Youtube was founded on the idea of broadcasting yourself. It was near impossible for the average person to make it into the TV industry and film. Youtube gave everyone the medium to share their videos of messages and entertainment. Digg functioned similarly to Youtube in that they wanted the user to get their news and information out compared to larger figures in the industry. In this case it was with local news and blogs against the likes of New York Times. With the development of mp3 files we were able to compress and share music easily through the internet. This brought forth the company Napster. This was a company who sought to offer digital downloads of music that could be customized and burned onto CDs. They used peer to peer architecture to connect end users with an mp3 hosted on someone else’s computer and made it available for download. This was a breakthrough idea because before then you would have to purchase an entire album in order to listen to that one song you liked on it. Napster was able to develop a massive community following 1 million downloads after only 4 months. They offered the ability to message users hosting downloads and potentially form a friendship over Napster.
Napster was later found to be in the wrong for illegal file sharing and was forced to shut down. Following their shutdown, we see Apple and the iTunes store offer the consumers music for $0.99 per song. The idea of separating an album into individual songs was being utilized here in a legal manner. Youtube was later brought into question when copyrighted material began to show up on their website. Things like TV clips and songs were posted to the site. They did remove the clips when found and by owner request, but struggled to maintain a good system at deterring this. Myspace was able to garner an audience by being a social network that allowed you to personalize your page, specifically adding music to your page, this being in a time where free music was still strongly desired. For the time being Myspace was able to be a forefront for the internet, but the company Facebook was in the making and slowly creeping into the picture.
