The increasing prevalence of CD-burning equipment further facilitated an illicit trade. In an era when the vast majority of music was still physically purchased on Compact Disc, an untold variety was made accessible to any listener with access to a PC and decent internet collection.

When the program went live later that summer, it did so with unprecedented popularity right out of the gate: millions of tracks were accessible almost overnight and user numbers were doubling every few weeks. In return, any files on your system were also available for download. Napster – titled after Fanning’s nickname – was essentially a glorified file-browser which used a stripped-back interface to grant access to MP3 files on interlinked machines. In a Newsweek article, Fanning later explained that it began as a means between friends to share files and converse, 'to build communities around different types of music.' Following a serendipitous late-night conversation with fellow teenage ‘hacker’ Sean Parker about the difficulty in finding the material they wanted online, however, he became the creator of the peer-to-peer platform that would change how people accessed – and commoditised – music forever. On the face of things, Shawn Fanning was just another bullet-headed college dropout, having departed Boston’s Northeastern University after too much partying. Unprecedented times call for unexpected heroes, and much as few would have expected Bay Area mavericks Metallica to be the ones to make a stand for artists’ rights, none could have foretold the pertinence of their arguments two decades on. For purveyors of creative media, it was the rise of a new Wild West, run roughshod over by Silicon Valley’s fresh-faced cowboys in plaid shirts and cargo shorts. At the end of the 1990s, as technology improved and internet access soared, the online realm opened up like a new frontier, full of untold possibility and peril.

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