Friends from the chatroom were hired as staff, and Napster was launched in May 1999. Parker, meanwhile, had wheedled $50,000 from investors, and the pair moved to California.
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Working on a borrowed PC in his uncle's Massachusetts office, sleeping in a nearby utility cupboard in order to conduct days-long programming sessions, Fanning had a finished product by the spring of 1999.
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The term Napster passed, of course, to the piece of software Fanning was coding. Fanning was a year younger, an unsmiling boy from Massachusetts who shaved his head against the curled, or "nappy", hair that had earned him his nickname. Parker suggested they collaborate and he met "napster", or Shawn Fanning, for the first time in person. He was 18, skinny, with gelled-up red hair and a tendency to look at the floor when he spoke. Share? Why would anyone do that? But Sean Parker, an aspiring entrepreneur, liked the idea.
(The MP3, devised in the mid 1990s, had become the dominant format for digital audio in the emerging internet age, and has pretty much remained so.) It would allow people to dip into each other's hard drives, and share their MP3 music files.
In about 1998, someone with the username "napster" revealed to those present in an internet chatroom that he'd been working on a piece of software to fix the problem. Winter says he had "friends who would spend 14 hours trying to pull a Butthole Surfers song offline. Getting music off the internet before Napster was tricky, unreliable – as someone remarks in Downloaded, "a colossal pain in the ass". How was this possible? It was as if the door to a bank vault had been left open, no guards in sight. For my part – plundering singles by Artful Dodger, by Semisonic – I have a memory of actually looking over my shoulder.
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"The thrill," said one, whose first download was by Smashing Pumpkins, "even when I listened to the music through my mum's tinny computer speakers." Another quickly sought to mine Marlena Shaw's backlist and "couldn't believe it worked". I asked colleagues of a similar age what they remembered of Napster's arrival. We were wilfully blinkered, probably, on the exact details of this last point. Music was something you bought after protracted debate with friends in the aisles of Our Price, and then, suddenly, songs were accessible from home. The internet, when it came in our teens, was welcome, exciting and fathomable, but it changed things briskly and sometimes bewilderingly. I was part of the web-straddling generation. It was like that famous shot from 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the prehistoric monkey throws a bone in the air and it turns into a spaceship. Speaking to me on the phone from the US, Winter added: "There was no ramp up. how much material was suddenly available," the technology guru John Perry Barlow tells Alex Winter, the director of Downloaded, in his new documentary. I installed the software, searched Napster's vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was 17, and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame ( OMC's How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). Some way from San Mateo, in suburban London I had just become one myself. As recounted in Downloaded – a documentary soon to premiere at the SXSW film festival, telling the story of a piece of software that came and went and whipped up a new digital music industry in its slip – Napster had 20 million users at the time. Figures scrawled on a whiteboard told how many people around the world had installed their file-sharing application and were using it to download music from each other's computers. I n the first weeks of 2000 the founders of Napster were in their office above a bank in San Mateo, California, considering dizzying numbers.
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