How Napster Inspired a Generation of Rule-Breaking Entrepreneurs

Napster's latest AI pivot 'is the latest in a series of attempts by various owners to ride its brand cachet during emerging tech waves,' Fast Company reported in July.
In March, it sold for $207 million to Infinite Reality, an immersive digital media and e-commerce company, which also rebranded as Napster last month. Since 2020, other owners have included a British VR music startup (to create VR concerts) and two crypto-focused companies that bought it to anchor a Web3 music platform. Napster's launch follows a growing number of attempts to drive AI adoption beyond smartphones and laptops.

And tonight the Washington Post re-visited the legacy of Napster's original mp3-sharing model, arguing Napster 'inspired successive generations of entrepreneurs to risk flouting the law so they could grow enough to get the laws changed to suit them, including Airbnb and Uber.'

'Napster to me embodies the idea that it is better to seek forgiveness than permission,' said Mark Lemley, director of Stanford Law School's Program in Law, Science & Technology. 'It didn't work out well for Napster or for many of the others who got sued, but it worked out very well for everyone else — users, and eventually the content industry, too, which is making record profits....' [Napster co-founder Sean] Parker later advised Spotify, and Napster marketing chief Oliver Schusser is now Apple's vice president for music.

Although many users saw Napster as an extension of rock-and-roll rebellion, that was not the company's real plan. First Fanning's majority-owning uncle, and then venture capital firm Hummer Winblad, wanted the start-up to leverage its knowledge of individual music consumers to make lucrative deals with the labels, according to internal documents this reporter found in researching a book on Napster. They warned that if no agreement were reached and Napster failed, more decentralized pirate services would take the audience and offer the labels nothing.

But settlement talks failed. The litigation blitz also took down a Napster competitor called Scour, which a young Travis Kalanick had joined shortly after its founding. Kalanick later created Uber, dedicated to overthrowing taxi regulations.

The article concludes that 'Now it is Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google, among the largest companies in the world, bankrolling the consumption of all media.

'They, too, have absorbed Napster's lessons in realpolitik, namely to build it first and hope the regulators will either yield or catch up.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.