There was a time when the internet still smelled like the future.
CRT monitors, screaming modems, and an almost romantic desire to share everything .
That's how Napster was born — a teenager named Shawn Fanning with too many lines of code and an idea that would set the music industry on fire:
What if we could all share our songs with each other, for free?
The year was 1999.
The Y2K bug was the paranoia of the moment, and suddenly, the music became infinite.
For the first time, millions of people could access everything they wanted to hear, without paying, without asking permission.
It was digital paradise… and the beginning of the end of the old order.
⚡️ The glitch that changed music
Napster was more than a program: it was a movement.
The first major act of online cultural disobedience.
A generation of teenagers connected by the sound of a modem and a shared folder.
It wasn't just about piracy — it was about belonging .
To discover. To break the monopoly of CDs, plastic, and control.
But of course, the system wasn't going to stay still.
🥁 Enter Metallica
In 2000, Metallica discovered that their song "I Disappear" —still unreleased— was circulating freely on Napster.
Furious, more than 300,000 users have sued the platform for copyright infringement.
The band that had sung about rebellion and freedom suddenly became a symbol of the "old world".
And Napster, on the banner of the new.
It was a culture war in the midst of the digital transition.
On one side, there were the artists who watched as the rules of the business crumbled.
On the other hand, there was a generation that didn't understand why sharing music was a crime.
🕹️ The beginning of something (and the end of something else)
Napster was shut down in 2001.
But the damage—or the miracle—was already done.
From its ashes were born torrents, peer-to-peer , and the very idea of streaming .
Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud… they all owe something to that teenage glitch that changed history.
And although today we live surrounded by endless music, something was lost along the way:
the thrill of searching, the waiting, the risk of a corrupted file destroying your PC, the value of the find.
Napster was the first soulful mistake of the 21st century.
A spark of creative chaos that reminded us that technology, before becoming addictive, was liberating.