Napster
Napster was a program that Shawn Fanning created while he attended Northeastern University in Boston. Napster allowed users to share and download music over the Internet.
Napster was featured as a top term of 2001.
Napster history
Napster was founded on June 1, 1999, and files were first shared over the service in September 1999. By February 2001, Napster had over 26 million users. However, Napster was shut down in July 2001 due to legal issues.
Napster filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 3, 2002, and on November 25, 2002, Roxio acquired the Napster name and logo in a bankruptcy auction. Roxio later rebranded their music-sharing service Pressplay as Napster.
On October 3, 2011, Rhapsody announced it would acquire Napster, which was completed later that year. On July 14, 2016, Rhapsody was rebranded as Napster.
On May 10, 2022, Napster was sold to Algorand.
Napster alternatives
During the height of Napster's popularity, there were several multiple P2P alternatives, including: Audio Galaxy, Edonkey2000, Filetopia, Filerouge, Gnute, iMesh, KaZaA, MojoNation, MyNapster, Napigator, NetBrilliant, Newtella, Ohaha, Riffshare, Scour, Song Spy, Swapoo, and WebNAP. Today, these services are no longer available as most people switched to BitTorrent.