"This paper deals with "Napster Music Community," a program that connects 60 million of music fans and enables them to exchange music files. The main hypothesis is that Napster is an example of an imagined and network community. The first section of the paper gives a theoretical background to the problems addressed: the notions of community and network, the concepts of imagined and network community, as well as the debate on virtual communities are extensively discussed there. Pundits such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durkheim, Benedict Anderson, Barry Wellman, Morris Janowitz, Robert Putnam and others are consulted. The third part of this paper consist firstly of an analysis of the Napster software that aims at demonstrating the structure for the actors to interact within, and secondly addresses 14 variables that have been distinguished as descriptive of an imagined and network community. In conclusion several implications from the research are drawn."

The Napster Music Community