Thank the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) for creating the MP3, but it was MP3.com and founder Michael Robertson (at left), who helped make it popular. The audio format compresses digital music so fans can easily store thousands of songs on tiny players and transfer them via the Web. It was among the first ad-supported start-ups to go down in flames. SpiralFrog was a successful harbinger in at least one respect, though. Talk about customer care: after it closed, SpiralFrog managers enabled former employees to use the customer e-mail list for commercial purposes. One frustrated manager wrote: 'How do we explain spending $1.5 million in marketing in the month of June when our resulting revenue was $69,711.an oops?' SpiralFrog accumulated more than $40 million in debt by the time the company collapsed in 2009. Songs were locked in DRM, and the music library was missing songs from two of the four major record labels. Turned out no self-respecting pirate would go near it. In 2006, The New York Times wrote that the business model was a clever piracy-busting idea. SpiralFrog became a flag bearer for services that offered songs free of charge while trying to support operations through ad sales. This one is about a prince turning into a toad. Streamcast's Morpheus system was much more popular, but the defendants were listed in alphabetical order. That Grokster became synonymous with the case was purely by chance, said former Grokster President Wayne Rosso. Supreme Court ruled that Grokster and Streamcast 'fostered' infringement and were 'liable for the resulting acts of infringement by.

But in a unanimous decision in 2005, the U.S. Two lower courts found legitimate purposes for P2P technology and ruled that the services should be protected from liability. They accused the companies of inducing copyright infringement. The case helped define the limits of online file sharing-some would say unfairly-for movies and songs.įilm studios and record labels filed the lawsuit against Grokster and Streamcast, the firm that created the Morpheus file-sharing client.

Grokster was a peer-to-peer company that gained a following in the early 2000s and will forever be associated with the landmark copyright case known as MGM Studios v.

Here, we offer you a ranking of the music sites that have had the greatest influence over the last decade or so. However, a shift to cloud music is just the latest in the evolution of digital tunes. It's an area that's drawing the attention of movers and shakers including Google,, and Apple. The big thing in digital music these days is the cloud-your songs hosted on someone else's servers, accessible to you from a variety of devices rather than locked into a specific gadget.

Music download before limewire