and they would try to find it. They found one compilation for me and it turned out it was the wrong band. I understood even then it wasn't that Napster existed that was the problem for CD companies it was the mindset. Not "I want this for free" but " I'm not interested in buying what you think I should". I don't think I've bought a single "hit" CD since. Or at least a hit in the country I live. I could have also told them what would happen when Napster fell. We all knew it was inevitable so we had scattered to other p2p's in advance. They weren't as big as Napster but that was the problem. Instead of being one easy to topple giant we were in harder to find smaller groups.

Napster was , literally, revolutionnary :) Good old times. Imagine if "netflix" or spotify was born at that time? ( more like spotify, due to slow internet but still )

Free streaming has been the best thing to ever happen to music

A hero, a legend, his legacy is the fact that I've never paid for music

I remember using Napster in my college days. It was so insane that you can find any music that you look for and you could "share" it in an instant. I knew I was "stealing", but I didn't have a problem taking from the Entertainment/music industry. In return, I made several cash/food donations to the local foodbanks/charities.... So in the end I felt allright. Nowdays, every music in you RU-vid.

I’ll never forget the magical feeling of thinking of a song I hadn’t heard in years that was out of print and impossible to find and downloading it in my room in a few minutes. From my mind to my headphones? WHAT??? I think my first day on Napster back in 2000 I downloaded about 75 songs. Kids that came of age after streaming will never know what a revolution it was. It was pure bliss.

9:47 I don't know about "if its good, people will find it". There is a ton of music way better than anything that goes viral. But nobody knows about it.

from 2000 to 2014 was the Wild West of the software piracy war. It went from Napster, Limewire, Frostwire, Pirate Bay, 4shared. If it existed in any digital format it existed free on the internet. All you needed was a $300 computer.

It Wasnt Me was never supposed to see the light of day. Shaggy’s whole album got scrapped and he was about to get dropped from the label when some radio host in Hawaii found the song on Napster , deemed it a bop, and played it on air .

I STILL over the years from transferring music from device to device, have Napster music. Man I miss those early days!

chumbawumba ruined everything

Anybody here remember Audiogalaxy? That felt like the ultimate, final, end-all-be-all version of Napster. I remember being a teenager with my buddy queueing up several hundred songs, then going out to holler at girls at the mall, then coming back to smoke and go through all that music. It felt like pirates getting a big loot score

I love all this Retro Reports. Great idea.

The p2p format expanded my musical tastes exponentially in the 2000’s as I was going through my twenties. I would’ve NEVER gotten into motown, disco, and classic country without these sites. For sure. And even in 2021 I still buy cds. No need for records. I bought hundreds in the 1990’s and 2000’s.

It wasn't just for music, some of us used it for software too. Just wrap a zip or exe into a mp3 extension. Sharing is caring.

"Bohemian Rhapsody was the first song I downloaded off Napster" - if u get it u get it

Thank you New York Times for the video!

The value of a song is so low, its no wonder why people say music hasn't improved. Why put in the work when you won't make the money back. Instead just make as much as you can to increase your chance of going viral.

I steal all my music. I don't care. I'm a pirate!

I remember all of this...lived through it....laughing the whole time. They actually thought they could stop the “internet”...fools.

I love Retro Reports. Great idea... that we need right.

Boyyyyy this brings back memories. My first year on college campus was 2000, at Napster's height.

I still have my Napster mp3 file.

I remember when Napster first came out and I opened it for the first time - it was too good to be true! I was downloading single tracks and my CDs from that point forward were amazing compilations, no more CRAP discs with only one or two good tracks constantly switching CDs just to hear one song here, another there, etc.

I just showed this video to a class of undergraduates (early 20's); literally 100% had never heard of Napster. #GetOffMyLawn

Tis series is a master piece...i watched all the videos and i m revisiting them now

I am so glad I grew up in 1990s and got to experience Napster when it first came out.

WAL MART and BEST BUY had thousands of titles in stock and were selling MILLIONS of CD's by the mid 90s! By the time Napster had come along, WAL MART and BEST BUY were responsible for 65%-70% of all CD sales! The record stores were already going out of business! Music and the consumer had lost their connection to each other, it's only natural downloading would become popular.

I remember when napster came out, the first time i used it I was amazed.

So nostalgic.. these were the good ol' days. Though I was mainly a WinMX user.

Fanning wearing a Metallica shirt on stage lol

And then there was Limewire! You had to give aids to your pc for a mp3 that may not even play.

back in 1999-2000, i remember starting like 10 songs before school lolll....Mom was mad because the phone line was busy all day so no message on awnser machine lollll

Napster was my favorite back then, downloaded so much music I was in middle school and burn CDS memories...☺️☺️😊😊

I made my mp3s from a CD in 1999.

KAZAAA NOTIFICATION SQUAD!!

It comes down to " what is best for the customer. " It's easier to have a big music's library. It's so amazing in a way. We have more freedom to explore and listen to more kind of music. It also give a lot of opportunity to different styles to emerge and to be listened to.

I got into napster in the late 90s, i never have paid for music in my life. The hiphop section at the mall was only a few albums, and i would have never been exposed to so many unique underground and historical artists, music genres, etc. Since then ive gone to so many concerts and bought merch, but to this day i never bought an album in my life.

"I will not use ______ Software for copyright infringement"

I haven’t paid for music since. That’s right, I’m a criminal!

The only music I ever pirated was music that wasn't actually sold to the U.S at the time, but the second that I changed I started buying it, even what I already had.

Steve Jobs saw what nobody could see (my definition of a genius); people would forego getting music from peer to peer services and pay for music if an alternative method of obtaining music on the internet was even more convenient and secure. Peer to peer music services, while allowing for the free copying of music, came with a number of thorny issues. One, it took time to search for downloads. Two, quality was wildly inconsistent. Three, there were security concerns of what was downloaded. Four, many users of peer to peer services did believe that they were stealing music. The Apple Music Store and Tunes alleviated all of these burdens. Users could be guaranteed to find the exact songs they wanted at a high quality. There was no security concerns with iTunes. Purchasing songs was convenient and users could but the exact songs they wanted. No longer was it required to purchase an entire CD to get a few desired songs, which filled the coffers of the music industry. Apple even had a method of absolving oneself from past use of peer to peer services; iTunes would perform a onetime scan of a designated folder of peer to peer downloaded music and recognize this music as purchased music in an iTunes library. This concession from the music industry was utter brilliance from Steve Jobs.

Remember $30 music CDs?

Who’s here after watching OMI In a Hellcat

Napster will forever be in my heart

rlly love these retro reports

I miss napstear

2:02 30.9 KB/Sec The good old days!

I really miss those times long live Napster!

I remember being petrified of getting sued I even drank Pepsi for a little bit when they had free song codes under the caps 😂

I got sued by Sony for downloading in my dorm 😩 $3K to settle out

And just look at what is happening to concert pricing because of companies like Ticketmaster, they just keep going higher and higher and the artists don't get much if anything from that inflated profits. It's only a matter of time until a Napster like event happens to concerts and cause the music industry to have to change once again, at the cost of the artists. Artist need to stop letting companies screw over their fans, after all it's the fans that pay them. Artists need to sell their songs directly to costumers in order to keep prices low and in order for them to get the biggest cut of the sales and they need to set the price for their concerts and if they find a company inflating those prices they cut them off and invalidated those tickets, let' the companies selling overinflated tickets deal with angry customers and you see how quickly they start to behave.

Can't believe 20 year's has passed by since Napster. Seem's like it was yesterday.

Napster was before my time, Limewire was what me and most everyone I knew was using until it eventually got shut down as well. The music industry was still trying to fight a losing battle. Spotify came to the states a few years later and that was pretty much the end of that.

back then when life was so easy

Best thing to happen to music in 100 years. The nasty control bubble of the record labels pierced. We can now by ONE good song and no fillers, plus any good artist with the will to do so can be published without the bureaucracy and price of the corporate machine. Only thing that could improve this further would be if copywrites expired permanently after 7 years similar to patents but a shorter term.

Oh man fond memories !!! Now I can download any album from torrents literally in minutes, I've never purchased a cd in decades.

Very accurate documentary

He's right, it's very much a cultural shift that people no longer feel they have to pay for music or any intellectual property for that matter. Obviously, in capitalism, there's going to be profit that goes to executives and shareholders. However, you can't argue that hardworking content creators are making significantly less than they once were and life is worse for thousands and thousands of content creators. You can argue that it was inevitable and that the industry was wrong for not embracing technology and keeping the mindset of the past, but that doesn't make not paying for content right.