Napster with Niko Stratis

This week, a tale of two Shawns/Seans, their impossible dream, and the file sharing service that lived fast, died young, and helped create the internet as we know it. Plus, Metallica.

Here's where to find Niko:

Website
Newsletter
Twitter

Resources cited in the show introduction:

The Racial Roots Behind the Term "Nappy" on NPR's Code Switch
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/08/09/412886884/the-racial-roots-behind-the-term-nappy

The Complex History and Politicization of Black Hair in America, presented by Danielle Harvey
https://kisaradio.org/podcast-feature-the-complex-history-and-politicization-of-black-hair-in-america-presented-by-danielle-harvey/

Coiled by Leanne Aile
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/coiled/id1585408648

"The Other N-Word" by Shalwah Evans
https://www.essence.com/feature/is-nappy-negative-or-black-hair-empowerment/

"How Natural Black Hair at Work Became a Civil Rights Issue" by Chanté Griffin
https://daily.jstor.org/how-natural-black-hair-at-work-became-a-civil-rights-issue/

"The Natural Hair Movement" by Kamina Wilkerson
https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/continuum:0001.008

Support us:

Bonus Episodes on Patreon
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Buy cute merch

Where else to find us:

Sarah's other show, You Are Good 

[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase

Links:

https://www.nikostratis.com
https://nikostratis.substack.com
https://twitter.com/nikostratis
http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com

Transcript

Sarah: Carson Daly knows what side his bread is buttered on.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. And today we are talking about the dramatic rise and even dramatic-er fall of Napster. We are learning about this today from Niko Stratis, who per her website is a writer, podcaster, speaker, and former smoker.  We've learned about email and the early internet with Anne Helen Peterson. We have learned about Karen Carpenter and the music industry with Carolyn Kendrick, and now we're going to go right to the intersection of the two, and figure out what happens when a new, unstoppable force meets a much older, immovable object.  

Some of you may have heard that we are having a Valentine's Day livestream show. I will be visible to your eyeballs as well as your ear balls, and you can get tickets if you want to see it at moment.co/yourewrongabout. It's going to be on Valentine's Day Eve at 5:00 PM Pacific, 6:00 PM Mountain - everyone always forgets to say Mountain Time - 7:00 PM Central, 8:00 PM Eastern, and of course, 9:30 in Newfoundland. And if you're in another time zone that puts that in the middle of the night, you can also watch it for the next seven days after it airs. And also you can watch it for the week after it airs anywhere. You don't have to be in Belgium. But of course it helps.  

If you want some bonus episodes, you can find us on Patreon or Apple Plus, and we just had an episode with the wonderful guest Eve Lindley, talking about the moment in time when everyone woke up and hated Anne Hathaway. 

But for now, Napster. We do have a content advisory for this episode, which makes sense when you realize that it's about building the internet in the late nineties and early 2000’s, and at about 12 minutes and 30 seconds, we talk for a couple of minutes about the background of how Napster got its name in this episode. But it's something that we're also not going to spend a ton of time on because it is rooted in a term with a very long and racist history. And we are not the people to explain that to you. But we have some links in our show notes of some articles and podcast episodes that can, and I really hope you listen.  

I loved doing this episode. This was a real chance to go back in time and talk about the way the internet used to be and therefore the way that life used to be, not necessarily in a hugely nostalgic way, but in a way that maybe can help us make a little bit more sense out of what's going on right now, I hope. I dare to dream. So here's Napster.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you about the file sharing, pirate download history that America has made. Here with me today is a woman whose name I want to say in a monster truck voice for some reason. Ladies and gentlemen, here is Niko Stratis. It's Nico Stratis. Today we are talking about Napster and there are plenty of audience members I know who are like, “What the hell is Napster?” And that's very exciting to me. What the hell is Napster? Describe it to me. 

Niko: Describing Napster is maybe the most boring thing in the entire world. It was a system that lived on the internet that allowed people to look at songs in people's folders on their computer and take them from them. That's the nucleus of what Napster was, is that idea, which was new at the time. It was a program that lived and died in the span of two years. It lived fast and it died young, that it changed the internet as we know it, and in fact, it changed the way that we interact with music on the internet as we know it for sure. 

Sarah: Even hearing you say that it sounds as space age, and amazing to me now as it did in 1999. Is that when it started? What are the years? 

Niko: Yeah, ‘99. It started in ’99.

Sarah: I would actually love for you to contextualize for us the world of Nineties internet and nineties computing. To me, humans feel so tiny in the sea, that is the internet. And in the nineties, I would say that the internet was like this cute little koi pond.

Niko: It kind of was. It was an oddity, right? I was trying to think of this. So my first experience with the internet, I'm from the Yukon originally. The other day I was talking to somebody, and they said, ‘The Yukon is a place that their dad uses in conversation when he's trying to describe somewhere that is nowhere at all’. A lot of people will say they grew up in the middle of nowhere, I grew up to the left and up of the middle of nowhere, off to the side of the middle of nowhere. So our telecommunications then weren't the best. They're not even that great now. There's literally one cable into the internet that goes into the Yukon, and every summer somebody cuts it by accident, and then the internet is just off.

Sarah: Doing what? With a lawnmower?  

Niko: There's a fiber optic cable that runs by the highway, and then they're always doing highway reconstruction in the summer. And then someone cut the internet cord and now it's gone. 

Sarah: Oh my God. That's honestly petrifying to me.

Niko: It's terrifying. We had our Tandy 386 computer we bought from Radio Shack. And I bought a modem. It didn't come with a modem. I had to buy a modem separately. I saved up my money and bought a modem, plugged it in, and I would dial into this BBS service that we had in the Yukon. For all the other people in the Yukon that used this BBS, which was maybe 20 people.

Sarah: It's funny because also the internet really creates micro generations and my first internet was in 1996 with AOL. So I feel like there was a whole period right before that of the early nineties where all of it is unfamiliar to me and it's fascinating. It's like Atlantis. 

Niko: it. It is exactly that. It's a lost city.

Sarah: I'm obsessed now in retrospect with the physicality of old computers. And at the time, I at least, and everyone else I knew were like openly fantasizing about wouldn't it be great when computers are these cute, slick, tiny little the size of a handbag you'd take to a wedding. And now we have that, and I really do miss it in the same ridiculous way that people miss aesthetics that they don't have to feel annoyed by anymore. It's called nostalgia. The time when the computer needed its own room, because if you had to boot it up and then you had to experience several minutes of worrying and clicking and a fan turning on and off and they were very noisy.

Niko: Talk about ASMR, right? That sound, you said that just that description of like you're pushing the power button, there's like a dung and then there's the whirring. Everything is coming to life, my computer doesn't do that anymore. It's just on all the time.

Sarah: Without getting into whether things are better or worse, it's just so interesting that something that's such a fundamental aspect of our lives has changed that much in the lifetime of me, such a young, cute person. 

Niko: More than a lot of other pieces of internet-based technology, Napster is the reason why we are where we are now.

Sarah: Okay, amazing. 

Niko: Napster is a great story of two different spellings of the name Sean/Shawn. 

Sarah: Oh, that's right. We get to talk about Justin Timberlake's character in the Social Network. I’m thrilled. 

Niko: The two Sean/Shawn’s that created Napster. Shawn Fanning is Shawn the first. Shawn with a W. 

Sarah: My favorite spelling, I love that one of them is phonetic. 

Niko: Shawn Fanning, born in Massachusetts, Brockton, Massachusetts. He's a Sagittarius. Actually Sean Parker, other Shawn, also a Sagittarius. 

Sarah: You can see how we're bound for a rollercoaster. 

Niko: Yeah. We're in for it. Shawn Fanning grows up in a bit of a difficult household. He has a bad father situation. His mom's trying her best. He's one of five kids. In the documentary I watched his brother refers to them as growing up not well off. He chooses his words very carefully and says, we grew up not too well off. 

So Shawn Fanning gets into sports in a big way before he discovers computers and really starts. He discovers this sort of like world of being able to go on to these BBBS services, these bulletin board services. He loses himself in this world. And people always remark on the fact that he was always sitting by a computer online with a radio on, always listening to music, which, so people are like, we're not surprised he developed Napster because he always listened to the radio. Everybody always listened to the radio. That's all we had. When I'm describing this, especially early internet technology, when I'm describing it to people that are younger than me, especially people that are significantly younger than me, I feel like I'm telling them about how rocks used to look. It just feels so old, right? 

Sarah: But this is a key thing of Napster, and the way life and music were technologically at this time, which was that if you wanted to play Orinoco Flow, you had to go on a quest to find the little silver object that it lived inside of.

Niko: Yeah. This is a peak CD boom. And in fact, this will come up later, but Napster is the beginning of the end for the CD industry. It kills record stores. 

Sarah: Yeah. CDs were also extremely expensive. I think a CD would cost the equivalent of 4 to 10 hours’ worth of minimum wage work for a teenager. I think there were murder cases in the nineties where part of the motive was that somebody had been promised payment in whole or in part, including CDs. Because they were such an important and difficult to obtain thing for teenagers. 

And to me there's something incredibly poignant about the fact of music being so much harder to hear, because songs are so important I think, when you're young because you'll hear a song that makes you feel a certain way, and I think it's like an almost universal human experience to hear a piece of music that lodges into your brain and your heart, and that you just want to hear over and over again until you have to move on or else you'll get completely sick of it. And in a small way breaks my heart that like as a kid for much of the history of pop music, you would hear something that you loved and then just be like, that was nice. I don't know if I'll ever hear it again. 

Niko: When I was reading about him always being on the computer with this radio, I would do the same. I would be locked away in our computer room and I would have the radio on. And then I would have a tape that was always in the tape deck with the radio. And I would always have it paused on record and I would wait, and I would hear those songs and I would be like, okay, I love that song. I've got to wait till I know it's going to be back in rotation on the radio and I'm going to try to tape it. And you were always chasing this dream because a new CD was like $20 and $20 in the mid-nineties was a lot of money. 

Shawn Fanning says something interesting about his time with being on these BBS services and doing all this stuff where he says, “going online and finding people who had the same interest, who I could learn from, your reputation was your own. It wasn't about how well off your family was, or how well you dressed, or how well you spoke”. And for him, it is this equalizer for him. He doesn't have to put on errors or pretend to be somebody he's not. He can just be who he is, and he's on an equal playing field in theory. 

He goes to work for his uncle John, who is a big figure in the building of Napster. His uncle John, like everybody that has an uncle that's I'm a businessman, but he can never tell you what his business is. And you don't ever know that some of those businesses are likely selling drugs, but he just doesn't want to say it. His mom wants Shawn to have a better life. So she sends him to spend time with her brother, his uncle John. And his Uncle John buys Shawn fancy suits. He buys him really nice cars. He buys him a laptop that's $7,000. Phonetic Shawn, his handle. 

He's in this IRC chat room, this internet relay chat room called, Woowoo, and it's with all these other hacker guys that he knows and other hackers and programmers. And his handle is Napster because he has an Afro and everybody calls him ‘nappy’. When he's playing basketball, which is very casual with that sort of racist talk. 

Sarah: Yeah. This ultimately became the name of the company, and nobody ever commented on it in a big enough way for it to log itself in the record is kind of incredible to me actually, now that we're talking about it.

Niko: But one of the people he meets on this chat room, his handle is Manowar, like MANOWAR. And Manowar is Sean Parker. 

Sarah: Manowar is from such a particular kind of universe of boy internet names. 

Niko: You could do a real case study on performative masculinity via the internet because there's so much flexing and I think the word Manowar is so indicative of that. He's 17 years old like my friend, you have never seen war, but for sure call yourself that.

Sarah: What wars specifically, are you a man o? Please tell us. 

Niko: And so Sean Parker, he's a young hacker too. And in fact there's this great story when he's a teenager, he's 16 years old, and he's learning to hack and he's flexing his hacking muscles. And his dad tells him, his dad is like a scientist and his mom is a banker or something like that. And his dad tells him basically to screw around when you're younger because when you have a family, you can't play this fast and loose with rules. 

So Sean Parker takes that to heart very much and he hacks a Fortune 500 company when he's 16 years old. His dad comes to pick him up at school and rushes him home because the FBI is raiding their house and taking his keyboard off. But he was 16 so he just got community service because he wasn't old enough to be tried as an adult. 

When everybody talks about Sean Parker, they're always like, oh, he was a genius. He's one of those guys that just a lot of people call him like a web oracle. There's all these very fawning profiles of him after the fact because he eventually becomes part of Facebook. He's an early investor in Spotify. He's able to see where the internet is going. 

Sarah: Yeah, and I think that there are definitely people who are great trend forecasters and who are good at investing. I would submit that it's a consistent problem in media that we're always looking for people who are like the next big thing in a bigger than life way, and at just 19, she dropped out of Stanford to patent her blood testing technology. It seems too good to be true and it's like yeah, the reason these things seem too good to be true is that they are too good to be true. 

And I feel like what I would question is I'm sure he did see where things were going, but also like people who make good investments also tend to make bad investments because they make a lot of investments. And I feel like we never talk about how success in any arena is based on not having just only good ideas but having a lot of ideas and a lot of follow through.

Niko: Yeah. And the two Sean/Shawn’s are perfectly matched for each other in this regard because one Shawn, phonetic Shawn, he's the guy that is like staying up all night coding and programming. In fact, he takes the idea of what he thinks Napster could be to this IRC chat room that they're all in and says, because you can, to give a little background to where MP3 technologies at the time it does exist, but you would go to a website and they would have it and you could download it and it might take a couple of days and you would do it in steps and sometimes you only got some of the song and it was very clunky. It was a thing for people that knew how the internet worked. It wasn't this readily accessible thing that just anybody could download a program and use. 

So it didn't take off the way that Napster did because it required you to have some technical skill in order to be able to access it and achieve it. And so he took this idea of, this is what I want to do. I want to make this platform, to this chat room. And all of the hackers and programmers in there, by and large, were like, I don't see that becoming a thing. And Sean Parker is the one to say, I actually think this has some legs. Let's see this thing through.

Sarah: So is the idea like yeah, sure, that's a good idea, theoretically, but where are the users? Where are the customers? 

Niko: Yeah. One of the guys, this guy Ali Aydar, I apologize if I'm not pronouncing your name properly and you do listen to this. One of the things he says to him is, stop wasting your time, no one's going to share MP3s. But he still comes on board. He agrees to come on board and help program. And because phonetic Shawn is a coder but he's taught himself, his Uncle John has this kind of business office set up that used to be a restaurant, and Shawn is sleeping on the floor and on the couch and is working on this stuff. 

Eventually phonetic Shawn is going to Northeastern and eventually drops out of university because he's like, I've got this idea for this thing, and I need to drop out of school in order to see it through. And then so he and Sean Parker sort of team up to become the heads of this thing, and Sean Parker is like the business guy. Both of them are like 18, 19 years old. It is that thing of can you believe they're younger than 20. But it is a lot of responsibility foisted on someone that has not experienced or been impacted by the world yet, which I think is important for people. 

Sarah: And also at this age, I would wonder, how many jobs have you had? If it was entrenched as a cultural myth, it was not as entrenched as it is now around the turn of the millennium. But I think now everybody recognizes that it's such a part of the tech founder origin story to drop out of college in some way, preferably an Ivy League one. And to go your own way and essentially say the established means to power aren't good enough for me, I'm inventing my own because people love that. And I feel like it's the same sort of perspective-less gutsiness that motivates 18- and 19-year-olds to join cults and start movements and do all manner of things both great and terrible. And in between they just require an incredible amount of confidence that you actually, I think, aren't capable of once you've fallen on your face a certain number of times.

Niko: Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot about a) this sort of mythos building, right? You say, the ivy-er league the college you drop out of the better because it's all part of your own myth building, your world building. It's calling yourself Manowar. There's so much performance involved in this sort of thing because you are putting on airs, you are faking it and crossing your fingers that you are in fact going to make it. Because neither of them have ever built a program and sold it and started a company that would eventually be worth a lot of money. The first time the two Sean/Shawns meet, it's a pitch meeting. They go to their first investor pitch and that's the first time they ever meet each other in person.

Sarah: Oh my God. There was something about the internet at this time that I think we still have access to, but in a different way whereby default your real life identity was not attached to your internet identity, which is what made ‘you've got mail’ possible. If we were to make that again today, they would be both running catfishing accounts or something.

Niko: You've Got DM would be a much different movie for sure. You've been slid into. I think part of that myth building comes with choosing the name that is presented and you can build up this idea of yourself because you can obfuscate who you are or who you are avoiding. So much of the early internet, I think, is about being able to go online and being able to be somebody else and then they were able to turn being somebody else into two other people that built the company. 

This is like the peak of the CD boom. Record stores are huge, but people are starting to complain that I don't want to spend $20 on a CD for one song. So much of it was like you were buying stuff for one song. It's like soundtracks are big, one hit wonders are really big because record companies know that they can sell a $20 CD because people want the one song they know. Chumbawamba is actually a really odd good example because people are like,, I want that Tubthumping song. I craved tubthumping and I'm going to buy a Chumbawamba record. 

Sarah: We did crave tubthumping, let me tell you to be alive in the late nineties was to crave tub thumping and it was also to get knocked down and then to get up again. Because they're never going to keep you down.

Niko: I got knocked down: the Napster story. This is my pitch for the narrative movie. So they start building this Napster and it starts to become a viable idea. And so they start pitching it to investors. And Shawn’s Uncle John is like an integral part of this company. He wedges himself and he gives them some startup money, but is like, I'm going to own 70% of the company and Shawn Fanning is going to own 30%. That's the deal that he cuts for him. Which Shawn is hesitant about but doesn't want to cause a fight with his uncle. It's very music industry to take a very predatory business deal because you're trying to make a name for yourself. That is extremely music industry in and of itself. 

Sarah: That's so true. So when does Sean Parker find out about this? How does that go? 

Niko: So they start pitching this around to investors and Uncle John is this guy that's ruining the deals. These investors will come in and it's these two 18-year-old kids that are like living in their own filth. They don't know how to present themselves for a business meeting. And then there's Uncle John, who in my head is just like Randy Quaid. 

Sarah: Okay. So like Randy Quaid, like National Lampoon Randy Quaid or, okay. Totally. Yep.

Niko:  He's, he's standing out in the corner yelling, ‘Shitter’s full’, but he's also bragging about all the people. He's one of those guys that's like talking about all the Silicon Valley people he knows and all this stuff. So he's really making the deals difficult.

Sarah: He's Silicon Valley, Randy Quaid. 

Niko: He totally is. Initially they talked to this one investor, this guy Ben Lilienthal. Sorry, I apologize again. There's a lot of names that I won't be able to pronounce all that well. He had created an email service that he had sold to a Boston company. He's got some money and they get close to an investment of a million dollars. But Uncle John keeps pushing for more money because Uncle John also has a lot of debt from all of his own failed companies. So he's trying to recoup his own losses. 

Sarah: Okay. And what, how much are they looking to raise at this point?

Niko: Part of the problem is that the two Sean/Shawn’s don't seem to know. By all accounts, they're too young to really be aware of how much startup capital they'll need and how much it'll cost for them to really build the thing they're trying to build. And this guy Ben Lilienthal backs out because the two Seans didn't know what they were looking for or how much they needed or what would be required. So it doesn't exactly inspire confidence and that deal doesn't end up going through. 

Sarah: Because they probably wouldn't know what operating budget they would need for running a snow cone stand. So why would they know how to run something like this? 

Niko: Something like this that has never existed before. It's not like they could say when X company made a thing right, they needed this much. There's no benchmark. So they eventually get this guy. He's a guy that his Uncle John plays chess with. His name is Yossi Amrami. And he's like a Harvard Business School guy. He's from Tel Aviv originally. I think it is important to say too, this is the.com boom still, the bubble hasn't burst. So investing in startups on the internet, this is why there's so much money. Everybody wants to get in on the ground floor because the bubble hasn't burst quite yet.

Sarah: And that's such an important cultural moment to center ourselves into, because I remember this being something I was conscious of as an 11-year-old, that there was a.com bubble that then subsequently burst. And one of the most famous aspects of this that I remember is pets.com, which I think just had this unbelievably high valuation for no apparent reason or something like that.

Niko: Yeah, sure. Yeah. I should back up a little here as well. And say that when this stuff is happening with these investment bankers, Uncle John has incorporated it for them already, so Napster does exist as a business. It is slowly building users. It went online in May of 1999. In June, Shawn gives it to 30 of his friends and says, here's this program we've developed. Within a short amount of time it has something like 15,000 users, because those 30 people, they give it to 30 other people, and it grows and grows.

Sarah:  And is it free at this time?

Niko: It's free. It's in beta, it's a beta program that they've developed and given away for free. It proliferates through universities, which is where so many of these things build on, especially early-stage internet because you don't have to worry about tying up your phone line at home.

Sarah: And so if I'm in a university in Napster has come to my campus, is my experience, like I boot up my Compaq Presario and I open up Napster and I'm then able to be like, oh, Jeff on the floor above me has Bungle in the jungle. I want that. And then I can download it. 

Niko: Look, everybody has Bungle in the Jungle, first and foremost.

Sarah: They do, yeah.

Niko: So you download Napster, you install it on your Windows PC, you mark the directory where all your music is going to be that you're willing to share with anybody, and then you boot it up. You log into the internet through, at this point, you want to have a 56.6 K BOD modem, which again, I am describing rocks. But you would spend the money on a nice modem to dial into the internet. Otherwise it was too slow, and it would take upwards of a day to download music, right? Which is bananas. 

Sarah: I cannot believe I spent my time this way, but when I was in eighth grade, I had Kazaa, another music downloading service, and we had dial up internet at the time, and I once spent, I think something like seven months downloading Dead Poets Society. There was a dedicated phone line for the computer room, and every day I would come home from school and log on to read my fan fiction or whatever. And just get a little bit more Dead Poet Society. Just a bit more. 

Niko: Just move that needle. 

Sarah: And I guess it's important to say that also streaming as a concept does not exist yet.  I don't think I heard the word streaming until 2006.  Just to belabor this, what streaming is is that you download a bit at a time and you watch as you go and the connection has to just keep building railroad out in front of you, like in Wallace and Gromit. And in the era of downloading material and then listening to it or watching it, you just had to get the whole file done because the internet would not keep up with you. 

Niko: No, I mean I'm glad you went Wallace and Gromit. Because I was thinking Wiley Coyote chasing the roadrunner, with streaming, the road runner is just always that much further ahead. The internet and streaming and media and culture all exists around us in a way now where we can be so passive to it because we don't have to be active participants in obtaining it. And at the time you had to type in, you would type into the song like, I'm looking for, Baby Got Back, or whatever you were looking for. And you would have to look for other people that have, and it would say ‘yes, so and so on Napster has this song’, it was peer-to-peer file sharing, which was unheard of. You opened up your computer, a directory and your computer to somebody else to come and sift through and you could see everything they had, and you could be like, I was looking for this, but I'm going to look through everything that they're sharing and I'm going to build my library based on what these other people have.

Sarah: It occurs to me that this is really an early social network. 

Niko: It very much is. And in fact it's the impetus behind when Shawn Fanning is envisioning what he wants Napster to be, he's in his head, he's drawing this idea of I want it to be like an IRC chat room and I want it to be components of all of the parts of the internet that he uses, that he enjoys. And condensed down to this really bite sized thing, and it is the first social network in a way. You're not chatting with people, but you are connecting to them. That is unheard of on a large scale. People didn't think of computers in that way still at the time. We were coming on board with that idea, but it wasn't widespread that you used your computer to communicate with other computers and other people.

Sarah: This idea of using them as a tool for connectivity and community is what made computers into something that everybody actually needed, and then technology became necessary in practically every workplace and in terms of navigating infrastructure in your daily life. But I feel like the computer becoming a social tool was the first big leap, really. 

Niko: Absolutely. Because I can put myself in the same shoe, right? I like this thing and I feel alone. I feel like I'm on an island appreciating or enjoying or loving this specific thing. But then all of a sudden you can go online, and you can see, oh, there's 5,000, 6,000, 10,000 other people around the world that have this thing that I enjoy in their catalog. And also, I can access whatever I want. And I can search for whatever I want. And it is the first instance that we get of there is an entire world of other people out there that are in fact just like you. 

Whereas before, you might feel- I lived in the Yukon and I knew nobody liked me. And all of a sudden across the world, there's so many people like me. For me, so much of culture is, what does this tell us about our world and how does this impact us and how are we impacting it? And I think so much of this early internet, as driven by Napster, is opening the world to us and giving us a place to belong. I wanted to escape the Yukon and I couldn't physically, but I could through the internet, I could through this sort of connectivity. And I think that is a thing that maybe goes unsung a lot in these sorts of conversations about the advent of technology. And I think it's so important. 

Sarah: Totally. Because that gets at why music is important to us to begin with, right? Which is that we will go to such lengths to get our hands on a song or an album, not just because we appreciate its aesthetics, but because of how it helps us feel and how it helps us to maybe imagine how life could be or what our relationships could be.

Niko: It gives you a place to belong that you didn't know of before. It gives you another Sean to be.

Sarah: Oh and also just for people who have never had the pleasure, how does the music get onto the computer? 

Niko: At the time, if you had a CD drive in your computer, you could put your CD in the computer, you could rip the MP3 like from your, from the CD rather to your computer. And then you stored your own music catalog on your computer. When you could take music from the CD and put it onto your computer and store it there, and then all of a sudden you could share it with somebody else. Then it became this thing of oh no, we've lost control. We've lost control of the copyright, and this is how that worked. And as Napster started to build, people are sharing their libraries with other people, they're doubling up their library, then somebody else is borrowing from them. They're doubling their own. So there's this exponential growth of a collective musical library amongst all these people that are using this program. And as the internet grows too, people are able to just take all these files and just add them to their library on their computer and just slowly build it over time.

Sarah: And so the aggregate gets larger. Basically it's becoming a community, like a single communal database the more users we get. 

Niko: Yeah, it's like a big record store that doesn't sell anything that we can all go to and pull from whenever we want. 

Sarah: I remember Napster first being in the news, and it just felt magical, right? Because it was the idea that you can press a button and get infinite cheeseburgers or something. 

Niko: At the time I remember hearing about it and being like, you mean I can just listen to whatever song I want? That is so humdrum now. If I'm out for a walk with my dog and I'm like, oh I want to hear this Boy Genius song that everybody's talking about, I can pull it up on my phone and I can hear it instantly. And it's so routine, but at the time it was like, oh, I can look up whatever music I've ever wanted to hear that I've never heard before and find it? That was incredible. It was magic. 

Sarah: And there would be songs that had haunted you for years, and that you had been trying to find for years, and you finally got to hear them again.

Niko: So they eventually get Yossi Amrani as their investor, he invests $250,000 for 1.25 million shares. And his provisos that he makes them is he wants to be the CEO, he wants to choose a three-member board that he sits on, and he wants the two Sean/Shawn’s to move to Silicon Valley, which they do. They rent an office space above a bank. It is very clear, and a lot of people have said this in a lot of the reading I came across, which is there's no real business plan. Because again, they're like 19 years old, they can't rent a car, but they have this company. Their business plan is basically, we want this program to work. That's the full extent of their business plan as they're building this startup. 

Sarah: And do they have any idea about how they're going to monetize it at any point? 

Niko: Their idea was we want to build this program and we want to have X amount of users. I think they wanted to have a million users and that was the extent of their goal. It is such a unique and tantalizing idea that it just takes off. It just builds so quickly. They have tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands, and then millions of users in this span of months. And in fact, they incorporate in May, they start giving it out in June. December of 1999, so six months later is when the Recording Industry Association of America files their first lawsuit on behalf of the five major record labels saying that Napster, they say that Napster is a haven of piracy, which is not untrue. 

Sarah: Yeah. It makes it sound really cool though.

Niko: It does. There's so much of this as like they just make them sound way cooler. They are two 19-year-old kids that don't own beds, that are like sleeping on floors.

Sarah: Like pirates do. Pirates don’t have beds.

Niko: In short order, these two will become massively famous, but at the time they're still nobody's.

Sarah: Yeah. I think we just adore success that happens as fast as possible. And one of the Mark Zuckerberg mottos is something like, move fast, break stuff. And yeah, that sounded really cool before your technology helped foment a genocide, also caused the rise of America's first openly white supremacist president in at least a while. Because when you say move fast, break stuff in the early days, it's yeah, embrace mistakes, Brene Brown, no. It's not taking into account how much responsibility you could end up with and how wildly unprepared you could be for it. 

Niko: In January Napster's so popular on university campuses that some have had to block it entirely because it's clogging their networks of computers because so many people are using it. Major universities across the country are like, okay, we need to do something about this because our network is down because so many kids are using Napster all the time. I mean they're commanding respect to the point where in April of 2000, April 13th of the year 2000 is when Metallica enters the picture. This is when Metallica files their lawsuit against Napster.

Sarah: Enter Sandman, if you will. 

Niko: Truly Enter Sandman. So here's the baffling thing about the situation. So the reason why Metallica is aware of Napster at all is they have a song coming out on the Mission Impossible Two soundtrack. 

Sarah: Oh my God. A movie I saw in theaters and thought was pretty great. 

Niko: So Metallica hears a demo version of this song that is slated to be on the Mission Impossible Soundtrack, they hear it on the radio. Not only has this not been released, this isn't the finished version of that song.

Sarah: That is wild that that happened.

Niko: It is truly bananas. And they trace it back to how it had made its way to Napster. How that happened, nobody's willing to say, my guess is that somebody that worked for the record label that was putting out the Mission Impossible Two soundtrack, got the demo and leaked it to somebody and it just wormed its way through a system and eventually ended up with somebody that knew somebody at a radio station and gave it to them and said, here's a demo of Metallica song, Metallica, who's in a low period. They haven't put out a record in a couple of years. They're not the titans that they were. And so they're not like the most relevant piece of culture in the year 2000. And so this is a big deal. They take them to court. 

Sarah: This is, I would assume, an unprecedented situation really. 

Niko: Nobody has yet really had to deal with this. And in fact, a lot of this really reflects poorly on Metallica in a lot of ways, and a lot of people hold a lot of animosity towards them. But they are, like you said, nobody has had to deal with this situation before and they're responding to it reflexively, obviously, but they're doing what they can to try to stem what they see as like a fire that could easily rage outta control. Lars Ulrich says, “We take our craft, whether it be the music, the lyrics, or the photos and artwork very seriously, as do most artists. It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is.” Which, in 2023, as we're talking about streaming and royalties and all this stuff, we are again having this conversation of is art a commodity or is it art? And what is the valuation of art? And it is interesting that we're still having this fight.

Sarah: That's the eternal story, really, right? Because I think also people who are in charge of art at a business level, if you look at how record label’s function and how movie studios function, publishing houses, et cetera, you always see this trend of the people who make the money trying to create the thinnest margins possible and therefore burning out talent by doing that.

Niko: Totally. There's a relatively short list of artists at first that are willing to put their name forward as of not being happy with what is going on with Napster, like Trent Reznor, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Scott Stapp from Creed. All the heavy hitters at the time are very much like, we do not like that.

Sarah: All the alpha males. 

Niko: It is extremely alpha male in May of 2000. This is the thing I think that will forever Mark Lars Ulrich in people's eyes. They track down a list. They hired a consulting firm to scan through Napster and its users and who's sharing one. And they get a list of 335,000 people that are sharing Metallica songs. They print those names out and deliver them to the Napster offices and say, these are all the people that are sharing our copyrighted work. They need to be banned from your service. 

Sarah: Wow. Not cool, Lars. 

Niko: They go to dad because mom said no. Do you remember when this lawsuit was happening? Do you have a memory of hearing about Lars Ulrich specifically who became such a caricature of himself at this time?

Sarah: I do. Yeah. I remember feeling at the time that the sort of media narrative was that the guy from Metallica was on this vendetta against this company. And even to me, as a kid with no skin in the game at all, I was like that seems a little bit disproportionate. 

Niko: Yeah. Because I think they're just reacting so quickly to the situation that they're not really fully thinking it through, and they're just like this is bad, we need to shut it down.

Sarah: I think there's also something funny about Metallica doing it, right? Where if they were being sued by Ricky Martin's management, you'd be like yeah, that makes sense. But the idea, I think you lose countercultural cred when you do that kind of thing. 

Niko: Yeah. Cause it does seem like you've gone to the cops. And that is just a thing you don't do. Depending on who the artist is that's leading the fight, it changes the public perception of it. When Pearl Jam fought Ticketmaster in 1993, people didn't care about it nearly as much. But when Taylor Swift fights them in 2023, that's a different story. All of a sudden people are invested in this fight. 

Sarah: And also people have been forced to use Ticketmaster for 30 years. 

Niko: Yeah. And we've been beaten down by the system. So in May, a month after Metallica figures out what's going on, in May, Napster blocks the password of 300,000 users that are sharing Metallica songs. That's how many people are using this service. And again, a pretty short order. This thing's been alive for a year at this point. And by the summer of the year 2000, Napster was sharing 14,000 songs a minute. This is when the CD burner picks up too.

Sarah: Oh my God. I loved making a mixed CD. I would also, I specifically remember burning CDs of Broadway soundtracks for my friends in high school. And then it was also really fun cuz you got to draw with Sharpie on top and draw like The Wicked Soundtrack and beautiful cursive or something.

Niko: It really allowed you to be this IRL influencer and this very analog way of I've made my own custom mix. It's on this cd. Here you go.

Sarah: Yeah, and I understand why the record companies would be running scared from this because what they were doing at the time was really based on having a complete monopoly that they believed would never end.

Niko: Yeah. And it's important to note too, that for all the bluster of Metallica and Scott Stapp from Creed being against this, there were people like Chuck D who wrote an op ed in the New York Times that was like, Napster's is good, this is a net positive. This is the new radio. 

And eventually Alanis Morrissette will testify in Congress and say this drives ticket sales. Napster has value in the world, we need to keep this. But at the time, people weren't really sure and artists especially were very wary. It's that idea of biting the hand that feeds, right? If they say one thing or the other, they could potentially ruin their entire career. 

Sarah: So it's like you also have this imperative to come out swinging in defense of the record companies who you hate and who are oppressing you. 

Niko: Yeah. We also enter into a period of a lot of months that use the word appellate court and injunction and all of these things, and you could tell they're very much scrambling. So they're trying to figure out like they're not allowed to engage in or facilitate others in copying, downloading, uploading, transmitting, or distributing copyrighted musical compositions. This will come up to bite Sean Parker in the ass in short order. An interesting thing that happened as well in the year 2000, there's a polling university campus where they say, would you pay for Napster? And all of these university students say, yeah, we would pay like $15 a month to use this as a paid service, which is more than Spotify is now. 

Sarah: Totally. And also like $15 was worth a lot more back then, but it was like so clearly, so much better of a deal than whatever you could get just by buying CDs and stuff.

Niko: I wonder what the alternative universe would be where if we'd attached a value to this immediately and said, music is available on the internet, it costs this much money. This is where the money goes, if we would feel differently about it, but we devalued it to zero and then slowly over time built it into a subscription service, but you started at zero, it was always free, so why didn't you just go the free route as opposed to saying look, we're going to put music on the internet. It's going to cost you money to get it. We might have had a totally different world wherein we attached a dollar figure to these people's art or however you want to look at it.

Sarah: Yeah, it's a little bit of internet chaos theory.

Niko: Lars Ulrich testifies in Congress, that was a big thing. There are arguments back and forth, lawyers from Metallica and Dr. Dre sent letters to Harvard and Columbia and asked them to restrict Napster and they're just like, we are not doing that. I'm sorry but no. This is what I think turns public opinion against Metallica, especially. They really tore the brunt of it. They were gunning so hard on control, and they were very much trying to say what people can do with the internet and when, and people really responded negatively to that.  This really dogged Metallica for a long time. Shawn Fanning shows up to the MTV Music Video Awards in a Metallica shirt and he walks on stage, he's co-presenting with Carson Daley. 

Sarah: So these guys are also like celebrities, based on all this. Are their faces out there? 

Niko: Yeah. Like in October of 2000, Shawn Fanning is on the cover of Time Magazine. And remember when Time Magazine was big?  If you can remember such an age.

Sarah: I can, I can. It's so funny to think about how Steve Jobs became iconic in a way that I think there isn't really room for anymore. Because everyone in that field, to some extent, is doing Steve Jobs, and there's so many kinds of freshman founders every year who are trying to work in that mold. Yeah. That archetype is now really absorbed into our culture in a way that we often don't even notice anymore. 

Niko: Did you use Napster or did you come onto file sharing in the post-Napster, Kazaa, Limewire era?

Sarah: Yes. I did not use Napster because I didn't understand how to get it. And also my mom specifically was worried about the FBI coming for me, so she told me I couldn't use it. So I used Kazaa starting in 2002, like immediately post-Napster, and then I think Limewire after that in high school. And I feel like these were probably pretty similar.

Niko: This was a thing I was really curious about, your experience with, because there was that fear of oh, if you download a song, you wouldn't download a car. 

Sarah: You wouldn't download a car. Yeah, it's, yes, I would, speak for yourself.  

Niko: But like that fear of, oh, if you do it, the FBI is going to raid your house.

Sarah: Totally. They were doing pretty well. I think with the whole shock and awe thing of being careful, you could be the one, it's prohibition. Is there a sense at this point that Napster is under attack and could disappear?

Niko: Yeah, it's very beleaguered at this point. Like in September, he shows up to the MTV Music Awards in the Metallica t-shirt, and Carson Daley has an awkward moment with him on stage where he makes a joke, Shawn Fanny makes a joke on stage with the MTV Music Video Awards, and Carson Daley immediate is like, oh, I think we actually need to move on with the show. Doesn't give him an inch. Because it is such a volatile conversation. 

Sarah: Carson Daley knows what side his bread is buttered on. 

Niko: Yeah. And it's definitely the music industry side of that piece of bread. They cut to Lars Ulrich in the audience, he's pretending to sleep. And then he presents an award to blink 180 2 later and gets resoundly booed on stage, people hate Lars Ulrich. It is such a big thing, right? Napster is this beleaguered underdog, and the big, bad music industry is coming for them. 

Sarah: Yeah. And Metallica is the tool in the music industry's hand, ironically, it would, why isn't it Tool? 

Niko: Why isn't it? It's funny, Dr. Dre is also filing lawsuits all at the same time as well. But Metallica's really the face of it. When Shawn Fanny's on the cover of Time, you know, in the profile when you read it of him, it is very much like he's this scrappy young kid that came from nowhere and made this thing, but it's all in danger of being taken away at any minute. It is such a, I don't know. It feels almost like a hero's journey in a way, right? You could draw that into a piece of fiction so easily. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. We love David and Goliath stories so much that we'll bend over backwards to find instances of them where they can't possibly exist. I think America still likes to see itself as this scrappy little startup country and it's like, no, I think we're past that. But yeah, I mean it's funny too because it feels like in this dynamic, Metallica is like standing for the entire music industry and they're the Goliath or it's representative. But really, I also can imagine how from their perspective, they're like, God damn it, we're fucked if this continues. We're freaking out. 

Niko: And also like you can look at it through a modern lens and be like, yeah, I understand that you wanted to get paid for your art.

Sarah: Right. Which is something that artists have been attempting to do for all of time with very middling success.

Niko: Yeah. And I mean with the advent of the internet, all of these companies, the music industry, part of it is it's almost like the music industry feels foolish that they never considered they would have to monetize the internet.

Sarah: Totally. Yeah. And they appear not to have, and this is also the time when a lot of businesses are getting caught with their pants down by the internet, right? Because they never thought it would be a thing until suddenly it was. And this happens in various ways. This continues to happen. I think we can see it now most with the realization that has become so widespread recently, I think, that you to produce some kind of short form video content to survive as a business or an entity online, which two years ago even, I think we were still like, TikTok is for teenagers and now it's just like you can't survive without it, practically.

Niko: Regardless of how many times the ever-growing internet bites us, we never learned that it has teeth. We are always so quick to see things as they're happening for what they are and then always have to be reactive to it. Yeah. And we could have learned so much from Napster. So at this point, they are beleaguered. There are lawsuits, there's injunctions, there's all these things. In November of 2000, Sean Parker, there's an email that leaks where he says that he's aware that people are sharing pirated music, which bites them because it was a thing they were claiming wasn't happening. So he leaves the company.

Sarah: So exit Sean Parker. 

Niko: We're down a Sean.

Sarah: One Sean down, one to go.

Niko: Napster eventually gets bought by a German company that represents one of the five heads of the five major record labels. So they join forces and that's a big story. But then immediately the German police come to them and say they slap an injunction on them because they realize that people are sharing a lot of right wing, extreme right-wing music through Napster. And they're saying the internet is spreading this right-wing rhetoric, and we want to stem the tide. We did not learn.

Sarah: We did not. Why would we learn? We hate learning's the worst! 

Niko: Learning gets us nowhere. And instead, why don't we just continue to hate the drummer from Metallica? 

Sarah: And that is the theme of this show. 

Niko: Over the next year from this point, there were a lot of injunctions and court decisions and injunctions and court decisions. And Orrin Hatch, who comes outta the woodwork on Napster's side a little bit, he has a Mormon Christian rock band that I was unaware of. Senator Orrin Hatch, the Mormon rockstar. Yeah. And he's excited cuz he's like, people are sharing my music on Napster. People on Napster are sharing my Mormon music.

Sarah: Orrin! 

Niko: He's a folk hero. He's a hero of the people. 

Sarah: The defender of Napster. Yeah. 

Niko: It all devolved into eMusic and the producers of the Grammys sued Napster in March of 2001. They get supplied with a bunch of songs that need to be removed from the recording industry. And there's all these burdens placed on them and barriers, and they're down a Sean. And eventually, in 2002, Napster eventually filed for bankruptcy. And because they're just, they're never able to get a stranglehold, they're constantly trying to say oh, we're going to move to a subscription service, but they can never build because they're constantly fighting all these lawsuits. But it was never about artists, it was always about the music industry not being able to make money off CDs. 

Sarah: Yeah. And to an extent, artists are just irrelevant to this whole conversation because it's really about how is the music industry going to keep making money and not paying the people who make music hardly any of it? 

Niko: Yeah. And it is such an easy story to look back on and being like, it is the Napster versus Metallica story, but there were a lot of artists that weighed in, good or bad. But it's really boiled down to this thing because you can put a figurehead out there, you can put Lars Ulrich out there as the foil for the music industry at large, even though it very much was like the music industry wanting to say, hey look, we want to continue to make X amount of money off the sale of $20 CDs. And in fact the rise of Napster and then, your Lime Wires, your Kazaas, all these things. We started to see CD stores start to close. Tower records starts to struggle. All these record stores start to struggle because CD sales are way down. 

Sarah: So is it like, Napster is forced to shut down, but they're just one wave in the ocean of what this technology is now capable of and what it's going to do to these industries? 

Niko: They are the canary in a coal mine, for lack of a better metaphor. They're the opening wave. They are the man of war. It all goes back to manna war. 

Sarah: It all goes back to man o war. And then how do things end for phonetic Shawn? 

Niko: Phonetic Shawn gets out when they file for bankruptcy. He makes some money. He goes on to work in a bunch of other industries. He got into the video game industry for a bit. He got into a bunch of other startups in the 2010s, like 2012. Him and Sean Parker come back together and create a video group chat platform that has a star studded, what's his name from That 70’s Show? 

Sarah: Topher Grace?

Niko: Not Topher Grace, the other one.

Sarah: I was hoping it would be Topher Grace. The other one, the Steve Jobs one, Ashton Kutcher.

Niko: Ashton Kutcher. He's one of the people that is selling this video chat service they have that kind of flops, and Sean Parker gets out and gets into other industries, right? Facebook comes around shortly after, and he sees it for what it is and gets on board. He's the president of Facebook. He invests 50 million in Spotify when Spotify is starting to build. He moves himself into different arenas. Shawn Fanning disappears into the background for the most part. We never hear from him ever again after this. 

Sarah: And it seems like Sean Parker ended up very rich, I presume from Facebook and that phonetic Shawn is perhaps more of a normal person, or is he also doing great, but quietly? 

Niko: He's doing fine, but quietly. He definitely is not hurting for money, he worked for electronic art doing some video game platform stuff when video games were becoming more online, like when World of Warcraft is starting to build, and I think he got like a million dollar buyout when his company got folded and all these things like they make out okay, but Napster, they fold and then changes hands, it's bought by Rhapsody and then it's bought by Best Buy and then it's bought by all these people, like Napster still exists. You can go to napster.com right now and download Napster. 

Sarah: What? 

Niko: Every time I look at it I'm like, I don't get, I don't understand you. Apparently, it does okay. It makes money, it makes $8 million a year, which is pretty good. That's more money than I make.

Sarah: There you go. Doing okay. I'm getting Napster.

Niko: The thing that Napster really does more than anything is it forces the record industry to realize that they need to figure out how to monetize music online. And unfortunately, they're behind Steve Jobs, creates the iTunes store in 2003 and forces their hand and says, this is going to be the terms of our deal. This is how much we're going to sell albums for on the internet. This is how much money you're going to make and you're going to take the deal. And they don't want to do it. But they've already been through this fight with Napster, and they can't fight Steve Jobs. And the iTunes store comes online, the iPod gets created and digital music as we know it fundamentally starts to change.

Sarah: Because if you're Steve Jobs, you actually have been to the rodeo a few times before and you know how to strong arm record labels. 

Niko: Yeah. I always wonder what would've happened if when they started Napster, if they hadn't had a business plan at all. 

Sarah: But yeah, it does occur to me that if you're going to start a business that you hope to be valued at like a billion dollars someday, you might take a course, just one. I don't know. It's a thought. 

Niko: Take a night class. 

Sarah: Take a night class.  Yeah. I feel like these are the Goodfellas of the world that we are forced to live in as millennials who understand that our ability to get a ride home from the bar or buy a concert ticket or listen to a song is based on the dick swinging activities of a lot of powerful people, primarily men, but that also a lot of them are just dropouts with a big idea and that they're that they're creating the world that we live in. So aside from all the other reasons that these stories might be attractive, we have to try and understand them because they're in charge, to an extent. 

Niko: Yeah. We don't have any choice but to adapt because they are in charge, and they are dictating the way that everything is going to change. I think a big thing about it is that it took the niche idea of the internet and made it accessible. The thing that worked for Napster was it was easy to use. And that ease of use really draws you into a world, right? The reason why Twitter became popular is because Twitter is easy to use. 

Sarah: Yeah. And these things, they're not doing something that has never been done before, necessarily, but they're doing it in a way that is user friendly and that's going to be the idea that beats all the others.

Niko: It has such an interesting legacy for such a short-lived thing. Just because it was like this wild west era of the internet where nobody knew what it was and no one really was aware of its full potential because we hadn't even really started to realize it, and they pushed for that to happen before anybody really pushed for it to happen on a large scale.

Sarah: I feel like this is a story about what the internet can be and what it is often forced to be, not because of its innate qualities, but because of who gets to control, who makes money off of it and when. 

Niko: Who could have imagined and when we're downloading Napster, Kazaa or whatever we're using, who could have imagined that this system that we're using would, so at some point in our lives never turn off.

Sarah: Yeah, no, I wouldn't, and I think that it seemed so far away that it was like the kind of dream where it was like once the internet is so different then we’ll be different too. And I feel like this is what. Futurism is about partly, is this dream of the perfectibility of humankind, which is always going to be, I think, elusive and disappointing. 

I think the thing about humans is that like we're always going to be this organism we are, which is this very illogical, easily manipulated, think that we are super intelligent in areas where we're like, demonstrably not, and we just have whatever we do, we just have to work with that and can't bank on. Yeah. I don't know. Do you get that vibe? Do you feel the sense that like when we fantasize about future technology, we're really fantasizing about future humans and how we’ll somehow be different? 

Niko: Yeah, I mean I think about that a lot lately because I think we are, especially because right now we are on the verge of the internet trying to change again. I want to imagine that there is some future version of us that is somehow different or better or more at peace with not being perfect. Because I think we are always chasing this perfect thing, right? And the more connected we are to each other, as I think it is a great tool, I think it is great that we can be so connected, and we can see ourselves reflected in other people. But I also think it has us chasing a version of perfect that just will never exist. 

Sarah: And now in a sense we're all Metallica because so many more people than we ever imagined have to make a living somehow online, if not directly, then you have to promote your small business, you have to have Instagram and TikTok. You have to, if nothing else, use the internet for basic functionality and bookkeeping and communication and stuff. I think the only growing industry that I can see in the US really is content creators and that's what freaks me out the most is that because of the accident of when you and I were born, we were actually able to like, as a default, hang on to privacy until adulthood. I feel like that's become the thing that is a real rarity to be able to know what it's like to be a truly private citizen before you really have the ability to decide as an adult whether or not to sacrifice that. 

Niko: Yeah, we will have eroded the very idea of privacy, right? There will come future generations that don't even expect it. They just assume that nothing is sacred, and no one is private. 

Sarah: Yeah, in the future, I'm sure someone has made this joke, it's an obvious one. Maybe I did it before, I don't know. But in the future, everyone's going to have 15 minutes of privacy and we'll be lucky to get them. I connect that to the fact that Metallica are weirdly the villains in this story and yet clearly the record companies themselves should be, and I think it's a case of just like it's hard to picture something that large and diffuse and seemingly inevitably a part of the way we live, because at the time it was like, how else are we going to get music? It's unimaginable to find a way to circumvent that. I guess the shocking thing is that we actually did, but that artists still aren't getting paid, so we should do something about that.

Niko: Because it was easier to hate on Lars Ulrich than it was to consider the fact that the music industry is a largely predatory industry that doesn't really pay or compensate artists fairly and is in fact a very much part of a capitalist machine that is only serves to ensure that the industry survives, not the people. We didn't consider artists to be workers at the time, and now we are in this conversation with Spotify or whatever where we say we want these workers, we want the musicians to make money off of their art, but how do we do that? Because we have devalued their work to such a degree that they're getting paid pennies on the dollar for every piece of their work that makes it out into the world.

Sarah: Niko Stratus, where are you on the good old internet? 

Niko: It's so funny to wrap this conversation about digital privacy and content creation and be like, here's all the places you can find my content creation. 

Sarah: Seriously. Yeah. 

Niko: I am @NicoStratus on Twitter and Instagram. I have a newsletter, nicostratus.substack.com. That's where you find me.

Sarah: And it's a great newsletter. I hate email and I like your newsletter. 

Niko: Thank you. That's very kind. I despise email, but newsletters are somehow the only good part of it.

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much to Niko Stratus for being our guest and trying the gray stuff, it's delicious. Don't believe me? Ask the dishes. Thank you so much as always to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing the show and making me sound like all of my sentences have a beginning and an ending. 

Don't forget we're having a Valentine's Day livestream moment.co/yourewrongabout, 5:00 PM Pacific on Valentine's Day, 8:00 PM Eastern. All the other time zones, exactly where you'd expect them to be based on that. You can watch it for a week after it's on. Watch it alone. Watch it with your polycule, watch it with your sweetie in a hot tub in the Poconos that's shaped like a champagne glass. I don't care. Just be there, or not. I'm not your boss, but if you're there, it'll be fun to spend Valentine's Day together. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time.