Napster- What is it?

In 1998 a university dropout, Shawn Fenning, nicknamed napster, spent days without sleep in his uncle's office producing a new music swapping program now known as napster. Napster is an MP3 file sharing program that lets you connect to millions of other users world-wide and swap music with them for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, even Napster itself as a program is FREE and is available to ANYONE with a PC and the Internet.

Napster spreads all types of music ranging from unknown and up and coming bands to famous names like Craig David and Artful Dodger this is all at absolutely NO COST. So as you can imagine, as Napster grew more popular than ever its total users topped 50MILLION in November 2000.

Nearly 75 percent of college students have downloaded music from the Net, according to a recent study by Greenfield Online, an international research firm. Nearly two-thirds of the 1,135 college students surveyed say they download music as a way to sample music before buying it.

So does this prove that the artists are actually benefiting out of Napster as people will hear their songs and possibly go and buy their singles. Many people believe music labels should have been donating money to Napster users, not threatening to sue them. And so the much-libeled Napster users are dedicated music buyers, quick to reach for their wallets. Greenfield research says it found that 45 per cent of online music fans are more likely to have increased their music purchases than online fans that don't use Napster. The study of Napster users found that 71 percent of users say they're willing to pay to download an entire album.

A maker of MP3 portable players said, "The year 2000 is a fantastic year for digital music, we had this earthquake called Napster whose...