If you’re a music fan of a certain age, you’ll remember the night that tech entrepreneur Shawn Fanning trolled Metallica on national TV by wearing the band’s T-shirt onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards. The stunt was a clever diss to the band, which was trying to sue Fanning’s file-sharing platform Napster out of existence, but also a seminal moment in music history that symbolized the beginning of the end of the industry’s longtime business model that revolved around selling records and CDs.
Napster would become little more than a footnote in that broader story as the platform was sold and resold to various private equity players, while the likes of Pandora, Spotify, and Apple would go on to popularize the streaming model we know today. But as of this year, Napster has a new CEO who has a plan to make the service relevant again—and it's not a bad one.
