Some consider Napster to be all about stealing music and pirating. Others consider Napster to be the pioneer for music services that are household names today like iTunes and Spotify.

Alex Winter calls it the story of one of Silicon Valley’s biggest failures and what it created. His new movie Downloaded chronicles the rise and fall of the first peer-to-peer file sharing service.

Last night 100 VIP’s, media, presenters, and entrepreneurs kicked off the Chicago Tech Week conference with networking, drinks, hor d’ouvres, and a viewing of Winter’s movie at the AMC theater in Downtown Chicago.

Originally, Winter wanted to do a dramatic movie, but he eventually decided a documentary would be more accurate. The film starts the Napster story when founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker were still teenagers. Winters went back several years and re-interviewed everyone that was involved.

Before the movie the audience got a look at the preview for Jobs, the new movie based on the legendary Steve Jobs, with Ashton Kutcher playing the main role. That too got big laughs from the audience of techies.

As for Downloaded, Winter has been showing the film at festivals and events. It was also shown during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 back in May.

Napster paved the way for music consumption the way we have it today. Throughout the Q&A session Winter reminded the audience that  what the record companies didn’t get was that Napster wasn’t about free, or stealing, as much as it was about convenience. That’s why Winter is an admitted Spotify user and never really caught onto iTunes or the more radio-style streaming services.

During the Q&A Winter talked about Lars Ulrich and his part of the Napster story. Metallica was very upset when one of their newest songs made its way to K-Rock before it was even finished. After some digging they found out that the track had been leaked via Napster. Metallica went through the trouble of identifying over 200,000 Napster users illegally sharing their songs and decided to print out the list and deliver it to Napster.  It was an epic part of the movie.

Winter was asked if it was hard to get Ulrich to agree to the movie. He talked about how Ulrich was so upset about Napster, but for some reason praises Spotify.

Then the discussion turned to the very recent stories about Pandora and the lack of royalties artists are receiving. Earlier this week Pink Floyd and the band Cracker took to blogging about how they were seeing next to nothing in royalties from Pandora. Cracker’s front man David Lowry said publicly that for over 1,000,000 streams of their music, he received a whopping $17.

I asked Winter what he thought the perfect model would be.

“Well if I knew the answer I wouldn’t be here, I’d be on my yacht.”

He went on to explain his real answer. To him the perfect model would be for the labels to get back to cultivating artists like they did nearly 2 decades ago and embracing a model of technology that was convenient, easy, and instant. People would pay for that.

Check out the official Downloaded trailer here.

Chicago Tech Week started on Monday with events for the local tech community. The “TechWeek” conference kicks off this morning at 8am and has plenty of great speakers, startups, pitches, and parties. Stay tuned to Nibletz for up-to-the-minute coverage of all the best happenings.

Find more of our Chicago TechWeek coverage here.