When Pirates Offered Better Service

The Day Music Changed Forever On June 1, 1999, an eighteen-year-old kid in a Northeastern University dorm room launched something that would bring the music industry to its knees. Shawn Fanning called it Napster, and within two years, 80 million people were using it to download 14,000 songs every minute.1 The technology was simple: a central server indexed which songs each user had, then let computers talk directly to each other. No complicated setup. No technical expertise required. Just type in “Metallica” and boom—there it was.