Piracy Killed Recorded Music. Has the Music Industry Recovered?

A brief 25-year history of recorded music, and how streaming has helped the industry recover

In 1999, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service, Napster, popularized pirating music on the internet for the first time. At the time, there were other file-sharing services, but Napster capitalized on a user interface that was particularly well-suited for playing music. This catapulted the service to a peak of 80 million users. College campuses had to li…