According to Pew Internet :The revolutionary file-sharing application created by college student Shawn Fanning officially launched in June of 1999. By November, the file-sharing network had grown so popular that it had attracted the first of many peer-to-peer-focused lawsuits from the RIAA. And by the time the Pew Internet Project fielded its initial survey on music file-sharing in July 2000, nearly one in four adult internet users said they had downloaded music files, and most of them (54%) had used the Napster network to do so.

Sharing music without permission is a violation of copyright, as the industry contends, but digital technology makes downloading music off the Internet inevitable. The industry missed an opportunity to turn informal file-sharing into a profit center when it failed to buy Napster, the first of the popular downloading services, when it had a chance in 2000

the success of the Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails experiments would be the prologue to an industry-wide loosening of the ties around digital distribution. Shortly after the RIAA had announced the end to its litigation against individual file sharers at the end of 2008, iTunes halted the sale of music bundled with “digital rights management” protection.