Episode Details

Twenty million users in year one. Eighty million at the peak. Then a lawsuit took Napster down in about six months. This one walks through how a platform built by Sean Fanning in June 1999 grew that fast and fell that hard.

Metallica chose to be the band everyone resented, betting that looking greedy in public was worth it if the industry finally took piracy seriously. Prince chose silence instead, walking away from digital music rather than negotiate with any of it. South Park noticed the gap between those two reactions and built a 2000 parody around it that holds up better than the lawsuit did. Spotify is buried in the same story, a company with its own shady start and its own fines paid, now standing exactly where Napster got sued out of.

Napster lost the case. The question of who actually gets paid never got resolved.

Topics: Napster history, Metallica lawsuit, Sean Fanning, South Park, Spotify

Originally aired on 2026-06-18