Скачать или смотреть How an 18-Year-Old Destroyed the $40 Billion Music Industry

THE TEENAGER WHO DESTROYED A $40 BILLION INDUSTRY

In June 1999, an 18-year-old college dropout named Shawn Fanning uploaded a program that would change music forever. Within 6 months, 10 million people were using it. Within 18 months, 80 million users had joined what became the fastest-growing software application in internet history.

His creation was Napster - and it terrified the entire music industry.

The $40 billion recording industry mobilized everything against him: massive lawsuits, FBI raids, congressional hearings, and even got Metallica to sue their own fans. They eventually crushed Napster, bankrupted the company, and celebrated their total legal victory.

But they made a catastrophic mistake.

Destroying Napster didn't save the music industry. It unleashed something far worse - a decentralized wave of file-sharing networks that couldn't be stopped. Kazaa, LimeWire, BitTorrent, and dozens of others rose from Napster's ashes, each more resilient than the last.

By 2009, the music industry's annual revenue had collapsed from $38.6 billion to just $17 billion - a devastating 56% decline in one decade.

This is the story of how one shy teenager coding on a borrowed computer in a dorm room accidentally triggered the complete transformation of how humanity consumes music. It's about the fastest rise and fall in tech history, a billion-dollar settlement offer that was rejected, and why winning every legal battle still meant losing the war.

Shawn Fanning didn't just build software. He proved that once information is freed, it can never be recaptured. The record labels could sue him into bankruptcy, destroy his company, and win every court case - but they couldn't make 57 million people forget what free, instant music felt like.

You can kill a company. You can't kill an idea.


TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - The 48-Hour Countdown
2:34 - The Dorm Room Revolution
8:45 - Napster Explodes
15:22 - The Industry Fights Back
23:18 - Metallica's War
31:42 - The Billion Dollar Offer
38:56 - Napster Dies
44:15 - The Hydra Effect
52:30 - The Industry Collapses


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