A 19-year-old's shareware player, a college freshman's file-sharing app, and a record industry lawsuit, all inside about four years, built and then broke the first version of digital music.
In April 1997, Justin Frankel, 19 years old and working out of his parents' house in Sedona, Arizona, released the first version of Winamp. His company, Nullsoft, named as a dig at Microsoft's size, had exactly two developers: Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev. MP3s were starting to spread online and there was no good, lightweight way to play them on Windows. Winamp was.
It shipped with a mascot, a llama, and a startup sound that announced "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass" every time it launched, a joke Frankel kept because he thought it was funny. What actually made it a phenomenon was that the whole interface was skinnable, and thousands of people built and shared custom skins, giving it a personality no corporate media app has matched since.
Napster launched the same day AOL would later close its Nullsoft deal, June 1, 1999, though the two had nothing to do with each other. Shawn Fanning, an 18-year-old freshman at Northeastern University, built it with his friend Sean Parker, who'd later become Facebook's first president. The idea was simple: search for a song, and Napster found it on someone else's computer and pulled it straight to yours.
It grew to roughly 80 million registered users at its peak. Winamp gave people a reason to want MP3s. Napster gave them a way to get every MP3 that existed, for free, instantly.
AOL acquires Nullsoft for roughly 80 million dollars in stock. Frankel is 20. Winamp has 15 million users, no venture funding, and had been kept alive partly by people mailing in shareware registration checks because they loved it.
The RIAA warns Napster that its business model violates copyright, then files suit that December.
The Ninth Circuit rules against Napster in February. A judge orders it to strip all copyrighted material in March. With no way to filter its own network, Napster shuts down its file-sharing service on July 11, 2001.
Winamp got bought. Napster got shut down. Both, in their own way, proved the same thing at the same moment: people wanted their music as files they controlled, not tracks locked to a store or a radio dial, and they wanted it badly enough to build a startup or a lawsuit around it.
iTunes showed up in 2003 as the legal answer to Napster, and streaming eventually replaced buying MP3s at all. Neither one brought back what made the Winamp era feel different: a player that was just yours, skinned however you wanted, playing files that were also just yours, with no service in the middle deciding what stayed available. Floyd doesn't relive 1999. It just keeps that one part of it around, for anyone who never stopped wanting a player that plays their music and nothing else.
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