Slashdot Mirror
Napster Introduces Subscription Charge
Simon Cozens writes "The BBC is reporting that Napster is introducing a subscription charge to pay off the music industry. " And the real question is what percentage of
Napster users will shell out the clams vs moving to OpenNap or Gnutella.
Funny, I just got this news item through a wormhole in the space-time
continuum:
NAPSTER SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE GOES LIVE
June 16th, 2001
Further to CEO Hank Barry's predictions earlier this year, Napster Inc. (a
wholly-owned subsidiary of TimeWarner-AOL-Bertelsmann-Universal) started
charging users to log onto their popular file sharing service. Since its
launch in 1998, 60 million users have created accounts.
The new subscription-based service, which entirely replaces the previously
free version of Napster, was launched at midnight last night. For a mere ten
dollars a month, users are given unlimited access to the Napster service and
the shared files of other users.
In the 18 hours since the launch, three users have subscribed. One of them,
"br1tneyD00D", was quoted earlier as saying "ne1 got nud brit pics...
thanks... and what is this opennap thing that every1 talks about".
Asked if he was worried by the sudden drop in Napster usage, Mr Barry
replied "See this desk? Real mahogany. Yours for two hundred bucks. Really,
you can walk out with it now. Okay, one hundred, but you're twisting my
arm."
-- Yoz
This, I have to say, is a novel concept; paying a middle man when there (technically) isn't one.
If Alice wants to download a Metallica tune from Bob, I don't really see them shelling out the $$$ for Napster. But if Alice would be free to download the same tunes from reliable, comprehensive and fast Napster MP3 archives, the story might be different. Is Napster just dumping the whole P2P concept and beginning the transformation into plain vanilla MP3 distributor?
Marko Karppinen
Has anyone heard anything relating to price? I mean, we all knew a subscription fee was coming, so this news is really no surprise. But I want to know how much they plan to charge.
On top of that, are they going to lock out systems like OpenNap? There are a few servers that have at least as many songs as the official servers, so won't everyone just start using those?
Really, it isn't all that bad. As long as the fee isn't too large, using Napster will stay easily be less expensive than purchasing albums at the store or even online. Perhaps they will even make it legal, selling individual tracks at pennies on the dollar.
First off, I'm not one of the guys that downloads songs just to have them...I download songs that I already own, and the very occasional single that I wouldn't buy in a store.
There is no way that I'm going to pay twice for songs that I've purchased legally already. I am all for supporting the artists, but not twice.
My $0.02
-Ben
Say what you mean, mean what you say! But please know what #$@% you are talking about!
Its kind of odd that their charging, I mean we're putting our mp3s on their service and their charging us for it? We should be charging them, we're the ones keeping the service alive by going on it. So we have to charge now to download other people's mp3s, I think their should be something where if you put x amount of mp3s on the service you only have to pay x amount of dollars. Just my two cents.
I know I should have finished filling up that second harddrive last week!!!
Anyway, I haven't been using gnutella because it is slower, less reliable and seems to have less of a selection. But as soon as Napster goes to pay, it's probably going to have more of a selection, leading more people to use it, leading more people to use it, until nobody cares about NApster anymore anyway.
BTW, get a gnutella program here... freepeer's bearshare program
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
At the moment, I expect nothing from Napster; if a song cuts out in mid-download it is a pain, but as I'm going to be getting the track for free, I don't mind spending a bit more time getting the track later on. Once money gets involved (and I have no qualm about paying a monthly/yearly fee in order for access to a music catalogue), I (and I'm sure others) will expect a much better quality of servers. And I'm also feeling a bit uneasy about the fact that Napster's current line of defence (being a common carrier) doesn't quite suit once they start charging for the service. After all, it's the people who use Napster who make it valuable, not the server setup. Anyway, we shall see...
Sooner or later, they had to keep it free so it would snowball. ITs actually a good service, I would be willing to pay for my account. As long as they dont do bandwidth charging.
90% of the users are cheap SOB's like myself. They won't pay anything, mostly because they dont have anything. Lots of em are kids. And yes, thanks to napigator for windows and built in support on gnapster, very few users will NEED to pay to get music. Thank you opensource.
I am !amused.
Ok, so Napster plans to charge for use.
How's it planning to distribute the spoils? It surely won't be using the ID tags? Naah, it'll just heft over a wedge to the recording companies.
They'll get richer and not one artist will receive a penny.
--
"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
Does this move ammount to sanctioning of Napster by the music industry ala the DAT tax.
I have no desire to rip off the music industry or the artists, who IMO have every right to charge whatever the heck the like for CDs (as I have every right to buy them or not buy them at a given price... it's not like we're talking about essentials of life here).
I'd actually prefer that the music indstry just get its act together and start a subscription based music download service. Maybe $30/month for unlimited downloads, or something like that. If the quality was good enough (ie, MUCH better than MP3), and if other goodies like cover art, etc were also downloadable, I'd sign up in a minute. Even at that price, it would save me a ton of money over what I spend now on CDs.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
**but what's next? i sure haven't seen anything REMOTELY as easy to use as Napster .. i'm not saying Gnutella or OpenNap are terrible for Slashdot readers, but the vast majority of Napster's customers are casual-to-moderate computer users who would never put up with the idiosynchracies of gnutella and its ilk**
I gave up on all that crap long ago.. I do AGSattelite now..
I like it.. both the Windows and Linux versions work well, (linux with minimal tweakage) and I get tons of songs much faster than with Napster.
Try it out.. its pretty nice.. and I have found the usual 5 second songs, and crap, and mistitled artists/songs, but its still pretty good, with a *huge* genra sweep.
www.audiogalaxy.com
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Some kind of CRC check for legitimacy could also be added, so I know the copy of Rush's "Tom Sawyer"(*) L33tD00d has is the same as the original and not some horribly recorded-from-tape version.
Also, I want discounts (preferrably up to 100% depending on collection size) for people who put songs up as opposed to download-only people.
(*)I don't know which megacorp owns Rush. If it isn't Bertelsmann, what the heck, you understood the general scheme.
As much as I love (and use) the opennap servers, they are not a viable alternative to commercial napster. The servers have limited load, for one, and the (commercial) Napster users DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT. A friend of mine was recently banned by Metallica because she had a song titled "Metallica-Sucks.MP3"
She didn't know what to do, because her IP dosn't change, and she couldn't get around the block. I asked her if she tried Napigator or any of the alternatives. Her response? "What? You mean that there's more than just napster?"
She's just a typical college student. If the average student dosn't know about the options, who does?
No, the typical Slashdotter dosn't count on this one.
---
Desperation is a stinky cologne
i would pay for it, but it will suck if i logon to find only 100 other users! so what will they do? make you share for free? and pay to download? what if i have 100000 mp3s to share, will they pay me some $$$? if not, then they are exploiting me, no? unless they plan to put those mp3s up their themselves, i don't see how this will work out fairly.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
And the real question is what percentage of Napster users will shell out the clams vs moving to OpenNap or Gnutella.
Of course, this is assuming that most Napster users even know about OpenNap or Gnutella. I know that at least 95% of my computer literate friends have never even heard of either one of them, and the ones that do are the active *nix users, not the casual MS Office users.
If 90% of Napster's clients come from Joe and Jill Schmoe using AOL, who don't know A) what the alternatives are or B) where to get them, than Napster has a pretty good racket going. Hook 'em by giving it away, then start charging later. They probably would have had to go to a subscription basis sooner or later, just to turn a profit, music industry lawsuits or no.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I know that I for one am planning to pay as long as Napster's database is larger than any other. As a jazz musician and arranger, I use Napster to listen to as many different recordings of the same song that I can find before writing a new arrangement of it or playing it in an ensemble. Since I'm often looking for relatively obscure songs, or else obscure recordings of well-known songs, an alternative system like OpenNap or Gnutella wouldn't be as much use until they have anywhere near the user base as Napster. Right now they seem to have primarily pop music. (Nothing wrong with pop music, it's just not what I'm usually looking for...)
I second the recommendation of AudioGalaxy... it's far too easy to find good music, so much so that I keep wondering if it's some kind of "honey pot" sting operation!
Join up - the more the merrier. I have about 2GB of weird stuff shared out right now.
(this is not a
...simply because every MP3 encoder works with a different algorithm, producing slightly different results - not to mention CD audio rippers that produce quantitatively and qualitatively different source files.
Collection size won't be a valid basis for discounts either, because users will make up fake band names and songs for thousands of files to reduce their subscription costs. And since no one will be looking for those fake songs, it will be impossible to enforce.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
The music industry is okay with this? Don't the have any idea how consumers think?
Right now I use Napster to explore new music, and I usually end up buying CDs of the stuff I like. But if I have to pay for the service, suddenly I'm interested in "getting my money's worth". Now I'll want to use Napster more often because I'm paying for it. In addition, I'm not going to want to buy CD's. Why? Because I already paid for the music once. Why would I want to pay again?
No one really knows how much Napster actually helped the sale of CDs. But whatever it is, after fees it'll probably go down.
I wonder if there's anyone who'll START using Napster because of the fees? Perhaps they'll be more comfortable now that it seems more legal...
JWho moderates the meta-moderators?
While I think that the idea of compensation for the "right to use Napster" is a good thing, I have to wonder if this type of setup really makes sense. You have to look at where the money will flow versus where it should flow. In this case, I think that the obvious recipient of any cash should be the person who is hosting the MP3s. After all, you're not downloading MP3s from Napster per se; you're downloading them from another anonymous Internet user who is providing the files as a service to the community as a whole. Up until now, that service has been provided for free.
.. let's just make sure we get it right.
Case in point: if some skinny earringed punk spends all night downloading Limp Bizkit MP3s from my machine over his 56K modem, and in so doing reduces my total available bandwidth for things such as 2.4 a kernel download, if anybody should be getting paid for it, it's me. Napster is the only widely-used Internet application that involves people just giving away large chunks of bandwidth for free without any form of compensation (either directly or indirectly through methods such as forced advertisement viewing.) There is no reason that this state of affairs needs to be maintained.
This could be worked out fairly easily, I think; all you would really need is to have everybody establish PayPal accounts and then modify the central Napster server so that it credits and debits appropriate amounts of money upon completion of a download. A dime a song? A quarter? These are numbers that we can work out. The important thing is getting the infrastructure in place. Once that is done, the rest of the pesky details can be worked out.
At any rate, money-to-the-hoster is the only fair and equitable scenario. It doesn't need to go to Napster itself; all they do is provide a simple online database that points you to the folks who are doing the real work. And it sure as hell doesn't need to go to the RIAA; the CDs that the songs were ripped from were already paid for once. You don't see the government tax you twice on the same income (except for inheritance taxes, perhaps, but that's a different debate.) You don't see the justice system attempt to try people twice for the same crime after they've been acquitted.
So if Napster is going to move to a pay-for-play model, good
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Maybe someone didn't think this all the way through...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I quite like the audiogalaxy software. Basically you download their piece of software called the "satellite" and you then use a web based interfact to select what songs you want to download, then without hassle it downloads the songs without further interaction. As it's web based you can do it all remotely so if you're at work you can remotely log into the website and set more songs downloading on your cable connection at home. It resumes partial downloads and is available for both Linux and Windows (closed source tho at the moment).
With tons of other [ways to get a five-finger discount], why pay for anything? The whole point of stealing is to get free stuff. I don't care about the companies, and I don't care about the inventors. I care about how fat my wallet is. Shelling out money for anything doesn't go well with me anymore.
Screw da Man! Run, don't walk, to loot your local Gap!
(/sarcasm)
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I figure they can't lock out OpenNap. Maybe if you download the new, 1337 client, they can change it to make it harder, but someone can [may already have] coded an open napster client. Even if not, plenty of folks have older versions [I know I still do] that will work just fine. BTW, Napigator makes life ever so much easier when looking for non-Napster-Inc. servers.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
I'm happy to pay for the music. As a consumer, there's 2 things I want out of digital music (maybe 3):
I want it now, conveniently, and I want to get it again if I lose a hard drive without paying for it again
I want to be able to buy only what I want. One song from an artist shouldn't cost $14.
I want artists to get more money, so more artists are supported, and more people are encouraged to go for it
One does have to wonder, what are the record companies good for, in this scenario? But whatever. I want my music digital, I want to pick and choose songs, and if I get those things, I'll happily pay for them. (I'd gladly pay $2-3 a song)
Oh, you're so ELITE!
Shit. Back in the days when I was trading C64 games I realized that counting the "warez" doesn't work. Give all you've got out freely and you'll get everything for free.
When the stuff you trade flows freely, everybody benefits. Yeah, there are unavoidable freeloaders but most traders will appreciate you for sharing freely. Can you argue with that?
Bean-counting warez was a bad mistake back then. It's a bad mistake now.
I think a pay service is a fine idea but they are going to have to give you a lot more than the hacked together search engine that they do now. For example, how about:
- Releasing a 1.0 client that looks like a professional application (e.g. doesn't have buttons stretching halfway across the screen) and fixes the dozens of obvious bugs.
- Implementing a sophistocated search engine that goes beyond simple keyword searches. It DESPERATELY needs boolean operators and making the Artist and # of results fileds work would be nice too.
- Searching across ALL of their servers regardless of which one you log on to. You may not have noticed, but right now searches only hit users on the same server as you so you never get more than a fraction of Napster content at one time.
Now that Napster actually has a business model I think it's about time that they replaced Shawn Fanning's amateur project with a professional quality application.Does anyone remember the AOL lawsuits from a few years back? People sued because they got busy signals trying to dial up -- they felt that by not being able to connect, they weren't getting what they were paying for.
As soon as Napster goes subscription (and hence becomes a legitimate business in the eyes of averagejoeschmo@aol.com), you can count on a huge increase in the proportion of modem users. While curious average users will sign up in droves, college students with high speed access will avoid the charges by using other methods of file transfer among their friends, e.g. ICQ, IM, FTP, file-sharing, etc.
And you can also bet that complaints from modem users will skyrocket: people can't connect to the servers, can't find the songs they want, downloads are too slow, high-speed users keep disconnecting them, etc.
Right now, a large percentage of Napster files come from college students (witness the huge drop in files over winter break), and since modem users don't have to pay for the service, they don't have any legitimate cause for complaint. But as soon as they're in the vast majority and are shelling out a monthly fee, modem users will expect a certain level of service. Unless Napster can deliver it, they had better be prepared for a barrage of lawsuits.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Is it for the basic service Napster provides, linking users with MP3 files together? In that case, there are similar free services, which makes it a little hard to compete (think Netspace vs. Microsoft)
Is it some sort of royalty fee for the songs? Because it seems they are charging a per-month fee, which wouldn't even cover the cost of one CD. Better than making no money, but does it stop Time-Warner from suing me?
How will they pay royalties? Search transfers for artist names? Occasionaly, the artist's name doesn't show up, and what if it's wrong? For instance, the Gourds (from Austin) did a remake of "Gin and Juice" (great remake, too), which is being labeled on naspter as either a Phish song or a Ween song. Has technology gotten to the point where a song can be uniquely identified, even if ripped at different bit rates, etc? Or will they just hack it?
This is a strange story - it once was "we're thinking about a pay system" to "the system might be in place in 5 or 6 months". Still no real story, no hint how it will be done. Perhaps the best question is, which Napster version is the one where they start monitoring your habits? Is it already out?
Agreed - aren't they the most-hit non-search-engine site in Europe or something? I bet slashdot could get BBC'd more easily.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
The majority of MP3s floating out there were done by the clueless who :
used Line-In instead of DAC
If they DACed, they used a Crappy CD/CDRom (Jitter-bug is a dance, not an CDROM "feature")
Encode at 128k at the worst possible setting
Couldn't ID3 tag if their life depended on it
And don't get me started on incomplete, unverified, mislabeled songs...
It's like paying for a really bad tape of an FM broadcasted song.
---
As long as the fee is relatively small (say, $5-10 per month) I'll gladly pay for Napster just to eliminate my guilt. Since I started working from home full-time (where I can crank the tunes and have DSL) I've begun using Napster a *lot*. I mostly use it to download songs that I think I might find interesting. If I really like them, I usually buy a CD, so I can feel like I'm not totally freeloading (also, by buying the CD I can rip my own, high-quality copies). However, stuff that I don't like quite well enough to spend $16 on, I still keep, and I still listen to, and I feel guilty about it. I know that what I'm doing is illegal and that bugs me.
If, for a few bucks a month I could know that the copyright owners are getting paid and that the whole deal is legitimate... I'm there. Really, I don't even care if the artists are getting paid, just so long as what I'm doing is legal, my conscience will be happy.
The reason, BTW, that I don't care about whether or not the artists get paid is that I think the free flow of digital music will eventually either cut the record companies out or force them to be fair to the artists. Technology is going to break their stranglehold on the industry and to stay in business they're going to have to start providing real value at a reasonable price to artists and consumers. The more the record companies rip the artists off now, the more pissed off the artists will get and the faster that process will occur.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Well, there weren't any details on how the subscription service would be set up, but one would hope it would be some flat rate for unlimited downloads. $10 - $15 would be reasonable for that kind of access, though I can already imagine the fr33 muzIk kiddi3z already kvetching about how "music should be free." As in beer, of course; some (not all, but some I'm sure) couldn't care less if the actual artists are free as in speech - for such an example see, Offspring, latest CD, Sony, controversy.
The article implied the artists would get paid royalties. In a perfect system, the artists would be directly paid all of the money, but then, nothing's perfect. I'd like to know how Napster/BMG plans to divide up the royalties. Number of downloads? Number of songs on the network? And what about indie artists who aren't a member of a label that signs on with Napster? What about artists belonging to labels that might still wish to litigate after the service kicks in?
There are still a shitload of unanswered questions, and lots of time in which to answer them.
Let the "last night of Studio 54" feelings begin.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Napster is a relatively simple protocol, with a simple (though now very well-tuned) server backend. It's fast, but it doesn't do anything particularly clever. This is why OpenNap turned up so quickly, and why we don't need to pay for Napster.
Audiogalaxy Satellite, on the other hand, has nearly all its cleverness on the server side. It keeps note of the songs you want and starts downloading them for you when you're around, automatically. It chooses the nearest peer to you automatically. It understands the difference between artists and titles, so you can browse by artist. You can leave the client running on DSL/cable at home while you use the web interface at work to send stuff to it. And loads of other features.
It's very, very cool, and it'll be much harder to clone for the Open Source world. I'd pay for it.
OK, I can see this is all well and good for the big five record companies. But what about the rest of us?
I make my own tracks. Before with Napster I connected and I shared them. Now Napster are going to be charging a fee for me to share my tracks, and furthermore they're going to be making money by charing other people to listen to them! Does this in any way strike anyone as injust??
I'll be emailing Napster to enquire as to exactly how they intend to resolve this issue. If I had money for lawyers, I reckon I might actually have a pretty decent case, because they've set a precedent by paying other artists.
But then of course the question arises: how much are they going to pay everyone? They could, I suppose, pay per search request (they can't tell when someone connects to download at present). But how do you link searches to particular tracks? Filenames are pretty meaningless.
There are a hell of a lot of issues that need to be worked out here.
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Was your AOL-Time Warner-Bertelsmann
:)
:)
:)
reference part of the joke?
But if you look at www.aol.co.uk scroll down to the bottom of the page where the copyright disclaimer is and you can see that they're already partners in europe
As for 3 subscribers, you've gotta be joking- hmm then again. There's a lot of (better) free alternatives out there
Now I've just gotta get out of the shock of a non goatse first post
Friday night 11:00pm
You go over your plans for the night:
1) You can stay home and drink by yourself but that's no fun (Be content with your mp3 collection and just listen to your own)
2) You can go over to your buds house and drink but you want to meet new people (Grab some mp3s from your friends)
3) You can go out to a bar, spend $10.00 on a cover charge, pay 3x more for beer (Use napster).
Most of us would choose 3. Sure we could go to the cheaper bars but there's no hot chicks there(OpenNap / Gnutella).
Once you start paying for Napster, you are tracked by your credit card to your real name and address. The record companies get a judge to force Napster to release to them, the name and CC# of all users who downloaded a song from a copyrighted artist, and force the judge to charge said credit card for the entire album. BAM.
You would have to be a complete idiot to sign up for something like this, which means it will be "First Posters" and "Goat SeX", and that's about all.
-Spackler
Repeat after me:
You don't have a 100MB Ethernet connection to the internet!
Ok, so maybe in the unlikely event that your college is 100Mbit within the dorms (the few that I know of are all 10Mbit, and even some still have Cat 3 strung), I seriously doubt that you have anything more than a full T3 to the internet at large. A T3 is only 45Mbit/s. And you're lucky if you even have a T3 dedicated to drom internet use.
It doesn't make sense that the music labels will settle for a subscription fee only system.
Something tells me Napster plans to migrate to a "copyright protected" music format later on so that they can squeeze out more money from people with expiration dates and "play-only-on-this-computer" authentication.
If they don't, they lose too much of their much cherished control over music. $10 a month won't make up for the amounts of music people will download.
If I'm tried for, found guilty of, convicted for piracy and sentenced to pay a fee to offset that piracy (like DAT tax, Audio CDR tax, audio casette tax, Canadian CDR tax, etc.), then why shouldn't I parate, right? The fine legitimizes the crime. It's like if the county mailed and forced you to pay you a parking ticket every day for parking in the handicapped zone. You may as well park there, right?
But I won't give you any points for not being able to look at the filesize and be able to guess that it is the complete song.
Normally, when I search, I sort by song length. This puts all the complete files together; then I go for low pings. But this still doesn't help with users who log off and users who set their simultaneous uploads to 0.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I have been on various OpenNap servers out there, and they are WORTHLESS, because it's only running on a SINGLE MACHINE, therefore only a few thousands users can be logged at once. That's not enough : the chance you'll find the song you're looking for is exactly ZERO PERCENT. Unless you're a Britney Spears fan.
Wrong. OpenNap servers can be linked together to form a network with shared file and user databases. This is what the OpenNap and MyNapster networks are. The numbers are already pretty damn big, and believe me, once Napster goes subscription-only the user base on these free networks will rocket far higher.
Note that if you're using the original Napster Inc. client for Windows, you can switch between networks with Napigator.
Remember that Napster has thousands of machines connected together, and even though they do have islands, you still search across a user database of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
See above.
Do these support text-based only? I SSH/telnet to Linux servers to use Napster (downloading with Windows Napster on a 26400 modem connection is not fun!). I don't have my own Linux box yet. Thanks!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
How long until after Napster begins this service with all the big labels will it be before they begin the OpenNap Witch Hunt? How long will it be before they claim 'the Napster protocol is proprietary IP and OpenNap is an unlicensed implementation of our IP"???
Napster is introducing a subscription service, while keeping the existing free service intact. All you Linux zealots shouldn't jump up in arms at the first mention of money! RTFArticle ...
My god, you'd think a Slashdot reader would be the type to hurl accusations before even knowing the facts... : )
As I understand it, the subscription fee will *only* be for those wishing to use the "deluxe" service of napster, where garanteed quality mp3's will be offered. No, they won't be profitting from your cherished semi-fragment of a Metallica song. The free part of the service will remain as is (although I wouldn't be surprised if they skimped on the search servers for it), while they'll offer good connections and high quality stuff to the people who pay. This has been in the Napster FAQ for months people...
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
Right now it's clear that the bulk of big faster napster servers are run by Students. If my university weren't so tight fisted then i'd run one (but the 28.8 connection with per minute charges that they give me free doesn't quite hack it).
:)
However I wouldn't run a server so that some corporation can get rich out of it.
Why should users pay napster and the record company so they can download a song from me!?
I wouldn't share on napster if it made napster inc rich.
Napster will soon find that for their business model to succeed they'll have to pay the servers - sadly that's unethical
They CAN, but it won't scale, not over the internet (latency!!!!!). You'd need too many machines, and the search would be too slow. Hell, it's already slow enough on Napster right now, even slower on most OpenNap servers. You are certainly right when you say the OpenNap user base will increase dramatically when free-Napster dies, but I don't see how *technically* it can scale up.
I wonder what the OpenNap server-linking system is, underneath. I imagine it'd be a cross between IRC-linking and Gnutella. That would scale okay, wouldn't it? (Yes, I know Gnutella has scaling problems, but I'm talking about the general theory of the Gnutella method rather than the implementation - and remember that *this* network is composed purely of servers, so the traffic would look pretty different)
I buy probably 5-6 CDs per month, sometimes less, sometimes more, but in the end a price like $30/month would be worth it to me. The added inconvenience would be worth the exposure to a greater selection of music.
There's no way I could burn an entire collection. New music is released much too quickly. Yes, I'd like to go back into old catalogs. There's a lot of music I'd like to check out, but my rate of CD buying doesn't really allow it. This would.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
If you want Fair Compensation and you care about your probably starving artists check out Fairtunes.
Matt
Anyway i'm not convinced, though it's an interesting challenge and I hope that OpenNap works out okay.
I'd like to point out that my first post has been modded down just because i dared voice criticism over OpenNap...
thats really interesting. i never thought of it that way. i still have trouble justifying wrong actions that way. have you ever heard two wrongs dont make a right?
this isnt to say that i dont trade mp3's-i do, i just admit that what i do is wrong. no silly justificaition for me.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
For Windows, FileNavigator is a full-featured Napster clone that can also share non-mp3 files (movies, music videos, etc.) on servers that support them (i.e. OpenNap servers).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Also, I think this is unfair to artists under non-RIAA labels such as Alternative Tentacles , with artists like Dead Kennedys, Butthole Surfers, D.O.A., and I think Husker Du.
If Napster starts actually dispersing royalties for music, I might actually use Napster. As it is now, I hear customers in my store where I sell CDs say things like "oh, I'll just download it"... I know a lot of the artists personally - let me assure you they are not all part of the mega-conglomerate that I dislike as much as anyone else. Some of the artists who are not getting royalties for the music are very much outside the box. I want them to keep recording; therefore, I personally want to pay to own their music. That is how they can buy more time in the recording studio.
Where's the forest? And what are all these trees doing here?
As much as I love (and use) the opennap servers, they are not a viable alternative to commercial napster. The servers have limited load, for one, and the (commercial) Napster users DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT. A friend of mine was recently banned by Metallica because she had a song titled "Metallica-Sucks.MP3"
She didn't know what to do, because her IP dosn't change, and she couldn't get around the block. I asked her if she tried Napigator or any of the alternatives. Her response? "What? You mean that there's more than just napster?"
She's just a typical college student. If the average student dosn't know about the options, who does?
You see, there was a time, believe it or not, where nobody knew what Napster was, either!
That's right, it is possible for people to learn about more P2P networks and clients if you give them a chance to grow.
Amazing, but true!
"And like that
No, the Napster deal will totally kill all hope for subscription based services (unless Napster now fails). This is the sweatist deal t he music industry could possibly have brokered for themselves. They _need_not_sign_any_new_artists_
to make money. Specifically, if I'm an independent musician whosells my own CDs then the music industry (not me) recieves all the money from Napster when people use Napster to transfer my songs.
Actually, it's just as bad for artists who are signed by the music industry. The industry will never need to pay the artists for Napster based revinue. Why would the music industry ever make subscription based services where they might be forced to pay the artists for downloads. hell, they do not even need to pay for servers now since Napster is P2P.
Finally, if some independent label did set up a subscription based service why would any consumers buy their shit when they can just pay the Napster tax and DL all the same stuff + the main stream stuff. The only way to fix this is for everyone to switch to IRC for file trading.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I would be prepared to pay for Napster, but in return I would like a defined QoS.
You will always end up finding that the *only* live version of Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at Atlanta, in greater than 64kbps (ugh), and that isn't truncated before the last bar finishes its EL34 plate-melting feedback wail, is gonna be coming from the fastest 28.8k connection from a user on a Zimbabwean ISP, where the backbone connection is accomplished with a k56Flex modem on a noisy dial-up line.
And you, with your bidirectional cable, DSL or better, sitting there in front of an Internet connection where you're used to access that's almost as fast as reading stuff off your hard disk, will *still* have to sit there. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, sitting on your hands so that you don't move the mouse and somehow cause Windows to crash, you will each packet to safely make it down the rickety telephone lines from a 486SX-33 running on a portable generator in Africa, all the way across the Atlantic, and finally through all the myriad of hops to your machine.
You lose a packet somewhere along the way. You see the transfer rate drop to 0.00. It stays there for a second, then resumes its blistering fast 0.08kbps. Great. Only 7 more hours of this hell to go through, afraid to touch your computer or any others sharing your Internet connection, lest the fragile connection get broken.
And, of course, it does.
Just as the anodes in the output stages of Jimi's Marshall stacks start to droop and short against the grids, the neighbor of the super-rich guy in the village picks up the telephone. The click on the party line is the click that is heard half a world away: Transfer Error!
Napster is over.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Of course, there is the other side. I collected a lot of our vinyl albums in MP3 for my girlfriend, who is album- rather than song-oriented. Some of her stuff is a tad obscure (Bob Dylan's Royal Albert Hall, or the pirate No Stone Unturned Stones album). You fight those Zimbabwean modems for a week or more, then one day...
vvvvVVVVVVRRRROOOOOMMMMMMMM the first transfer starts, 20kbps, 30kbps, levels out at 50kbps; the second starts, goes straight to 50kbps, the third starts, goes straight to 50kbps, the fourth naturally gets remotely queued but that doesn't matter, you are gripping the armrests and when transfer #1 finishes #2 kicks in, you rightclick #1 and play song, go to the library, take a few samples from different parts of the track, and the last bars are fading sweetly off into nontruncated bliss when you pop back to transfer and transfer #2 is finished and #5 has started, and within 10 minutes you have the entire album. Half an hour later you're popping the CD into the stereo for the female companion to admire. And life is good.
Oh, and while I usually get 800kbps or so ratings from bandwidth meter websites, on Napster I often see exactly the 1.5mbps down and 200kbps up I'm promised by BellSouth for my DSL connection.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
...it's the CPU speed for doing the MP3 encoding. The MP3 format is designed so that it takes quite a bit more horsepower to encode a song than to play it. My 450MHz Celeron makes short work of playing MP3's, but using all the resources it takes close to real listening time to encode them. A GHz level CPU with better cache would cut this some, but not enough to not be a nuisance. As the guy said, Napster (like a MP3 player) runs in the background. MP3 rippers don't.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
The Napster/Bertelsmann Q&A says this:
Will Napster continue to offer a free service?
Yes! We are committed to creating a system in which users can choose to participate without paying any money. We realize that Napster is nothing without its user community -- you make us what we are. However, for a small membership fee we feel that we can facilitate an enhanced service that you'll find even more valuable and that will allow us to generate revenues to be able to make payments to artists and songwriters for music files that our users share with each other. We are working with Bertelsmann and other potential allies in an effort to work out the details of how all this will work and we will, of course, keep you fully informed as details become available.
I haven't used it lately, by the way; but I did use it a bunch last year, mostly in the first half of 2000.
:)
I have never used Napster to download an entire album, except in one case (detailed later). All of my Napster usage was to find individual songs that I wanted, but was not about to pay the cost of an entire CD for. The problem is that I want one song, but I can't just buy one song at the store (singles CDs are as overpriced as album CDs). Given no real alternative, and yet still desiring the song, I used Napster. Probably got about forty or fifty songs, but no entire albums.
The only time I downloaded an entire album was when I wanted to find a particular song off the Swingers soundtrack. It's a song with almost no lyrics (at least, the lyrics are only at the end, and hard to make out), so I couldn't just do a text search to figure out what it was. So I downloaded the entire Swingers soundtrack, and listened to it one by one until I found the song: "Pick up the Pieces" by Average White Band.
Then I deleted the rest of the album.
The final irony: My mom bought me the Swingers soundtrack CD for Christmas this past year.
I guess my position is, as long as I can't get the music I want (which is to say, individual songs that are normally only available as part of an overpriced single or album), I'm going to go download them.
I did buy 20-30 regular CDs last year, as well. When I want an entire album, I buy it. When I want one song, I WOULD buy it, if it were available. Sucks to be the big labels; if they'd had a system available whereby I could have downloaded, for 50-99 cents a pop, MP3s of those 40-50 songs I got from Napster, I would easily have done that instead of wasting time trying to find good connections on Napster! The fools!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
My mp3s are mine and mine alone, and you can copy 'em as much as you like. Not that you'd want to, but hey.. that's hardly the point.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
If you really need new music just hit IRC. Enough DCC channels automatically send out requested files in *.tar format from fast college boxen. (This is all in EfNet by the way).
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.