Napster was an idea that started in the young mind of Shawn Fanning. Shawn was a 19-year-old college freshman attending Boston's Northeastern University when he came up with the idea for Napster. This single thought, moved into action, has now changed the way we get music. Shawn wasn't satisfied with the available means of finding MP3's, so he decided to make a new way.

When Shawn was younger his uncle decided to look out and provide for him because Shawn's father abandoned him and his mother when he was born. He gave him the incentive of $100 per 'A' in school and bought Shawn his first computer. Shawn excelled quickly at using a computer, and he interned summers during high school at his uncle's business NetGames. Through doing so, he learned a lot about programming. After not being accepted to Boston's Carnegie Mellon University, he went to Northeastern where he was moved up to junior level classes. Being bored with school, he started downloading and collecting MP3's, and stopped going to classes. His uncle eventually let him start working on his own project at work, an application that allowed users to search for MP3 files over the Internet. He dropped out of college and began to pursue his project instead and his uncle was behind him all the way. When the first beta version was finished he gave it to 30 friends he had met in chat rooms and had them promise not spread it, nor tell anyone about it. But it seems none of them kept to their word and after a few days more than 3,000 people had downloaded it. Napster became so popular among college kids that it has now been banned from many college's campuses for taking up too much bandwidth.

Now Napster faces many struggles, lawsuits from the record companies and multiple recording artists, and finding a way to make money out of it, plague them. They have now been ordered to ban all copyrighted songs from their searches, and also not to let anybody with Dr. Dre, Metallica, or other artist's songs use their service. The have a long road of legal battles ahead of them, and many think they won't win.