Who better to release a comprehensive music documentary about the rise, fall, and lingering influence of controversial music sharing service Napster than the star of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure?
No Way? Way. …and it’s not Keanu Reeves. Let us remove that puzzled brow of yours….
A first reported over a year ago, Alex Winter – the actor best known for his role as the titular Bill of the cult 90s flicks – has put together the new documentary that uses Napster as its central focus to explore a discussion about the nature of illegal downloading and sharing, plus its residual impact on popular culture.
Commissioned by music television network VH1 and currently in post-production, Downloaded looks to do for Napster, what David Fincher’s The Social Network did for Facebook, albeit in a documentarian way rather than a moody, fictionalised way.
In fact Downloaded features the real-life Sean Parker (as played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network), one of the co-creators of the infamous music-sharing service, who with Shawn Fanning, built the client from the ground up from their humble condo in San Mateo, California in 1999.
Empire Online reports that the film will also feature interviews with music industry types, who will express various arguments for and against Napster, as well as commentary from the musicians themselves, including Henry Rollins and Noel Gallagher.
Writer/Director Alex Winter (or ‘Bill S. Preston, Esquire’ to film nerds) has written a short bio in the lead-up to the release of the film, chronicling the potted history of Napster that his forthcoming feature will document.
Writing on his official website:
In 1995, teenager Justin Frankel figured out a way to receive and play an MP3 of the Butthole Surfers song “Pepper” on his computer, and then showed the world how to do the same. And it made Justin very rich. But few understood the implications of Winamp, Justin’s simple, desktop based MP3 player.
Three years later, Shawn Fanning, a freshman at Northeastern University, created the code that would become the basis for all peer-to-peer filesharing. In 1999, Fanning and his business partner, fellow teenager Sean Parker, launched the file-sharing service Napster. And what had begun as a largely unknown and underground distribution medium erupted into a full-blown global revolution.”
By the end of 1999, 25 million users were connected to Napster worldwide, trading gargantuan amounts of data, music, and other media content across the inflating peer 2 peer network. Fast forward to 2011 of course, and Napster had died a grizzly death by multiple court cases, one very pissed off Metallica drummer, and millions spent in and out of lawsuits.
The lawsuits proved costly for Napster and despite their being dropped at the eleventh hour when it appeared German conglomerate and record company Bertelsmann BMG would buy the company, Napster eventually filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Winter continues:
The labels were powerless to stop them, and refused to cut a deal. In September of 2002, when the RIAA finally succeeded in litigating Napster into bankruptcy, over 100 million Napster users had discovered an insatiable hunger to download.
Downloaded is a documentary that will allow each participant to tell this tale. Not just Napster’s extraordinary rise and fall, but the wider story of how we got from Winamp to Wikileaks. And how the entire world has changed as a result.
It’s about the music and the bands, the fans and the moguls, and the brilliant young minds that ignited the biggest youth revolt since Alan Freed hit the radio.”
Napster’s influence on the shape of digital music’s feature is impossible to understate, and co-founder Sean Parker still continues to strongly influence the direction of the music industry as a member of world-leading music streaming service Spotify.
At the time of Napster’s demise, Parker said: ”Spotify is an attempt to finish what I started at Napster.”
It’s the perfect subject matter for a cinema-length documentary, and while there’s no confirmed date yet, a recently released trailer for the film means that it’s not too far off. Keep an eye on Alex Winter’s website for details of where and when we can catch it.
