Initially, Napster was envisioned by Fanning as an independent peer-to-peer file sharing service. Napster was founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. In 2016, the original branding was restored when Rhapsody was renamed Napster. Best Buy later purchased the service and merged it with its Rhapsody streaming service on December 1, 2011. Napster's assets were eventually acquired by Roxio, and it re-emerged as an online music store commonly known as Napster 2.0. Following Napster's demise, alternative decentralized methods of P2P file-sharing emerged, including Gnutella, Freenet, FastTrack, and BitTorrent. While effective, the service could not function without the central database, which was hosted by Napster and eventually forced to shutdown. The P2P model employed by Napster involved a centralized database that indexed a complete list of all songs being shared from connected clients. Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002. As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Napster was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution.
