p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- Napster is dead. Long live Napster II.

Not.

Because Napster II is the disinterred corpse of the former P2P file sharing application which lurches from financial crisis to financial crisis.

Napster — the original, that is — was built by Shawn Fanning and, had the corporate music dinosaurs been able to extract their heads from their anal orifices, they and Fanning would be bathing in endless streams of cash, and it would now be 10 years old.

But that was not to be and Fanning went to the Dark Side with his DRM product, Snocap, now owned by imeem, but barely alive.

His latest venture is something called Rupture which ‘Lets you share your gaming life’.

“At its peak, more than 60 million people worldwide used Napster,” says the San Francisco Chronicle in a birthday retrospective, going on »»»

In one free-music frenzy, users downloaded 2.79 billion songs in February 2001, just before a series of rulings by U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel and a federal appellate court in San Francisco that the program did violate copyright laws and had to be shut down.

The company filed for bankruptcy in 2002. The name and logo were bought out of bankruptcy by the online music subscription service that now is a subsidiary of consumer electronics retailer Best Buy Co. Inc.

Recording industry revenue has plummeted since then. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, sales of recorded music worldwide dropped from about $38 billion in 1999 to $18.4 billion in 2008.

The Big Music music dinosaurs are slowly but surely sinking into the tar pits, and as they flounder and founder, what started as a craze enjoyed by a (relatively few) geeky music lovers is now THE way music lovers  interact with each other online, completely ignoring sites foisted by the once dominant corporate music industry.

Says Fanning in the story, “”Again, it’s adapt or die.

“As industries change and new technologies come out, you’re forced to look at it from the standpoint of what’s best for the consumer, what will the consumer want? And through the Internet age, which was the big thing they didn’t fully grasp, in the end, the user is always going to win.”

Where are they now? »»»

Hank Barry
Then: Interim CEO and a board member for Napster Inc. from 2000 to 2002.
Now: Director, law firm of Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin of San Francisco.

Hilary Rosen
Then: Chairwoman, chief executive officer, Recording Industry Association of America, 1998-2003.
Now: Managing partner for the public relations firm Brunswick Group’s Washington, D.C., office.

Marilyn Hall Patel
Then: U.S. District Court judge in San Francisco. Ruled in favor of the record industry to shut down Napster Inc. in 2001.
Now: Judge, U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Currently presiding over copyright case in which the Motion Picture Association of America seeks to block DVD copying software from RealNetworks Inc.

The Chronicle also has a downloadable podcast of the interview.

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financial crisis – Napster: worth more dead than alive, July 21, 2008
endless streams of cash – The Days of Wine and Napster, May 19, 2009
barely alive – Warner, $33M down the `digital music drain`, May 8, 2009
San Francisco Chronicle – Assessing Napster – 10 years later, June 1, 2009