It’s 6pm on a weeknight in 2002. I settle into a desk chair and thump the huge, round power button on the family computer with my big toe. It clunks like a manual typewriter returning. Several minutes of whirring and clunking ensue as Windows XP boots up, bathing my 13-year-old face in its harsh blue glow. Next, another few minutes of what sounds like Wall-E being fed through a meat grinder as I connect to the internet, preventing my mother from making or receiving phone calls for the next hour. I immediately open Napster and queue downloads for as many horribly compressed, incorrectly titled songs as possible and watch them race to 100%. Out of Reach by the Get Up Kids competes with Method Man’s Bring the Pain. Jostling beneath them, probably: a selection of Slipknot singles, Fiona Apple’s entire discography, an unspeakable amount of Ween. Also Tom Lehrer reciting the elements over a Gilbert and Sullivan tune, popular at the time for reasons I no longer remember.
Depending on how you see things, Napster killed the music industry or set it free. The peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing programme, launched by Boston university students Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999, enabled users to share audio files stored on their personal hard drive. In theory this made it helpful for accessing, say, bootleg live recordings or hardcore punk EPs limited to 300 copies on tape. In practice, it saw a peak of 80 million users downloading anything that had ever been released at a rate of 14,000 songs a minute.
