Napster: The Revoloution loren DeLoache

In November 1998, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker changed the way the internet would be used forever. The main job of the internet was just to store and retrieve information. It was Shawn's idea, just a regular high school student, to have a global internet community with access to every music file, ever.He ran with this idea, shared it with his friend, Sean Parker, and took the idea around to investors. The program was named Napster. This program founded by two high school students revolutionized the internet.Before Napster, communication was limited to phones and speaking in person. After its creation, there was now a way for people to communicate by sharing music with each other. It was a way of "sharing music so freely." said Fanning, founder of Napster.

The purpose of the documentary is to elaborate on the revolution and how it affected the music industry and the rest of the world. At first, the thought of a program like this was laughed at by elders. Ali Aydar said, "You are telling me people are going to download a client, put that client o their computers and they are going to allow stuff on their hard drives to be shared?" He thought no one would be open to letting that happen, but he was so wrong.

Napster started to spread around college campuses like wild fire. Many musicians were getting irritated with the fact that people were getting to download their music for free. big corporations were becoming fearful that having a program that could do such things like this, that Fanning would be able to hack and reshape the entire internet. Eventually a law suit was made against Napster for illegally downloading music, or piracy. In 2000, Napster agreed to to filter copyrighted music in an attempt to appease the RIAA, but it didn't exactly work. Napster was finally shut down, but hundreds of more similar programs appeared.

I believe that the director intended this documentary for people who were in the pre- and current technology age. It is meant for people in the pre-tech age to help them better understand exactly what was happening. I think it is for the tech age because it helps them understand what helped to revolutionize the internet into what it is today. By showing both the previous and more recent interviews it helps the audience to realize how recent this really is. Having Shawn Fanning do the new interviews gives the documentary more credibility and would not have been as valid without showing the older ones as well. They used big CEOs, celebrities, and big people in the music industry to speak about this, using ethos. using just regular people would have been pointless because they have no known knowledge about the subject.

Music is not really played through out the documentary, but they had some techno sounds and throughout the credits at the end they played a song about putting the world on fire. I think they used this song because in a way, metaphorically, Shawn Fanning put the world on fire.

Alex Winter, the director, did a great job of using people from both sides of the argument. Showing little to no bias. He represented both sides fairly. There was a side that believed Napster was goo and nothing was wrong with it. That it was really inevitable and everyone should accept it. Then there was the other side, that believed Napster was evil. They were scared that it would turn into something much bigger that they could not control.

Overall, the documentary does a good job of digging deeper into Napster and showing what it was, what it did, and who all it affected. Don Iennis said that he knew "whoever was older than 20 years at the time would be an immigrant," and that "whoever was 20 years or younger would be a native." to the new technological world. The incorporation of music, interviews, and speaker selection helps to persuade the audience to make a decision of liking Napster, the biggest revolution of the internet of our time.

shawn fanninng managing Napster

Credits:

Created with images by Picography - "notebook laptop work" • wannabehipster - "fanningtime" • andreas160578 - "turntable hub s-record-players" • Joi - "Shawn Fanning"

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