201: Napster introduced
Napster was a file sharing service led the technological drive for P2P file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Limewire, iMesh, Morpheus, and BearShare, which are now used to download music, pictures, movies, and other files. Napster specialized in music files in MP3 format and had a very easy to navigate user-friendly interface. The result was a system that was extremely popular for online file trading of large music libraries. The downside here was that by sharing all of these files, Napster was circumventing the copyright holders rights by allowing illegal data to be shared. This issue was first brought to court by Metallica in 2000, and quickly followed up by Dr. Dre. The RIAA joined in with their own suit and they went to trial. After loosing the main court case and the following appeal in July of 2001, Napster closed it’s network and tried to shift it’s service method to a pay per use service. This didnt work and Napster had to fold and sell all of their assets in Chapter 11 proceedings. The name and logo were aquired by Roxio who used it to rebrand their music sharing offering formerly known as Pressplay.
It is absurd that Napster is only #201 while iTunes is #5.
Napster is what changed the music industry drastically, making people realize that they could download individual songs and that digital music was so much more convenient than CDs and tapes.
iTunes was merely a response to the situation created by Napster!
(It was a great response, of course, both legitimizing and mainstreaming downloads, but the disparity between these two results on the list makes no sense.)
October 24th, 2007 at 12:18 pmCompletely agree Mike–no Napster, no itunes!
November 15th, 2007 at 10:43 pm