Once upon a time, kiddies, there was a music-swapping service called Napster. It was the greatest free Internet lollipop of all time, and those recording-industry meanies took it away from you.
That’s the rise-and-fall saga that Alex Winter of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” is here to tell, and he’s on the side of the Napster dudes. But Winter can’t get his arms around his material. He seems reluctant to pare anything, and his talking techie heads — Napster founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, along with a host of others — often make the same points, one after another.
Winter doesn’t exactly press the hard questions. These guys were brilliant enough to revolutionize file-sharing. Yet they seem amazed — no, honest, you could have knocked them over with a feather when it was pointed out by everyone from Metallica to Dr. Dre — that millions of people downloading practically the entire history of recorded music could be considered copyright infringement.
The Napster crew are, however, entirely credible when they say they thought the industry was going to be smart enough to monetize the concept. Instead, the lawyers came down on them like Thor’s hammer. Winter hits his stride detailing how the music bigwigs hung Napster out to dry, but couldn’t do a thing about their industry’s permanently altered business model. This exercise in recent nostalgia (the original Napster went bust in 2002) might have been better if the tart cynicism of that section had shown up earlier.