Tag Archives: napster

Now It’s Time For Napster To Get Its Own Movie: “The Social Music Network”

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At Long Last, Napster Is Getting Its Own Movie

“The Social Network” was one of the greatest surprises of 2010, what with the movie being nominated for 8 Academy Awards (of which it won 3, including one for Best Original Score). So, it comes as no surprise that filmmakers are looking for other sites that would make for great movies.

And one of the few websites that can lend itself to a movie rivaling “The Social Network” in dramatic content is Napster. Created by 18-year-old college student Shawn Fanning in 1999, Napster was the most disruptive music service of its age. It marked the birth of peer-to-peer sharing, no less.

The service was forced to close down in 2001, following a string of virulent lawsuits. And although Napster remained around as a 100% legal music service and it changed owners several times, its 15 minutes were basically over.

But it’s a story well-worth sharing. And it will be told in documentary form soon. The as-yet unnamed project is going to be directed by Alex Winter (Bill from the “Bill and Ted” films), and this is a story he’s been wanting to tell for a long time – he once signed a deal with MTV films to create a scripted version of the story in 2002. But that came to nothing. Continue reading →

Napster Is Back Again

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You Read It Here First - Napster Is Coming Back From The Dead

I announced the return of MySpace just last week, and now I find that an even more emblematic service is trying to slip back into the public eye. I’m talking about Napster, one of the most widely-discussed P2P filesharing platforms ever.

“What do you mean ‘slip back into the public eye’? Wasn’t the service dead and gone for good?”, I hear you retort. To which I have to reply, “no, it wasn’t”.

You see, although Napster’s days as a filesharing service were over by July 2001 (when the service was forced to close down after a much-publicized legal dispute with the RIAA), the name “Napster” has changed owners a good couple of times. One of these was Roxio, which relaunched Napster as a 100% legal music service shortly after it was originally closed. It was all to no avail, and most people never noticed. To them, Napster sank from sight when it stopped being a place to get music for free. Period.

But Napster’s latest owners are intent on reclaiming some of the fire the service had on its P2P glory days.

Napster has just been acquired by Rhapsody for an undisclosed sum, and it is to be relaunched as an on-demand service letting users listen to all the music they want in exchange for a monthly subscription. Continue reading →

If Napster Had Never Existed…

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…things would have been a bed of roses for the music industry. Well, that is what most major labels think. They presented a graph in the recent litigation against LimeWire that drove the point home.

napster album sales

Napster Killed The Radio Star...

This is open to endless debate and speculation, of course. Did sales fall by the wayside because music was being pirated, or because the music that many artists were pumping out was substandard? Speak your mind in the “Comments” box below – let it all out…