Napster died quietly, after a long illness, on July 1, 2001.

That’s when Napster’s overseers “suspended” all file transfers, essentially pulling the plug on its life-support systems, although Napster’s chat rooms remained operational — much like a library that says it is open, just not for reading books. But Napster had been sick in recent months, and its death did not come as a surprise. Restrictions imposed by the courts — as a result of Napster’s losing legal battles with the international conglomerates that now control the music industry — had crippled the service.

In order to comply with court orders, Napster was operating under a mandate to prevent the transfer of some 800,000 copyrighted music files. This was, as everyone knew, an impossible task. For a while, Napster employed filters to keep its users from pirating copyrighted songs. Users invented new languages to beat the filters; the filters were in turn made more restrictive. As Napster filtered more and more files, the service slowly strangled itself. At Napster’s peak, one could find songs by everyone from Aaliyah to Rob Zombie, and all the Madonnas and Merzbows in between. By the end, one was hard pressed to find even Faster Pussycat or “Weird” Al Yankovic. In the end, Napster’s masters conceded defeat and mercifully put the service out of its misery.

Invented by a then-19-year-old Northeastern University student named Shawn Manning, Napster popularized and revolutionized the once-obscure practice of sharing songs in the form of compressed digital files. By inventing a user-friendly interface and establishing a network of centralized servers, Napster created a living, breathing, evolving virtual music library unlike any ever assembled in cyberspace or the real world. At the height of its popularity, Napster came close to living up to the unwritten promise espoused by its fans: all the music in the world for free. Napster attracted some 30 million users or more. In the process, these users standardized what was still an emerging format — the digital MP3 file — in a matter of months.

Napster’s mass popularity has guaranteed that the practice of free file-sharing will survive. (Napster is scheduled to be reborn as a paid “subscription” service this summer; in effect, the brand name will be used to market an industry-licensed digital music dealership.) The next generation of Napster-like programs are “clones” of a program called Gnutella, which — unlike Napster — links together communities of users without a central server. On the one hand, Gnutella clones (the most popular being BearShare and Limewire) are clumsier, slower, harder to search, and less reliable than Napster. On the other hand, they’re much more difficult to monitor and, in theory, impossible to shut down through litigation.

In practice, however, the death of Napster marks the end of a brief and unparalleled era — one that constituted the most substantial revolution in the way teenagers consume music since the birth of MTV. Napster was so good because it was immensely popular — it was only as good as the people who used it, so it needed to attract all different sorts of people. It was the place everyone went; its miracle was that without ever really deciding, everyone agreed on where to go. In an era that has seen a relentless fragmentation of popular taste, Napster was an unprecedented agent of consensus.

Napster almost changed everything, at least a little bit. It seemed too good to be true, and it turned out to be too good to last.

Issue Date: July 12 - 19, 2001