Napster has been called the fastest-growing business of all time, is credited with revolutionizing the music industry, and is considered by some to be a precursor to iTunes. Lawsuits by various industry associations eventually shut down the service. Napster was opposed by recording labels, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the heavy metal band Metallica, among others. Within a year, the service had tens of millions of users. Parker raised the initial $50,000, and they launched Napster in June 1999. A few years later, Parker and Fanning, a student at Northeastern University, cofounded Napster, a free file-sharing service for music.
When Parker was 15, he met 14-year-old Shawn Fanning over the Internet, where the two bonded over topics such as theoretical physics and hacking. He considers his time at Napster to be his college education, calling it "Napster University", since he became well-versed in intellectual property law, corporate finance, and entrepreneurship. Several media profiles refer to Parker as a genius. In his childhood, Parker was an avid reader, which was the beginning of his lifelong autodidacticism. By his senior year of high school, Parker was earning more than $80,000 a year through various projects, enough to convince his parents to allow him to skip college and pursue a career as an entrepreneur. He won the Virginia state computer science fair for developing a web crawler, and was recruited by the CIA. While still in high school, he interned for Mark Pincus (the CEO of Zynga) at Pincus's Washington, DC startup FreeLoader. Consequently, towards the end of Parker's senior year at Chantilly, he was mostly writing code and starting companies. While there, Parker wrote a letter to the school administration and persuaded them to count the time he spent coding in the computer lab as a foreign language class. Parker attended Oakton High School in Fairfax County, Virginia for two years before transferring to Chantilly High School in 1996 for his junior and senior years.
Since Parker was under 18, he was sentenced to community service. Because his IP address was exposed, FBI agents tracked down the 16-year-old.
One night, while hacking into the network of a Fortune 500 company, Parker was unable to log out after his father confiscated his computer keyboard. Parker's father, who put his family before his entrepreneurial dreams, told Parker, "if you are going to take risks, take them early before you have a family." In his teens, Parker's hobbies were hacking and programming. When Parker was seven, his father taught him how to program on an Atari 800. government oceanographer and chief scientist at NOAA. Parker was born in Herndon, Virginia, to Diane Parker, a TV advertising broker, and Bruce Parker, a U.S.
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