What Happened to Napster?

Napster let anyone download almost any song for free starting in 1999. It lost in court and went dark in 2001, though the name lived on as a paid service.

current mood: nostalgiccurrently listening to: ♫ a half-finished download at 3 kbps

Written by Daniel Rivera · October 9, 202656k: ~1 min

In June 1999, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker launched Napster, a free program that let people share MP3 files straight from each other's computers. For about two years it felt like every song ever recorded was one search away. It grew faster than almost anything online before it, and the record labels sued almost right away. A court ordered it to stop sharing copyrighted music, and the free Napster shut down in July 2001. The name survived and changed hands for years as a paid music service.

How did Napster work?

Napster kept a central list of what everyone had and connected you straight to the person with the song. You installed a small program, picked a username and told it which folder held your MP3s. When you searched for a song, it showed every person with a copy and how fast their connection was. You picked one, hit download, and the file came straight from their computer to yours.

That middle step ended up at the center of the court case. Napster didn't store the songs itself, but it ran the list that made finding them easy.

The name came from Fanning's nickname in high school. Friends called him "Nappy" because of his curly hair. The logo was a cat wearing headphones, which ended up on stickers, shirts and plenty of desktop wallpapers. The files themselves usually landed on a Winamp playlist.

Everyone was on it

By February 2001, Napster had about 26 million users around the world. Most were students, because college dorms had fast internet and nobody had to pay for it. Some campuses found that MP3 downloads made up a huge share of their outside network traffic, and a lot of schools blocked Napster outright. Students found ways around the blocks, and the schools tried again. Anything they grabbed usually ended up on a mix CD by the weekend.

At home, things moved slower. On dial-up, one song could take a long time, and if somebody picked up the phone, the download died.

People left their computers running overnight with a queue of songs and checked in the morning to see what finished. A file named "Track 03" could turn out to be the right song, a live version, a different band, or ninety seconds of silence. Part of the fun was the gamble, and nobody ever got the ninety seconds back.

The first version only ran on Windows. A Mac version called Macster came out separately and was later bought and renamed Napster for Mac.

Vote: Did you ever use the original Napster?

Every nightorNever, honest

You'll need a free crib to vote.

Metallica, Dr. Dre and the lawsuits

The music industry moved fast. The major record labels, through the RIAA, sued Napster in December 1999. In April 2000, Metallica filed its own lawsuit after an unreleased song of theirs, "I Disappear," started spreading on the service.

The band said it had found about 335,000 users sharing its music and delivered the list of usernames to Napster. Dr. Dre sued about a month later.

For a lot of fans, that fight felt personal. Some people still remember where they were when they heard Metallica was going after their own listeners. Others agreed with the band and said artists deserved to be paid. Both sides argued about it on message boards for years, a habit that goes back to the old forums.

In July 2000, a federal judge ordered Napster to stop sharing copyrighted songs. An appeals court paused that order two days later, and Napster kept running while the case moved forward.

In February 2001, the appeals court ruled against Napster, and a new order told it to block copyrighted files. Filtering millions of songs by name didn't really work, and in July 2001 Napster shut the network off completely. It settled with Metallica and Dr. Dre that same month.

What happened to Napster after the shutdown?

Napster went bankrupt in 2002, and the name kept going without the free sharing. In June 2002 the company filed for bankruptcy. Later that year, Roxio, the company behind CD-burning software, bought the Napster name and logo for $5.3 million. It relaunched Napster in October 2003 as a paid store, with songs to buy one at a time or a monthly subscription.

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Best Buy bought Napster in 2008. At the end of 2011, the streaming service Rhapsody took it over, and in 2016 Rhapsody renamed its whole service Napster, so the old name came back as a regular streaming app. The brand has been sold a couple more times since then, most recently in 2025. By that point, most people who used the original had moved on to whatever app their phone came with.

What came after

When Napster went dark, people kept downloading. They moved to Kazaa, LimeWire and a long list of others that had no central list to shut down. If you spent the next few years fixing song names from LimeWire, you were living in the world Napster left behind.

The labels learned something too. People clearly wanted to grab one song at a time, right away, on their computer. Two years after Napster shut down, Apple opened a store built on that idea, and buying songs on iTunes became the legal version of the same habit. Anyone who still wanted their music on a shelf went back to taping songs off the radio, which at least never dropped at 98 percent.

Little things people remember

• The cat-in-headphones icon sitting in the corner of the screen
• Searching a song and sorting by connection speed to find someone on a fast line
• Hoping the person you were downloading from didn't log off at 98 percent
• Files with the wrong band name, so a song was "by" whoever was most popular that year
• Finding live versions and rare B-sides you couldn't buy in any store
• Dorm networks that suddenly crawled every night around ten

Napster was the first time a lot of people heard music they couldn't find at the mall. Somebody's folder full of old soul records or obscure punk bands was open to anyone who searched, and plenty of people found a favorite band through a mislabeled file. It also kicked off the long argument about what music is worth online, one that streaming services are still part of. The same hunt for new bands got easier later, as finding bands before algorithms shows.

If one of those songs still means something to you, it belongs on your profile. Make a crib and set it as your song. Here's a Top 8 of what this page remembered, in no particular order.

1. T#1 The cat in headphones
2. S#2 Sorting by connection speed
3. T#3 Track 03 mystery files
4. N#4 Ninety seconds of silence
5. S#5 Stuck at 98 percent
6. L#6 Live versions and B-sides
7. W#7 Wrong band names
8. D#8 Dorm networks at ten o'clock

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