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In May 2000, the latter delivered 13 boxes of documents to Napster’s offices, listing hundreds of thousands of users suspected of unlawfully sharing their music. The RIAA, the trade body representing US record companies, had begun suing the firm in 1999, and acts including Dr Dre and Metallica tried to close it down. Napster had also spawned copycat services such as LimeWire that were built with one eye on avoiding the same legal mistakes Napster had made.īut Napster was by now seriously under threat. Moby said he was “veryflattered” that his music was being shared on Napster and Courtney Love claimed that “major label recording contracts” were the real pirates. By October 2000, its creator was on the cover of Time magazine. Napster had swiftly become a cultural talking point. “I figured if the company could survive for a year or so and make some arrangements with the record companies, that it could be a very good investment.” “I just wanted it to survive,” says Barry.
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His company invested $15m and got two of the three seats on Napster’s board. Music copyright lawyer-turned-VC Hank Barry became the company’s second CEO in a year. “Wouldn’t you prefer to spend $17 and get 17 songs that you like?”īut at the time, breaking apart the CD was never going to land well with labels, and Richardson stepped back in May 2000. “Why would you spend $17 on a Britney Spears CD and get only two songs that you like?” she asks.
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Richardson was planning a per-track download model – “a dollar a song” – echoing the $0.99 track price that iTunes would offer in 2003. (John Fanning did not respond to multiple requests from the Guardian to speak about his time at Napster. She claims he wanted to work with one firm valuing the company at $115m, but which Richardson felt would damage Napster’s long-term future.
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“I tried to keep him out of operations day-to-day as much as I could,” she says. Richardson knew John Fanning’s 70% stake would cause problems. “A man from one of the majors banged the table and said the answer was to ban the internet.”Īs the new millennium began, in San Francisco, a power struggle within Napster was threatening to pull the company under. Her account of a meeting between industry heads at Midem, the industry’s annual trade conference, in January 2000, sums up this divide. Jeremy Silver, VP for new media worldwide at EMI at the end of the 1990s, recounts chasing one of EMI’s most senior executives into the toilets to speak to him about digital plans: “The only time I could get him to stay still and listen to me was when he was having a piss!”Īlison Wenham was heading AIM, a newly formed trade body for independent labels, when Napster appeared. But it was a Sisyphean struggle to get the boards to really listen. EMI’s Capitol imprint was the first major to sell a download version of a single, Electric Barbarella by Duran Duran, in 1997. But the story is also about the slowness of a generational handover of power. There is an ossified narrative that record labels were too arrogant and lazy to see the digital revolution coming, and deserved their downfall. Pioneer … Napster founder Shawn Fanning arrives at court in 2001.