Napster

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Napster

Napster creates a threat to the music industry, which includes Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and well-known musical groups, because it diminishes their distribution control, record sales and lowers their profit. The music industry must continue to take legal action against Napster to eliminate its negative impact.

Last year a nineteen year old college student attending Boston's Northeastern University was sitting in front of his computer screen with a challenge, a challenge to create a way of downloading music off the Internet faster (Graham 1D). The nineteen year old solved the problem and created software that would generate a worldwide conflict. This nineteen year olds name is Shawn Fanning creator of Napster.

Fanning's software became very popular among his college friends. He stopped going to classes and he spent all of his time working on his software. His uncle then noticed how popular the software was becoming and loaned money to Fanning to start an online company (Graham 1D). Nineteen-year-old Fanning gave his software the name Napster, because he had nappy hair when he was younger and "Napster" became his nickname as a child. (Graham 1D.) Napster officially started June 1, 1999.

Napster can be explained as a file-sharing program also called peer-to-peer sharing. Napster links music off of people's computers and permits other Napster users to recover them from whomever might be connected to the Internet at that time (Graham 1D).

Napster has been nothing but a success in the eyes of many. USA Today author Jefferson Graham explains, "To its fans, Napster is the greatest radio station in the world, a place to pick up new music for nothing" (Graham 1D). Napster has taken the MP3 technology of compressing music files loaded on computers hard drives, and used it to its benefit. We can download MP3s in less than two minutes (Gibeaut 39). This aspect is very appealing to the fast moving generation of today.

Chaos rose when Napster provided free music to virtually everyone. The idea of free music exploded among college students. Downloading is even easier from inside a dorm room because colleges are on networking systems, which means instant Internet connection. Unlike a modem that has to connect every time we sign on the Internet, a network is always connected to the Internet and runs very fast. This networking factor destroyed the music industry's distribution to college students.

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