The Gatekeepers: Napster Generation

I have a theory that you are profoundly and inescapably defined by the music you listened to between the ages of 15 and 25. Similar to language acquisition theory - there’s a type of critical music acquisition period. Maybe you loved a few top 40 radio hits that your parents played in the car when you were a kid, but by 15 you started making choices about the kind of music you wanted to listen to, and the next ten years were crucial to the development of your aesthetic. At 32, I still go to shows and read new album reviews, but I’m haunted by the way I compare every new song to one I heard for the first time in college, or how all of my favorite albums are at least 10 years old.

In 2004, I was a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill when my roommate told me that I could download hundreds of songs for free with a program that made it possible for anyone in the dorm to share their entire iTunes library. “But is it illegal and scary like Napster?” I asked. She assured me, “No, it’s totally different.”

I can’t remember if the program was LimeWire or iShare or another software, but I knew that I was supposed to be afraid of Napster. My mother would tell me about stories on “60 Minutes” where parents had been sued for thousands of dollars because their kids had been caught illegally downloading music. The university had, allegedly, expelled a student the previous year for file-sharing. We all did it anyways.

I never had Napster specifically, but I was part of the Napster Generation. I’m defining the Napster Generation as a popular of people who were between the ages of 15-25 during the height of file-sharing, which was roughly 2000 to 2005. That would include Americans born between 1975 and 1990. In recent years I’ve started to notice that my fellow members of the Napster Generation seem to know a lot more bands from their music acquisition period than generations before or after. We were downloading hundreds of albums at a time. An exposure to that much music, and during such influential listening years, is a defining feature of my generation. Maybe we had initially downloaded these bands from an illegal source, but in the trendy vinyl resurgence we have started collecting reissues of the records. Our demand for physical copies of albums from the early aughts has contributed to an unexpected sales bump in the industry.

With members of the Napster Generation occupying so much of the market, even after the age of 25, it can be assumed that our tastes will continue to dictate the music that is released. In a weird twist of fate, the kids who stole millions of dollars worth of merchandise from the record industry, grew up to be some of the most influential gatekeepers in the market. Or maybe it’s just the collective guilt of thieves.

Photo by Kyle Loftus on Unsplash