Napster ?Download time remaining: three seconds? two seconds? one second? download complete! Do you wish to download another song? Click yes or no.? This is what is happening in most homes around the globe. People are downloading song after song from Internet sites or downloading and uploading songs straight from other people?s computers. This was merely a dream a few years ago. In the past, music lovers had to go to stores to buy their songs on cassette tape, or on compact disks (CD?s). Now, with a few simple clicks of the mouse and a few keystrokes on the keyboard, anyone can have access to millions of songs instantly. Shawn Fanning, 18 at the time, created a new revolutionary program, Napster (?Technology: Meet the Napster??). This simple program was the first of its kind. It allowed users to connect to other computers to download Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) (?MPEG?) Layer 3 (MP3) (?What is a MP3??) files directly from another computer.
Napster now has over 64 million registered users (?Graham- Napster must??). Thousands have come to utilize Napster, yet its history is quite rocky. Individuals and groups proclaim themselves for or against this phenomenon, yet, ultimately, it simply lets music be exposed to the people.
Since the creation of Napster in 1999, over 64 million people have used Napster to download their songs (?Graham- Napster must??). People have been buying new hard drives, so they can store more songs. ?I?ve got three thousand songs on my hard drive!? says Jacob Lawrence, a 27 year old, who uses Napster frequently, ?I?m the biggest fan around? (?Inside Napster??)! Napster, at one point, had over 3000 gigabytes of songs, that any registered user could access (Napster). People have begun to use Napster like an everyday appliance, like a toaster or a washing machine,