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Napster Traffic Drops
rev420 writes "Wired is reporting that Napster traffic has fallen by 60% since it instituted it's (er, the labels') name-blocking scheme. Despite their best efforts, few people seem to be finding name-scramblers like Catnap to be useful and the Aimster's Pig-Latin encoder is no longer available because Napster requested that it be disabled." No big shocker here.
I walked up to Best Buy the other day and purchased Aerosmith's "Just Push Play" CD, for several reasons:
1) Aerosmith rocks, as does their new CD.
2) I needed the excercise from the walk.
3) I wanted to encode the disc at the highest possible quality setting, which to me means using MusicMatch Jukebox in Very High quality mode with error correcting (when it reads the CD) turned on. On my 900MHz Athlon, the CD rips and encodes at 0.7x speed. The CD now sits on my shelf, awaiting the next great digital recording standard.
Now, while I would grant you that I need all the excercise I can get, I would rather be able to conveniently purchase a licence to the CD online, download high-quality unrestricted files from high-bandwidth servers in the format of my choice, be able to redownload them later in newer formats or to replace my existing copies, and save a few bucks by cutting out the meatspace overhead. I'd certainly buy a lot more music. (Come to think of it, MusicMatch licenses their software in this manner...) Unfortunately, by fighting a lost cause in the most obnoxious manner possible, the record companies are merely making life more difficult than necessary for honest customers and giving priceless publicity to Napster, Gnutella, etc.
The record companies need to learn what the software industry figured out years ago: copy protection on mass-marketed products just aggravates your best customers.
Having read the story I logged onto Napster, performed some searches and noticed a marked improvement in the speed at which results were returned. Maybe it was just me, but Napster was less responsive when the craze was at its height. Now that a huge chunk of users have left, Napster seems so much faster.
I'm not going to lament the absence of users because, chances are, they were not sharing files which I was looking for. I use Napster mainly to locate obscure hard-to-find, sometimes out-of-print tracks which I have no hope of being able to purchase. I also use it for techno, house and jungle mixes, many of them never released on CD or tape and most of them bootleg. Since I have no chance in hell of ever being able to find these items for purchase elsewhere, let alone be assured that the money will find its way to the music creators, then I have no qualms about my actions. If, however, I find the item somewhere I will purchase it but that has happened only once or twice.
Without those 60% I've still been able to find items of interest on Napster, so I will still find a use for it.
ian.
ian
I doubt it. Most people that are interested in trading live shows do stuff w/etree (http://www.etree.org). shns are a far better quality recording for live stuff.
I do download *SOME* live MP3's, but not for the purpose of recording to CD.
unfortunatly, most bands that ALLOW taping of their shows are "jam bands like Phish". Grateful Dead, String Cheese Incident, Widespread Panic, Phish, etc. All have influences from similar places.
Although.... I did just pick up a Rachel Auburn hard house 12" which samples Madonna. I wonder if the RIAA can legally name this title in it;s lists for napster - I mean it only samples an RIAA act.
Courtney love complained that napster was full oof techno, well - now it's going to get ever more full as the RIAA doesn't care about these short run vinyl pressings.
if you ask joe 56K napster user, he'll tell you he doesn't use napster any more since it was shut down a few weeks ago.
all of my friends are novice napsterbaters at best, and they never even try to sign on anymore, since the press keeps telling them on the evening news that napster is dead. lost its court case. defunct. deceased.
it's along the same lines as those people i talked to about buying a computer about 5 years ago who said that Apple had gone out of business and that i couldn't buy a mac anymore.
like everybody else is saying here, napster's still there, and you can still get anything you want, and, in my estimation, it's faster: no more queueing up to get on a server, the serious users are still there (like me) and the fat pipes are still flowing.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Remember that Napster usage increased sales of CDs.
Correlation does not imply causation. And in fact, I'm not sure anyone has shown correlation.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Given the time it takes for Gnutella searches to return (10-30 secs on average), I like to type in a few key words and let it go. All searches are presented in their seperate tabs.
I hope nobody is still using Gnutella 0.56? It's BAD for the network! Update to something new, please...
Napster traffic has fallen by 60% since it instituted it's (er, the labels') name-blocking scheme.
... Well, ma'am, it's is a contraction of "it is," not a possessive pronoun for chrissakes!
That's it! Just switch its and it's in all of your mp3 file names. The RIAA will never know what hit them!
Example: Well, Ms. Rosen, we did block the R.E.M. song "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," but you can't honestly expect us to block "Its the End of the World as We Know It"
Also, try having fun with two, too, and to.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
So do you demand to be let in to movies for free that aren't sold out? Hey, those empty seats aren't doing anything right? If the management won't let you in, hell just walk in through the fire exit.
The fact is, it's the movie cinema's call - not yours. Sure, you can try and argue you wouldn't pay to see the movie (but your still willing to walk to the cinema and sit through a couple of hours of this movie). But at the end of the day, it's not up to you. The cinema rightly views you a potential customer, and letting you in for free undermines their service to those who did pay.
Same with Napster. You'll search for a song, pay bandwidth charges to download it - yet claim you'd never buy it so who's losing anyway? Well I'm not convinced you wouldn't pay for that song - which is irrelevant in any case as the music label has exclusive rights to sell this song. You're undermining the people who did buy the CD - why should you get it for free when they paid for it? Hell, they may as well start downloading future releases too. Uh oh, you've started a trend that's reduced the future earnings of that artist.
Whether or not it's good for an artist to permit their songs to be traded on Napster (as some artists have) is up to them, not you. It's not something you can force on them because you've decided trading their songs "can't be theft". Your claims that the industry is making more money than ever and that Napster has opened your eyes to new artists are irrelevant - it's not your right to force what you think is best onto someone else (well, unless they're your child).
So you see, trading mp3s can't be theft, because nothing is missing.
Potential revenue is missing and the integrity of the artist and their material is compromised to those who did pay for it.
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Rare Window - free your photos
Actually the RIAA, MPAA and every damn author, musician, commercial software developer, director, screen writer, actor, orator, song writer, graphic designer etc.
I don't see any distinction between "theft" and "copying" as particularly relevant at all. Theft is really an economic concept (although the bible espouses it as a moral one) - you're stealing wealth from another person, be it money, physical property or intellectual property. It's simply FUD to imply that "theft" is some kind of amoral, natural law and "copying" is an artificial construct of the RIAA and other nefarious organisations to make more money.
The fact is, there are many, many people whose careers would be undermined if everyone was legally allowed to copy their work. This copying deprives them of wealth either directly or in diminished future earnings. Where's the distinction?
All this post-facto argument is a contrived attempt to justify (and thereby keep alive) this admittedly addictive habit of downloading free music.
Give it up. Downloading illegal mp3s is not a natural progression of Freedom of Speech; it's not some noble crusade to make information free. It's theft.
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Rare Window - free your photos
That's cool. I didn't mean to say that every artist doesn't permit copying. Rather, all (ok - most) artists want to have the discretion to choose whether their works are made available to be copied OR NOT. It's cool that you distribute your work for free, but you made this decision - it wasn't forced on you. That's the issue. Arguments that copying is not theft and therefore one should be free to abitrarily copy others work (or that it's legally wrong but morally right) are what I'm against.
Theft deprives someone of property directly. Copying does not (though it may, indirectly). There's plenty of reasonable arguments to be made about copying being bad, but none of them come down to analogies about stealing cars.
So what do you call it when I hack your bank and electronically transfer funds from your account to mine? I'm just moving numbers around - no theft of 'property' - I'm not saying it's "copying", just that it goes beyond the bounds of your convenient definition of theft. The stealing cars analogy is grossy over-simplifying the matter. That fact is, the more you look to define what theft is, the more blurry you'll find the distinction between theft and copying.
Let's talk in broader economic terms (note: we could talk in social or environmental on other areas of theft) and the distinction is even more diminished. At best, copying boils down to some sort of "take from the (information) rich, give to the (information) poor" Robin Hood approach.
I think the Free Software and Open Source movements are great - and I directly benefit from them. As do I benefit from artists such as yourself distributing free music and typefaces. I'm not against these things at all. What I am saying is that artists have the choice as to whether they distribute their works free or charge some amount of money for them (or a combination of the two) - we should respect this.
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Rare Window - free your photos
Finally a Gnutella client that had most of my wishlists. It appears almost bug free too. When I run it for 3-4 days in a row, it might hang. IT also creates too many threads when left running for a long time. But the threads are idle.
I quit using Napster long back. I run LimeWire all the time on my computer and it accounts for a major chunk of traffic on my DSL.
If you haven't you should give this a try.
any one else can recommend anything similar??
LinuxLover
http://www.eDonkey2000.org
Distributed file sharing. Download from multiple people. Download from people downloading themselves.
FunOne
FunOne
The registry is "the thing that gets fixed when you click on this .reg file that lets you connect up with a new Napster ID".
Only a clueless newbie would click on a .reg file without inspecting its contents. But - the people who don't know what the registry is are precisely the people clueless enough to blindly do so in order to get back onto Napster.
So yeah, if all they did was nuke users, they would ultimately end up with a situation where all Joe Windoze knows (and to accomplish his task, all he needs to know) about "the registry" is that "it's what gets fixed by clicking on the 'i want my napster back' icon"...
Kinda odd what they are filtering- for example, most of my Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan was filtered while most of my CSNY, Neil Young, and 4 out of 6 of my Cake MP3's weren't.
-bugg
The way that I read it was that traffic, per se, wasn't what was down. What was down was the number of shared songs per user.
"Webnoize, a 'digital intelligence' company that has been monitoring Napster usage for a while, reported on Thursday that the number of shared songs per Napster user had fallen 60 percent since Napster began filtering MP3s on Wednesday."
Metaphysicist
Metaphysicist
"If at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking until you do succeed"
- Cu
I get 100 hits (the max) for Britney Spears, as well as for Metallica. I just downloaded "No Leaf Clover" from one of many available copies.
If Napster is publicizing who/what is blocked, I didn't see it. But right now, it seems that they're not blocking much at all.
CuteMX is no longer available. It was only for testing, but might be back later on.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
CuteMX is gone due to testing. It might be back though.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I don't know, but I'm still getting it. I better not mention this again, though, as I was marked as a troll within seconds of posting. People have no sense of humor around here.
... but seriously, Rachel Auburn? give me a break. that new label of hers, "RA," puts out the worse circus house crap around. it's kind of cute at first, but it gets very annoying, especially if you're exposed to an entire set of that bouncy nonsense. if you want some decent UK Hard House, there are better alternatives. HardNRG.com and Energy UK. i'm not sure if you spin yourself, but those two are good places to start for the non-dj.
...of course, some people like Rachel Auburn. but there's no accounting for taste! :) at any rate, it's better than the RIAA shlop that's been removed from Napster. i'm all for it: now it's even easier to find the good stuff! a quick search brings up 97 copies of my CDs :).
- j
You mean the majority of napster users were actually trading copyrighted works from the big five, rather than innovative pieces from unknown artists/composers?
This is not a very convincing argument. Is the money destroyed? Do we not spend that money on other things? By copying, we've created NEW wealth; just because some imaginary figure can be calculated doesn't mean that it is necessarily a loss for society.
Perhaps you can make a utility argument based on the reduced *incentive* to create (I don't buy that either, but many people do, and it is reasonable). But once works are created, I can't believe any argument which says that society benefits from having to pay to duplicate it.
Anyway, my original point was not a defense of copying. I am just trying to keep the ideas of "theft" and "copying" separate so that we can engage in a discussion which is less confused by bad terminology.
Every author, musician, software developer...? No, certainly not every one. There are lots of people who give away their work for free, and lots who permit you to copy it. I'm serious, some people do not think the way you do. Linux and a lot of the software that goes with permits copying explicitly. I'd like to think of myself as a graphic designer and musician, and my fonts and music are free, and I permit copying. I'm sure we can find significant examples for your other categories. This is not an obvious point.
As for the "copying is moral" argument, I don't expect to win over many people with just slashdot posts. Morals are more complicated than that. However, I believe the distinction between theft and copying is real, and that you are just plain wrong to claim they are the same. Theft deprives someone of property directly. Copying does not (though it may, indirectly). There's plenty of reasonable arguments to be made about copying being bad, but none of them come down to analogies about stealing cars.
I think it's important that we don't conflate the idea of "theft" (stealing property, removing it from its owner) with the idea of "copying" (duplicating something without degrading the original). To be sure, both are illegal under current US law. However, they're illegal for different reasons, and with different justifications.
The RIAA and others want you to fall into the mind trap that copying IS theft, since practically everyone believes that traditional theft is immoral. In order to make sound judgments about these issues, we need to clearly separate the two concepts.
I don't know if anybody else has checked it out, but I just logged on and I only saw about 6k people on napster. So I fired up gnapster's OpenNap browser, I went around to a few servers... stopping at the MusicCity network, it has 30k users on it! And the number's grown about 1000 since i got on 20 minutes ago that's crazy... everybody must have gone there I wonder if the RIAA will be able to get ISP's to shutdown OpenNap. Supposidly ISP's aren't liable for the traffic on their servers... but who knows with the courts lately.
- "Never let a computer tell me shit." - DelTron Zero
Perhaps this is just a ploy by Napster to throw off the RIAA. Because Napster is implementing all of these blocks on its own servers - the Napster network - people are flocking to the other networks. Hmm, imagine that. Perhaps I should keep my mouth shut about this before the whole world finds out, then.
This kinda reminds me of the Simpsons where booze is banned and the owner of Duff Beer says "No, we aren't worried, our customers enjoy duff for it's smooth taste, not it's alcoholic content. They will enjoy our Duff Zero even more." Three minutes later duff goes out of business. Once again, we can look to the Simpsons for a humorous take on reality.
It's just a matter of time before someone figures out an easy workaround to the naming/renaming scheme, then Napster will be right back up where it was before. In the meantime, there is always Aimster.
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1. Small networks, like in my house, where no one computer is bigger than the others, peer to peer would be handy. I could share files with JUST my friends on the net if I could add a little client side authentication, and still protect from prying eyes.
2. For general, non-client authenticated peers, the FBI would have a harder time finding pr0n, the RIAA would have a harder time finding m34talica... etc.
It's the sysadmin in me wantin' to know.
...or maybe not.
Yeah; people are trading cool music that the RIAA doesn't own (or at least didn't put on their list). Napster is better than ever. It's faster, and its easier to find rare stuff by known artists since all their proprietary stuff isn't in the way. By looking at other people's files based on common interests you can discover new bands. Why do people always assume "piracy" is the only thing p2p tech is good for? Just because that's what the RIAA says?
As long as the RIAA attack on p2p remains at the level of filtering I think Napster - at least the spirit of Napster not Napster Inc./Bertelsmann - wins. Sure it's harder to trade copyrighted stuff but that is technically illegal and they have the legal muscle to enforce the law - so let them waste their money doing so. (Besides, that stuff is easy to find in stores anyway!)
If filtering Napster makes them happy I am not complaining. The real fear is that they will limit the functionality of the internet. This is a radical new distribution mechanism and in the long run it is better for musicians even though it may not be better for the music industry as it currently exists.
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That's because Scour went under, and it's assetts were bought out.
The company that has owns it has a website here. They have not relaunched yet. but they are talking about it.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
re: "Maybe 40% of Napster's users really *do* use the service to trade bootlegs, live recordings, and other unregulated music."
I'd really like to believe that.. however I'm pretty confident that the 35% are mispellings and artists too obscure for the RIAA to care for.. maybe 5% unregulated music.
Tyrannoctonus
Clients Gigs
Napster 6830 1926
OpenNap 28320 33009
What can I say?
No amount of filters/lawsuits will stop the 31337 underground. I don't agree with them - but I feel a bit sorry for the RIAA - trying to take on the 31337 underground. They obviously don't know who they're messing with. These guys are the mafia of the internet. So get their ISPs to ban them, I hear you say. Sure, but when that was tried with one of the 31337 leaders, the 31337 group took out the ISP - DDoSed it to death. If they can't do that they'll attack the upstream.
They have literally thousands of automated vulnerability programs searching for open servers to build new platforms to attack again. You can't stop them - they are the 31337 underground. I know, I've tried to stop them. It's not their abilities (well, in most cases at least) but their sheer numbers that make them impossible to defeat. Also, they are not centralized, so law-based methods won't help - they are in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, UK, USA, Canada, Germany, France, Russia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico...yet they all speak a common language - "31337 h4x0r 5p34k."Their average conversation is this:
- y0...- wh4t n3w sh1t y0 g0tz?
- k00l sh1t- FTPx0r d4 1nf0...
Yes, you definitely don't know what you're messing with. I don't agree with what they're doing either, but trust me - there is no way to stop them. They are the 31337 - Elite in the 31337 speak....and that they are, Elite 31337 h4x0rs on the information superhighway...A long term strategy to deal with them must be formulated - that I'll grant you. Because if they aren't stopped eventually, 31337 5p34k will be the world's official language. These guys make other terrorist groups look like the tooth fairy for one reason - all other dictators so far have done their work through military force - therefore they could be combatted with military force....but the new era will see increasingly complicated telecommunications systems taking over functions of the very human world. And the 31337 will control that, unless we formulate a plan to stop them within the next 5 years.
There is one man that needs to be targetted - the Dark Lord of the Internet, a 31337 h4x0r known as "Goatboy25". A 25-year old 31337 h4x0r who is the New Dark Lord. These are dangerous times on the Internet.Dangerous times on the Internet indeed.
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
The current American popularity recipe is two equal parts of cheap and easy. The easy part just flew out the window. Even though it is still VERY easy, it is not simplistic. The cheap part is going next, so can I download "Taps.mp3?"
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The recording industry didn't shut Napster down. They are bleeding it to death.
;-)
Banning users wasn't going to shut Napster down because a banned user could fix their Windows registry and signon with a new ID. The IDs also required no verification.
Screening the shared files for copyrighted material and automatically not sharing them is a killer though. Nobody is going to bother with rediculous naming schemes to share their content - there are easier things to do. (Like BearShare, or other Gnutella clients.)
My take on it? Gnutella all the way. Now if it were just a bit more usable.
Napster would have been a great service if the quality of the MP3s was limited to 96kbps or 112kbps. Something that is similar to broadcast radio quality, but not CD quality. Then people could have continued to sample and enjoy new music, while having an incentive to go buy the real thing if they wanted a higher quality version. Just like we have today with radio. Too bad the recording industry has cut off their nose to spite their face.
downloading mp3's is not theft, it's copyright violation. Theft and copyright violation are different things, copyright violation might leed to loss of income but it doesn't decrease the value or amount of property like theft does. If I copy a cd it only harms the copyright holder if I don't buy that cd because I have copied it. If I steal a cd from a store it decreases the value of their inventory....
I'm not saying that copyright violation is not wrong, I'm just saying that copyright violation is not the same as theft. Record and software (media ?) companies would like you to equate copyright violation with theft, but they're not the same...
I agree with the parent post, because of Napster I have discovered a lot of new music. I intend to buy every single cd once I graduate and start making some decent money.
it's only going to reduce the number of "mainstreamers" getting mp3s, and in all honesty, those are the people the record companies should be worried about.
It's the mainstreamers that purchase albums like britney spears, n'sync, aguiliera, etc...but because they only listen to the albums for a few months until the trend changes, they feel no loyalty to the band, and have no reason to purchase the cd.
the people who have been using mp3s since way before napster, have other means of getting them: ftps, irc, and private forums immediately come to mind. and ftp can NOT be stopped unless the whole protocol is banned (won't happen) Us, on the other hand, do purchase cds even after downloading mp3s. Yes, I have about a hundred mp3 cds that I didn't buy. But I've also bought well over a hundred cds because of mp3s that I first downloaded.
No I don't condone downloading mp3s, and yes, it is theft. But economically, me downloading mp3s is making them more money than if i wasn't.
and napster's death isn't going to stop me or millions of other music lovers. as i said, there's other ways that are faster, more efficient, and more reliable.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
I wish I could see a plot of the traffic on Napster over the last year or so. Does anyone know if there's a chart anywhere?
I bet the 60% drop is from the recent peak when people thought Napster was going to be shut down. Or maybe they are just saying 60% fewer files are being shared? Well duh if they are filtering them.
I tried searching for stuff like Eminem and Britney last night and it was all still there. A few spelling variations but not hard to find. In fact if I didn't know anything about the court battles I wouldn't even have noticed much.
The bottom line is that this will only slow down song swapping, but now that people have seen what technology can do for their songlists, no one will ever go back to only buying CDs.
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Oh bother.
Hell, it's not even making them any money.
Let's face it, the average music listener is busy listening to Brittany or N'Sync, and the only reason for downloading that crap is that your folks aren't paying you enough allowance to buy the CD.
What I loved about Napster was the stuff that is copywrited, yet not for sale. Rare tracks, bootlegs, unreleased cuts, out of print EPs... that is the stuff dreams are made of.
The labels aren't going to burn a CD and print a jewel case up so that they can sell you your "I had it but a friend borrowed it and never gave it back so now it's out of print and I can't get it *sob*" music.
But, they could have allied with Napster to provide work that they no longer sell to to audiophiles and hard core fans. Let's face it, if the RIAA made any money off of such a partnership, it would be more than they are making now. I would have paid for the Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails cover of Down in the Park, but it's not for sale.
Not to mention that it would have been an example, something for related industries to emulate. Ever tried to find an out of print book? Wouldn't it be nice if you could download it (even for a small fee), rather than scour used book stores, estate sales, flea markets, etc.?
The labels really fucked up a golden opportunity. For shame.
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. - Andre Gide
I see two possible causes for this, first, the filter may be ineffective, and copyrighted works may still be being traded.
Second, the RIAA greatly underestimated the number of legitimate downloads going through the network, or fudged the figures a bit to improve their position during the trial. Maybe 40% of Napster's users really *do* use the service to trade bootlegs, live recordings, and other unregulated music.
I noticed some suttle differances yesterday. If you searched on Wednesday for "Oops," hoping to find the Britney Spears song I noticed some suttle differences yesterday. For example if you searched for "Oops ... I did it again!", you would find the song. But there are now only two or three different versions of the song, where in the past there might have been dozens. There are still many copies of "Oops ... I Farted Again," the Weird Al Yankovic parody of the song.
Diplomacy is the art of letting people have your way
people ARE leaving napster.... find out *where* they are going at NAPanon, a support group for homeless Napster users!
Absolute Stupidity
http://www.13kingdoms.com/odd/