Uploaded October 2017 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
College students are making good use of the Internet. The latest software makes it a bit too easy for students to access their favorite tunes.
The main challenge was, can this thing scale to a massive number of users? And I just thought, “Okay, if this piece of code works, this is going to be huge." And I had a moment there where I asked myself, “Is it morally ______________”? Technology is advancing. This is going to happen anyway. You have a generation of people now who expect their music for free. It's very difficult to change.
In 1998, at Northeastern University - a ______________ - Shawn Fanning, began developing a computer program called Napster in his ____________ room.
He asked for help from Ali Aydar - a ____________ programmer he knew through his uncle.
And my response to him was, "Can you just concentrate on your studies."
Fanning didn't follow Ali's advice. He __________ _____ to focus on the program, and partnered with fellow teenage programmer Sean Parker to release a beta version. As it started to spread through chat rooms, they traveled to the Bay Area to grow the business.
Initially, I was ______________ that, “Gosh, I'm sitting across from two 18 or 19-year-olds”. I changed my tune once I learned that there are already 40,000 people using this thing.
It was one of the first large scale _______ to _________ file sharing programs. It allowed users to access music files stored on the hard drives of fellow Napster users.
40,000 wasn't a big number, but it was bigger than what I thought it was going to be initially, which was zero because people weren't willing to open up their hard drives.
And in the '90s, consumers' emotional ties to music ______________ big money - no one better than Puff Daddy's record label made two music videos featuring elaborate helicopter chases in consecutive years.
The CD boom was from '84 to 2000. You actually had to drive your car to the Tower Records and buy a CD for $18 to get the one song you liked. And so that was a good model. It made the industry tons and tons of cash.
Selling millions of Chumbawumba albums with one good song was an economic boom.
That was pretty much the end of that ______________, because very soon afterwards, Napster really took hold in the public's consciousness, and the consumer realized that they could get the music that that they wanted to hear for free.
It was on college campuses — with high speed internet that Napster really took off in the fall of '99. How many MP3's on your computer? About 600. Maybe like a hundred or something. 6 or 7 thousand. Napster, Napster, Napster.
It's called file sharing, seen by some as the wave of the future.
It was very exciting, we knew we were building something that was going to be big.
Ladies and gentlemen, creator of Napster, Shawn Fanning …
When I first heard about Napster, I recall my impression having two different elements. One being, "This is incredible. It's revolutionary and things will never be the same again in the music industry." And the other being, "This is going to destroy the recording industry.”
No longer do you have to go a store.
And so, months after Napster's rise, the recording industry began a long legal battle to stop it. They are waging a war in the courts over who controls what artists create
College students are making good use of the Internet. The latest software makes it a bit too easy for students to access their favorite tunes.
The main challenge was, can this thing scale to a massive number of users? And I just thought, “Okay, if this piece of code works, this is going to be huge." And I had a moment there where I asked myself, “Is it morally ______________”? Technology is advancing. This is going to happen anyway. You have a generation of people now who expect their music for free. It's very difficult to change.
In 1998, at Northeastern University - a ______________ - Shawn Fanning, began developing a computer program called Napster in his ____________ room.
He asked for help from Ali Aydar - a ____________ programmer he knew through his uncle.
And my response to him was, "Can you just concentrate on your studies."
Fanning didn't follow Ali's advice. He __________ _____ to focus on the program, and partnered with fellow teenage programmer Sean Parker to release a beta version. As it started to spread through chat rooms, they traveled to the Bay Area to grow the business.
Initially, I was ______________ that, “Gosh, I'm sitting across from two 18 or 19-year-olds”. I changed my tune once I learned that there are already 40,000 people using this thing.
It was one of the first large scale _______ to _________ file sharing programs. It allowed users to access music files stored on the hard drives of fellow Napster users.
40,000 wasn't a big number, but it was bigger than what I thought it was going to be initially, which was zero because people weren't willing to open up their hard drives.
And in the '90s, consumers' emotional ties to music ______________ big money - no one better than Puff Daddy's record label made two music videos featuring elaborate helicopter chases in consecutive years.
The CD boom was from '84 to 2000. You actually had to drive your car to the Tower Records and buy a CD for $18 to get the one song you liked. And so that was a good model. It made the industry tons and tons of cash.
Selling millions of Chumbawumba albums with one good song was an economic boom.
That was pretty much the end of that ______________, because very soon afterwards, Napster really took hold in the public's consciousness, and the consumer realized that they could get the music that that they wanted to hear for free.
It was on college campuses — with high speed internet that Napster really took off in the fall of '99. How many MP3's on your computer? About 600. Maybe like a hundred or something. 6 or 7 thousand. Napster, Napster, Napster.
It's called file sharing, seen by some as the wave of the future.
It was very exciting, we knew we were building something that was going to be big.
Ladies and gentlemen, creator of Napster, Shawn Fanning …
When I first heard about Napster, I recall my impression having two different elements. One being, "This is incredible. It's revolutionary and things will never be the same again in the music industry." And the other being, "This is going to destroy the recording industry.”
No longer do you have to go a store.
And so, months after Napster's rise, the recording industry began a long legal battle to stop it. They are waging a war in the courts over who controls what artists create
