Mp3s have been in development since 1987 (The History of the Mp3, ND), but didn’t hit mainstream until 1998. Before mp3s the only audio with good quality that were downloadable were wave files. Wave files give you CD quality sound, but they come with a hefty price. Usually one song from an album as a wave file would be over 50 megabytes, and keep in mind; this is before broadband hit commercial audiences, so everyone was still getting online through a phone line, therefore 50 megabytes would take a long time to download. Mp3s changed all that. The mp3 file format was incredible because it would compress a 50 megabyte wave file into a 5 megabyte mp3 file, while still retaining CD quality sound. This meant that people wouldn’t have to wait as long to download a song. Around this same time CD Burners became very popular in retail computers. People could download mp3s and then burn them onto CD, and the mp3s would be converted back into wave files so they could be played on a regular CD player. The technology was awesome, but it wasn’t perfect. Finding mp3s, let alone entire albums, was a pain. Most website that advertised the files were usually slow, had many dead links, and eventually got shut down. Getting mp3s files online seemed like a thing of the past, and for a while it was, until some college kid was fed up with spending hours looking for songs that didn’t work, so he created a project that turned the entire world upside down. His name was Shawn Fanning, and his project was called Napster.