Press Release
Sound Credit Welcomes Tony Brooke as President in New Era of Music Collaboration
Music tech leader Tony Brooke joins to drive partnerships, business growth, and platform expansion.
April 15, 2025
The music file-sharing evolution from P2P, to general file transfer services, to Sound Credit.
The way music files are shared and distributed has undergone a dramatic evolution over the past two decades. What began as a wild west of peer-to-peer (P2P) song swapping in the late 1990s has transformed into a landscape of legitimate streaming and cloud-based collaboration. This article provides an in-depth look at how file sharing has changed the music industry – from the Napster era of rampant piracy and legal battles, through the rise of iTunes and Spotify, to today’s cloud-enabled workflows. It also explores the new challenges that have emerged around metadata, credits, and royalty tracking, and the innovative platforms aiming to solve these issues. Industry professionals and investors alike are witnessing how technology continues to reshape music creation, distribution, and monetization in real time.
Napster’s launch in 1999 ushered in an era of widespread digital music piracy, catching record labels off guard. The software’s popularity exploded to tens of millions of users almost overnight – an estimated 26 million to 80 million people were sharing songs for free at its peak. This massive P2P network allowed fans to obtain virtually any song without paying, eroding the traditional album-sales model. By violating copyright on a grand scale, Napster quickly provoked the music industry’s ire and a series of landmark legal battles. In 2001, after losing a high-profile lawsuit, Napster was forced to shut down, but the genie was out of the bottle. Numerous copycats and decentralized P2P networks sprang up – from Gnutella and Kazaa to LimeWire and BitTorrent – continuing the file-sharing frenzy and further undermining CD sales.
The impact on the industry was seismic. U.S. recorded music revenues plummeted by roughly 50% during the 2000s as piracy took hold. In 1999, U.S. music sales stood around $14.5 billion; by 2009, they had fallen to just $7.7 billion. Copyright law was forced to evolve rapidly in response. The Napster case established that even innovative tech startups could be held liable for contributing to mass infringement. This set the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court’s MGM Studios v. Grokster decision in 2005, which ruled that file-sharing services inducing piracy could be sued. By 2010, the industry had also won a decisive victory against LimeWire. The RIAA even took the controversial step of suing individual file sharers, leading to headline-grabbing penalties. These aggressive enforcement actions underscored how dramatically Napster-era piracy had upended the status quo.
Stung by piracy, the music industry gradually shifted from fighting digital technology to embracing it. The turning point came in 2003, when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store as a legal alternative to P2P networks. Consumers could finally buy music online safely, song by song, instead of pillaging it via Napster or buying an entire CD for one hit. The iTunes Store’s early success proved that convenience and reasonable pricing could compete with piracy. Record labels, initially reluctant, began licensing their catalogs to Apple and other online services, seeing a new revenue stream in digital downloads.
However, downloads still meant ownership of files, and many users continued to share those files illicitly. That shift arrived in the form of music streaming. In 2008, Spotify launched a model of “access not ownership,” offering a vast library on demand for a low cost. Over the next decade, Spotify and competitors like Deezer, Pandora, and Apple Music transformed listening habits. By 2015, global music revenue finally rebounded, and by 2019, Spotify had over 100 million paying users. Today, streaming is the dominant format, accounting for more than two-thirds of revenue in many markets.
The rise of legal platforms also changed the licensing framework. Apple’s iTunes negotiated label deals; Spotify and others secured licenses by offering equity and royalties. Content ID systems and centralized databases showed that rights holders and tech platforms could collaborate. By the mid-2010s, digital music distribution had evolved from a threat to a growth engine.
While streaming platforms revolutionized music consumption, a quieter shift transformed how music was made. General-purpose cloud services – Dropbox, Google Drive, and WeTransfer – became essential for music collaboration. Artists and producers used them to share project files, stems, and mixes across the globe in real time.
These tools rose to prominence because they were simple, free (or cheap), and widely accessible. They weren’t built for music, but they were good enough for it. Sharing large WAV files became as easy as emailing a link. Remote collaboration boomed – a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Still, these tools weren’t made for professional music workflows. They lacked high-fidelity playback, didn’t preserve metadata, and offered minimal file security. Credits, version tracking, and proper attribution often got lost in the shuffle. And when metadata gets lost, so does the path to getting paid.
Metadata – the information that identifies who made a song – is often the missing piece in modern file sharing. Song titles, writers, producers, performer IDs, codes like ISRC – all of it matters when royalty systems try to track who should be paid. But today’s workflows often overlook metadata.
Files passed between collaborators on cloud services can lose critical data. Email threads and text messages may carry credits, but they’re rarely formalized. Once the song hits a streaming platform, if those credits weren’t captured early, contributors can go unrecognized – and unpaid.
Industry-wide, this creates a major financial problem. Hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties go unmatched each year due to incomplete metadata. Streaming platforms may have a listener for the song but no confirmed songwriter. Royalty societies are left to guess or delay payments. It’s a crisis of attribution – one born not from malice, but from poor infrastructure.
There’s also a lack of standardization. Credits stored in a DAW don’t always carry into distribution. MP3 tags differ from streaming platform formats. Metadata often “falls through the cracks.” The result: creators lose income and recognition, and royalty systems get bogged down.
The answer to the metadata crisis isn’t just better storage – it’s smarter infrastructure. True progress comes when creators can collaborate in a way that naturally preserves attribution, clarity, and accountability throughout the process. For the industry to move forward, the tools used to share music must also reflect how music is made — together.
Sound Credit is building that foundation. More than just a file-sharing tool, it’s a full-stack collaboration platform tailored to music professionals — where recordings, credits, assets, and metadata live in one place. Teams can manage multiple versions, leave notes, organize sessions, and work across roles — all while capturing the essential credit data that powers royalties and recognition. Rather than embedding metadata in the files themselves, Sound Credit keeps the data integrated with the files inside the same ecosystem, connected through robust delivery and export integrations across the supply chain.
This approach turns file sharing into something more meaningful: a shared workspace where creativity, data, and ownership are respected equally. It’s not just about moving files faster — it’s about moving the music industry toward a model where credit is part of the collaboration, not an afterthought.
As the creator economy continues to globalize and accelerate, platforms like Sound Credit are redefining what it means to work together — and ensuring that the people behind the music and content aren’t just heard, but recognized. The journey from Napster to now has been a rollercoaster. From lawless P2P piracy to cloud-powered collaboration, the music industry has adapted again and again. Today, the challenge isn’t access – it’s accuracy. And that challenge is where new value can be unlocked.
Credit attribution isn’t just about fairness – it’s about revenue. With better metadata, rights can be honored, royalties properly paid, and careers sustained.
For investors, this is a major opportunity. As music creation scales globally and streaming generates billions in micro-transactions, the systems that track credits and rights are more important than ever. Ethical, data-rich platforms aren’t just solving a problem – they’re reshaping the foundation of the music business.
The next era of music file sharing is about moving files with meaning. With attribution. With accuracy. With accountability. And with that shift, the music industry has a chance to ensure that the future is fair to its creators.
