Independent artists and labels have always been the trend setters in music and the music business. (Shawn Fanning)
I am grateful they are now showing that leadership when it comes to using technology to make music more accessible. (Shawn Fanning)
I understood an idea like this could become popular, but at the same time I didn't think it was my implementation that would be so widely used. (Shawn Fanning)
He said this has the potential to be the first broadband killer application, and it has sort of become the truth because obviously it's so bandwidth intensive. I mean, it has been an issue. (Shawn Fanning)
I was at Northeastern University playing with the idea and getting feedback from my roommates, and then started drafting a really basic design idea. (Shawn Fanning)
I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific, but I could see a system like Napster evolving into something that allows users to locate and retrieve different types of data other than just MP3s or audio files. (Shawn Fanning)
I wasn't really sure that my implementation of it would be what really took off, but fortunately I was able to get a prototype done. (Shawn Fanning)
That's why I ended up leaving school - because it required so much time, and it was such an excellent idea. I figured I would regret not going full force with this idea. It seemed we could make something of it. (Shawn Fanning)
There really was nothing like it at the time. We had good ideas for implementation, so we proceeded. I think it was an excellent solution to the reliability issues with existing search engines. (Shawn Fanning)
I think the most difficult thing had been scaling the infrastructure. Trying to support the response we had received from our users and the number of people that were interested in using the software. (Shawn Fanning)
I think then, when we started receiving the first of the user feedback, feedback from people that I had not specifically told about it, but had spread from friend to friend and then they were giving us feedback. (Shawn Fanning)
Nobody has ever built a reliable peer-to-peer service, where people can really access all the music they want in one location,... Once I got it into my head, I couldn't imagine the media space without one. (Shawn Fanning)
It's been all over the press, and schools are deciding to shut it down. We released a public announcement saying that we had some potential solutions that we were working with, and once we had something concrete we would start implementing it and approach schools. (Shawn Fanning)
It was very early, and we were still like beta or alpha stage, and so we started receiving a ton of download. The server became overloaded, and that's when I realized that this had a huge market. (Shawn Fanning)
I had to actually purchase a book to learn the API and write the client. It was pretty frustrating trying to learn the API and develop a product quickly. (Shawn Fanning)