NEW - The Lawsuit That Made Spotify Possible

Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift · Jun 19, 2026 · 8m

Twenty million users in year one. Eighty million at the peak. Then a lawsuit took Napster down in about six months. This one walks through how a platform built by Sean Fanning in June 1999 grew that fast and fell that hard.

Metallica chose to be the band everyone resented, betting that looking greedy in public was worth it if the industry finally took piracy seriously. Prince chose silence instead, walking away from digital music rather than negotiate with any of it. South Park noticed the gap between those two reactions and built a 2000 parody around it that holds up better than the lawsuit…