2000: The Napster Monster and Apple’s Heavenly Jukebox
Napster's legal woes intensify in 2000, even as creator Shawn Fanning is celebrated on MTV and on magazine covers. Meanwhile, Apple acquires a startup called SoundJam and turns it into iTunes.
In May 2000, Napster’s poster boy, Shawn Fanning, was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek magazine in a suit and bowtie, alongside four other “most influential people in electronic business.” Three of the four other companies represented — Yahoo, eBay and Amazon — were well established and successful dot-com businesses, and all would survive the internet economy downturn. The other company, Softbank, was a renowned investment bank.
Fanning was much younger than the other executives pictured (who included Jeff Bezos) and he was the only one on the cover not smiling. Perhaps Fanning’s grim visage was due to Napster’s legal issues — including the case brought by the Recording Industry Association of America, which was currently before the US District courts. Or perhaps Fanning was just uncomfortable in a bowtie.
Regardless, Napster was an internet sensation by May 2000. It had 10 million registered users and, according to research firm Webnoize, 73 percent of college students were using Napster at least monthly. Plus, the company had just closed a $15 million venture capital round with Hummer Winblad, which promptly installed one of its partners, Hank Barry, as Napster’s chief executive.
Hummer Winblad was also an investor in Liquid Audio, the company that had provided the technology for David Bowie’s pioneering 1996 online single, ‘Telling Lies.’ Ironically, Liquid Audio aimed to provide secure distribution for online music, to prevent users on the likes of Napster and Gnutella from pirating it. As a Wired article explained in May 2000, “Liquid Audio was a part of the Secure Digital Music Initiative, the music industry's attempt to create security standards of Internet music, while also working independently to develop watermarking technology.”
But before Napster even had a chance to contemplate a possible team-up with Liquid Audio, the RIAA ratcheted up its legal case against them. On June 12, the RIAA filed for a preliminary injunction to shut down Napster. “Napster has been aware from the moment of its creation that its service offers little but pirated music, and that rampant infringement of the most commercially popular music in the world is the very foundation of its system,” its lawyers wrote.[1] In addition to the RIAA, Napster was fending off lawsuits from the rock band Metallica and rap artist Dr Dre.
On July 26, 2000, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel sided with the RIAA and ordered Napster to stop distributing copyrighted songs. As part of her decision, the judge said that 70 million people are expected to be using Napster by the end of the year and "what lures them is the infringing use." Napster’s lawyer, David Boies, protested that it would be hard for the company to comply with the order, since Napster couldn’t easily track which songs were copyrighted. Judge Patel had little sympathy. “That's their problem, they created this monster," she said.
Napster immediately appealed and were granted a stay of the preliminary injunction until October, when the case was scheduled to be heard. One of the judges cited the opinion of his Napster-using son, who had told him that forcing Napster to remove copyrighted material “would be like trying to take the piss out of a pool.”
So the company could continue operating, although its future was still imperilled. There was a lot of extra strain on its servers too — usage had ballooned due to all the publicity, to around 22 million users by the end of July.
In the months following, Fanning became something of a rock star in popular culture. On September 7, he appeared on the MTV Video Music Awards show, introducing Britney Spears. Fanning wore a Metallica tee-shirt on-stage and awkwardly joked with host Carson Daly that it had been “shared” with him, but he was thinking about buying it. The camera panned to Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich in the audience, who looked decidedly unamused.
Several weeks later, Fanning was on the cover of Time magazine — joining the 1996 version of Marc Andreessen in representing the internet to a mainstream readership. Just like with Andreessen, the accompanying article tried to imbue Fanning with a pop star vibe. It described him as a kind of nerd version of Eminem (whose album “The Marshall Mathers LP” had topped the Billboard charts earlier that year):
“His name and his face — those piercing blue eyes, wide cheeks and stolid expression under the ever present University of Michigan baseball cap — have become synonymous with the promise of the Internet to empower computer users and the possibility that some kiddie-punk programmer will destroy entire industries.”
David Bowie had compared the Internet to an alien at the end of 1999, but now, as the dot-com economy slowly unraveled and the cultural industries began fighting back, the internet was being painted as a monster. First, by Judge Patel, and now by Time magazine, which thought Fanning — and young programmers like him — might “destroy entire industries.”
In his own youthful peak, Bowie had never been compared to a monster. However, Eminem was being written about in that way in 2000; and later, in 2013, he even wrote a song called “The Monster.” It reflected back on when he was at the height of his fame, around 2000:
I wanted the fame but not the cover of Newsweek
Oh well, guess beggars can't be choosey
Wanted to receive attention for my music
Wanted to be left alone in public, excuse me
For wantin' my cake, and eat it too, and wantin' it both ways
Eminem had been on the cover of Newsweek, alongside his mentor Dr Dre, in October 2000, the same month the RIAA vs. Napster case was heard. Other than Ulrich, Dre was the next most vocal Napster opponent of that time.
What Dre did, Eminem usually followed, and sure enough he came out swinging too. “I've seen those little sissies on TV, talking about [how] 'The working people should just get music for free,’” said Eminem about Napster, according to a Yahoo News story in May 2000. “I’ve been a working person. I never could afford a computer, but I always bought and supported the artists that I liked. I always bought a Tupac CD, a Biggie CD, a Jay-Z CD. If you can afford a computer, you can afford to pay $16 for my CD.”
Napster’s user numbers continued to climb — it was approaching 50 million by the end of 2000 — but the company was in a hopeless situation legally.
As the face of Napster, Fanning had become both rock star and an enemy to rock stars. As the San Francisco Chronicle reflected in an end-of-year analysis:
“One image stands out during the momentous Year of Napster: Shawn Fanning making a beeline for a black sedan, looking like a rock star trying to escape the swarm of news photographers chasing him.”
Perhaps Fanning was finding out that it was better to be a shape-shifting alien than a monster. As Bowie had said in his own song about fame in 1975: “Is it any wonder I reject you first.”
SoundJam and the Beginnings of iTunes
Sometime in the final quarter of 2000, Apple secretly acquired SoundJam, an MP3 player for the Macintosh. Its core team — Bill Kincaid, Jeff Robbin and Dave Heller — had all worked at Apple prior to developing SoundJam, so they easily slotted back into Apple’s Cupertino HQ. The trio began work on turning SoundJam into the product we now know as iTunes.
The origin story of SoundJam goes back to a report Kincaid heard on NPR radio about the Diamond Rio, the pioneering MP3 player which the RIAA had targeted before suing Napster. As Kincaid wrote in a later online account, he’d not heard of MP3 until this point:
“It all sounded really interesting — and when at the end of the spiel the fellow said something about ‘Don't get excited, Mac users, 'cause it won't work with Macs.’ I thought, ‘Ha! I can fix that!’”
Kincaid initially planned to develop a “Rio Manager” app for the Mac. He was soon joined by Robbin, a fellow engineer, who suggested they extend the product vision to building “a Mac equivalent to WinAmp” (the media player for Windows developed by Justin Frankel, now building a Napster competitor called Gnutella).
SoundJam had only been released in the summer of 1999, but just over a year later they were back ensconced at Apple HQ. As told in Steven Levy’s book, “The Perfect Thing”:
“In only four months, the team produced the first version of iTunes. With its brushed-silver look borrowed from iMovie, it was not just a huge step up from Sound Jam but a leap beyond the jukeboxes available on Windows machines.”
The original vision for iTunes was to manage the music that Mac users already owned. It would be just a music player, not a music store — according to Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, the record labels didn’t approach Jobs until the beginning of 2002.[2] However, Jobs had begun to think about pairing iTunes with a portable music player. The planning for what would turn into the iPod began in the fall of 2000, wrote Isaacson.
With the rising notoriety of Napster and the secret projects inside of Apple to build a digital jukebox — and soon a portable MP3 player — the time was ripe for the music industry to make the shift from analog formats (CDs, vinyl records, AM and FM radio) to digital (MP3, internet radio, streaming). The cultural implications of this were discussed in a cover story of The Atlantic Monthly magazine in September 2000, entitled “The Heavenly Jukebox.”
The article was written by Charles C. Mann, who opened with an anecdote about Lars Ulrich protesting outside Napster’s office in San Mateo, back in March. But the larger point of the article was the societal shift just beginning to happen in popular music:
“Within the music industry it is widely believed that much of the physical infrastructure of music — compact discs, automobile cassette-tape players, shopping-mall megastores — is rapidly being replaced by the Internet and a new generation of devices with no moving parts.”
Mann cited a research paper which claimed that by 2003, “listeners will rarely if ever drive to Tower Records for their music,” but instead “they will tap into a vast cloud of music on the Net.” This was the “heavenly jukebox” of the article title and, wrote Mann, it “will hold the contents of every record store in the world, all of it instantly accessible from any desktop.”
In reality, it took several years longer for the “heavenly jukebox” to arrive, in the form of streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. But Mann’s article was right about the big things. He contended that legal challenges by the likes of Metallica and the RIAA would ultimately not be enough to turn back the tide of digital music — “the Internet, as the new-economy magazines like to say, has Changed Everything.”
Also in The Atlantic Monthly that September of 2000 was a story entitled “The Lawless Frontier.” But it wasn’t an article about Napster, it was about the “tribal lands of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.” Not to stretch the geopolitical metaphor too far, but there was a sense of lawlessness about music on the internet as the twenty-first century began. In 2000, we didn’t yet know that Apple would soon ride in and be the new sheriff in town. Or that the record industry would eventually embrace internet streaming as its new default business model. There was a frontier mentality about digital music at this time, and it wasn’t clear how law and order would be imposed.
In its “web only” supplementary coverage of the heavenly jukebox story, The Atlantic provided a directory of websites for readers to check out. It was mostly comprised of peer-to-peer sites, like Napster, Gnutella, and other copycat sites. One listing, for a site called Scour Exchange, had this apt description: “A Napster-like service that lets people search for other media. It, too, has been sued by record companies.”
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