What happened to the founders of Napster?

At about thirteen years after the closure of Napster, the popular file-sharing program that allowed illegally downloading copyrighted music, the Economist told the successive drafts of Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, the two computer Americans who launched the program when were 20 and 19 years old. 

The two gained sudden popularity in 2000, when Napster was sued by some big U.S. record companies have made it easier for numerous violations of copyright law, allowing millions of people to download songs without paying the rights to the authors: the company was forced to remove any material covered by copyright from the site, declared bankruptcy and was eventually sold to Roxio, a U.S. computer company. After several changes of ownership, now part of Rhapsody, an online music store, and has become a sort of Spotify: you can listen and download on their devices more than 20 million songs at 9,95 € per month. 

The most well known of the two founders is Sean Parker, also thanks to the fact that the film focuses on the history of Facebook, "The Social Network", its part - that of a computer genius a little 'crazy - it was sung and played by the famous actor Justin Timberlake. After Napster, Parker founded Plaxo, a sort of manager in your phone book contacts, but he was asked to leave the company by some investors. Then, at age 24, became president of Facebook, a post from which he was forced to resign because he was arrested for alleged possession of cocaine (although he was never formally charged). The Economist says that when he heard about the project of Spotify, a widespread program that allows you to stream free and paid - with some benefits - millions of songs, "he wrote in a bar in a long letter to the founder of the service Daniel Ek, explaining his ideas for the company. "Parker won a seat on the board of directors of the company, and was involved in the launch of the service in the United States. Being still Sean Parker, however, gives him a few more problem: The Economist says that once he happened to attend a meeting between the manager of Spotify and the head of a major record company when the latter asked him , shouting, "You came here with your own private jet? There I had it too, a private jet, before Napster. "

Following the release of "The Social Network" Parker was a guest in an episode of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," one of the most watched talk shows in the United States, and was the subject of a long profile in the American Vanity Fair, in which he wrote that he had "a reputation for erratic party animal." Contacted recently by The Economist, said he believed that he survived the "epic failure, a Greek tragedy," Napster "thanks to a common little resistance." 

Of the two, explains the English weekly, was certainly the most introverted Fanning, which became apparent when he found himself in trouble during testimony before a U.S. Senate committee about the issue of copyright infringement by file sharing programs, in 2000. After Napster, Fanning tried first to develop Snocap, a kind of platform launched in 2004 where artists and record companies could resell their material protected: thanks to the wide diffusion of iTunes, however, did not succeed. In 2006, Fanning developed Rupture, a social network for gamers, which was purchased for about $ 15 million from the big manufacturer of Electronic Arts video games, but dismissed Fanning and his staff in 2009. 

In 2012, Parker and Fanning launched with Airtime, a social network whose conversations are taking place mainly on video, still very little spread. 

According to the Economist, Fanning and Parker "were able to quickly recognize the social potential of the Internet and its ability to gather people around common interests like music." The British weekly leads also to the success of Napster subsequent products like Airbnb - an online service that allows people to rent or sublet their homes - and Uber - a private transport service in the middle between the taxi and car rental with driver through an application: "Napster helped to inspire the so-called" sharing economy, "in which a software acts as an intermediary between strangers that wish to share or exchange things." In addition, of course, to "get educated a generation of consumers to believe that music can and should be free on the internet," placing the foundations for the free version of Spotify, that allows you to listen to an unlimited number of songs alternating with some advertising . 

As for their subsequent activities, however, Willian Sahlman of the Harvard Business School told the British weekly that the success achieved thanks to a startup can easily lead one to think that its founders has been acquired thanks to them, rather than the timing right of entry into the market. Even Steve Jobs, remember the Economist, "the most celebrated software entrepreneur of modern times", he did not get much with NeXT, the computer manufacturer founded by him in 1985 when he was sent away from Apple. 

The Economist concludes that "Napster, in the end, is just one of many pioneering companies that have invented a technology and then allow others to make us money," but that his story teaches that "success requires much more than wanting to be rich, and that an initial failure should not deter you. At 33 and 34 years, Fanning and Parker still have the time and determination to try to re-create, in a creative way, a bit 'of chaos. "