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Napster Going Legit
mtstump writes "Wired is running a
story stating that Napster has signed deals with three of the five major recording companies in an effort to make Napster legit." It's the perfect model: the users pay you *and* for the bandwidth to share the songs they already bought. Course I still don't see the benefit for us. No doubt we'll see more of these deals as napster becomes less relevant and decentralized networks grow in popularity.
Don't be too sure about that.
A former colleague used to be one of the sysadmins at one of the -- if not the -- largest sexually explicit server farms in the world (they're in Seattle; wish I could remember the name). These guys can assemble any kind of explicit site you want, filled to the brim with pictures, in under 24 hours. These guys apparently generate over two gigabytes a day just in server logs.
These guys have a database. A massive database. In this database is every picture on their server farm, with information on who the copyright holder is, who the photographer is, who the subjects are and their ages, when it was taken, how many times it's been viewed and from where, how much money has been charged to view it, etc. etc. etc. etc.
If an image previously thought to be public domain or otherwise unencumbered turns out to be copyrighted, they have the logs and database records to make sure they receive back-royalties.
There's a real industry here. Despite it's "unsavory" nature to the general public, any decentralized distribution of their "property" in noticable volumes will get you smacked down. (Due to rapid article expiration and non-existent searching capabilities, USENET does not constitute noticable volumes.)
BTW, most of the people who stand to lose Real Money(TM) in the sexually explicit image industry have a very different way of doing business. They don't send threatening letters. They don't sue you. They just come 'round in the dead of night and break your knees.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
it is wether or not you can walk into the proverbial store, grab a CD, and walk out without paying for it.
There is no store, and no CD. Not even a proverbial one.
When you take a CD from a store, that store has one less CD to sell. When you copy an mp3, no one has lost anything. The only thing "lost", and I put that in quotes because you can't lose something you never had, is a potential sale. But even that isn't lost, because as you say:
Napster "Generates sales" to some extent, many people download songs from artists they would never, ever buy albums from.
So, if the person downloads a song that they never, ever would have bought, and no store or retail outlet has lost any of their merchandise to sell to others, what exactly is the problem?
Oh, wait, it's illegal.
Let me tell you something flat out: When the cops aren't watching, I don't give a shit if something is illegal or not. I base my actions on what is moral. Our laws are so fucked, the two (legality and morality) seem to overlap only by coincidence.
Do I think copying is moral? Well, okay, I've been trained to think I should pay for my entertainment, so maybe I don't. That's why I've never used Napster. But I don't think it is so bad that I can't greatly sympathize with what is essentially a reaction to the industry stranglehold on creativity, their gouging of consumers and relentless efforts to hold back technological progress in the name of maximizing their own profits.
And on the scale of morality which I adhere to, causing a corporation to have non-maximal profits means nothing at all to me.
The enemies of Democracy are
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Nah. Betcha you won't even care about any of these teen bands in five years. But Beethoven's music is still wonderful after over a century and a half.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Interesting.
I've been wondering about that for a while.
I've got a wide range of musical tastes. Funk, disco, new wave, house, techno, industrial, EBM, metal, rap, hip-hop, hell, I'll listen to damn near anything except what's on today's Top-40. I've been listening to some of those genres for 20 years.
Drop by alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.19[5678]0s. You'll see lots of music from each decade.
Drop by alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.rap-hiphop or .dance and things are different. You'll see almost nothing older than the mid-90s. Most of the stuff is last year or newer.
That's not to say that I expect to see Public Enemy's "Nation of Millions" posted every week (though Pink Floyd fans seem to have no trouble reposting Dark Side of the Moon with astonishing regularity :), but the lack of history in the genre groups is startling.
Some of this is due to things like (e.g. dance) the importance of the DJ over the actual tracks and the relative unavailability of the latest mix from DJ $SOME_GUY_IN_IBIZA each week. But it's a little unnerving to see almost a complete absence of "old-school" music in these two sub-genres, as both rap and house/techno variants have histories going back to the early 80s.
The old geezer in me says "Young punks just want the new stuff, they've got no respect for the classics that defined their genre. Buncha cable kiddies who think anything invented more than a week ago is obsolete and not worth listening to anymore".
But I don't trust myself when I start thinkin' like a geezer. It usually means I'm missing something important.
I think the poster to whom I'm replying has stumbled onto the important something I missed.
from nytimes:
Napster in a new agreement with the recording industry is changing direction using an entirely new version of peer-to-peer technology. According to Napster's VP of Marketing Ken Philps, users wont need to download the Napster client for this service. In fact, they won't need a computer at all. Napster is using the recording industry's large distribution network to ship bulk quantities of CDs to buildings around the nation. Napster calls these buildings "Retail Centers." Users get off their asses and drive their cars to the retail center, where they then can purchase a wide variety of their favorite music labels.
"There's no subscription attached to this service. This gives our user a whole new level of flexibility, and allows us to tap into an entirely new market of non-computer users. We believe this new market will grow in years to come, " said Philps.
Someone you trust is one of us.
"It's the perfect model: the users pay you *and* for the bandwidth to share the songs they already bought"
Maybe if the users stopped "sharing" the files with people who did NOT buy them, this wouldn't have been such a big deal to begin with.
"Course I still don't see the benefit for us."
Taco, you must be blind. How is being able to get music digitally, and legitimatly, without actually buying a cd is not a benefit? Not to mention that Individual artists could work with Napster to sell their own music online in such a manner, giving them an easy way to distribute their work via an incredibly popular online service for little cost, without ever getting involved with record companies to begin with?
"No doubt we'll see more of these deals as napster becomes less relevant and decentralized networks grow in popularity."
Not too likely. Given that peer-to-peer networks like GNUtella scale poorly (See the Slashdot story about that here.), Napster is likely to experience a nice rebirth of sorts. Once users realize that they can just buy a few songs they want from record company whores like Britney Spears and J-Lo, instead of getting the less catching songs used as album filler between hits, money-conscious pop fans will jump right back to Napster.
This is just another crappy Slashdot post about the big evil record companies versus Napster, hero of the people and savior of artists. The Slashdot crew posts these because even though they hate the record companies (Rightly so, the record companies and their affects on music are disgusting.), they are too lazy to make a concerted effort to help artists survive independantly. Anyone with a brain knows that Napster is just as sleazy as Sony or BMG, and cares even less about the artists. At least the record companies front musicians money to work with. Napster just wants to leech off of the artists and record companies, growing fat on the blood of artists, as well as the pus and bile that fills the veins of record execs.
If Slashdot really wants to fight the record companies, perhaps they should bring up Prince's successful online music club, or review the work of independent artist Ani DiFranco, both working outside the world of record companies.
Stories like this are the product of laziness. If anything is to become less relevant on the net, it will be Slashdot, as a result of this crap, not Napster.
If you go to download.com, their most popular download is no longer Napster... It's AudioGalaxy.
.mp3 trader goes on.
I believe AudioGalaxy is already filtering some stuff, but when they become the target of the RIAA, something else will become the new fad.
And so the life of the
Yay.
Sorry, you are wrong. After reading about Napster on Slashdot, I began downloading all of the music that I already own.
Believe it or not, I began buying CD's left and right. Right after buying a CD, I would download all of the tracks to support the artist!
I also discovered alot of new independent bands that I never heard of. I'm not quite sure how I found these new artists, since you have to search for a song to download it, but I did. Right after downloading, I clicked the little CDnow button and supported the artists! Sometimes I even mailed money to the artists for no apparent reason!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
No, because the primary purpose of stocking caps and cars is legitimate. The primary purpose of Napster was to facilitate piracy of copyrighted material.
First you are wrong on this point.. the primary purpose of Napster is file sharing, which is perfectly legal and legitimate (the legitimacy of FTP and Gopher has never been challeneged yet it has the exact same purpose in a less user friendly manner). Naspter is a tool that CAN be used illegally, but for that matter so is a baseball bat. The primary focus of Napster is a tool to share legal files, unfortunately it was misused; however, the tool shouldn't be punished the users that misuse the tool should.
Don't like that analogy? How about this one: The mafia owns a pizza parlor. Perfectly legitimate business -- until they start laundering money. Then it is a crime, because the primary purpose is not selling pizza, it's to launder money.
Using this as an analogy in the Napster case means that ALL pizza palor's must be shut down because one person choose to use a legitimate tool (a pizza parlor) for illegitimate uses (laundering money) so, instead of arresting the person that used the tool incorrectly (the owner of this pizza parlor) you shut down ALL pizza parlor's in the world because they could potentially be used to launder money. So instead of shutting down the individual that is breaking the law (the person downloading music that he doesn't own) the RIAA has decided to kill the tool that makes it possible (Napster, which has a perfectly legitimate use as a tool). A screwdriver can be used to break the lock on a house does that mean that all screwdrivers should be illegal? Instead, wouldn't it make sense to jail people who used screwdrivers to break into houses?
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
> ... Napster is now only of historical interest
distributed systems like gnutella and its clones don't scale and are too slow to be of any use on the Internet. FTP has gone down the tubes in the last few years. Even though such sites as oth still exist, getting music is still very difficult on FTP. I don't see how newsgroups / IRC will help much, since they are not automated.
I think most people that have used napster and FTP and gnuetlla can tell you that napster really was the best method of obtaining mp3s at one point in time. I am hoping that Napigator / opennap takes off though.
There was a time when I may have paid for Napster service. That was before overfiltering and the RIAA suing everyone and their grandmother. If the RIAA is going to get a dime from Napster, they wont get one from me.
I'd like to see the artists get paid. I'd also like to see the RIAAers get nut-rot.
I'd like to see the artists own all their own music.
The way I see it is:
The record company can make money selling media- they buy the blank CD for whatever it costs them, the CD case, the paper cover, the plastic wrap, etc... they can jack up the price on the piece of plastic and make a profit on it. They shouldnt get any money from the music itself. That is money that the artist, not the record company, earned.
Therefore, all of the money made from selling just the song itself (an electronic copy from Napster) rightfully belongs to the artist, and NONE of that belongs to the record company, since there is nothing tangible involved in the transactions.
Maybe they can charge for the electrons.
Other than that, the music shouldnt belong to them. They didnt create it.. they should get paid for making music distribution possible. When they have no part in doingthe music distribution (a la napster) they have no right to whatever money is involved. THat should be between the artist, the user, and napster.
-Johnny 5000
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
its too late now. be a nice dot-com and get in the grave with the others ok? see you on gnutella.
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"i was saying gnu-rd"
Everyone was claiming that the music industry was doing itself serious long term damage persecuting Napster in the name of saving short term licensing revenue, and now we're seeing that come true.
If the record companies had kept Napster running at full tilt as a honeypot to keep all the users attracted, then just started charging a couple bucks and improved the service with the income, I'd still be using Napster. But they made it suck, so there was incentive to develop competing services, and now the market is fractured. Sure Napster could become popular again, but will it ever see the 80-90% market share it did before? Already the service is seeing a 47% decrease in logins.
The sad thing about all this is that the main problem here is how do we pay the artist? When Napster was dominant there were several interesting solutions to that problem, now who knows?
I think this model would work great if it allowed access to *every* song made. A SuperJukebox, or an Jukebox Super Highway if you will.
Heck, I'd even accept some copy protection on the songs from the JSH, if that means I could get songs from out of print, or pick songs from albums that I don't want.
But it's not going to be that easy, not at first. What this will do is kill Napster. Fine, Napster is alot like a 1850s abolitionist movement, in that they are doing something quasi-legal while calling it a right. Napster had a flawed model and it got into it with the Recording Industry, now it's draging out it's death. The sharing of files that you don't know any media of isn't legal in most of the Industrialized World at this time. That's the fact of it, and Napster was a conduit for piracy.
CmdrTaco says "the users pay you *and* for the bandwidth to share the songs they already bought"...That's not completely accurate. How many people that used Napster have downloaded something they don't own on a physical media? I know I have. That's against the rules in the current system, at least in the system that Napster argued about. Personally if I was Napster I would have yelled about that fair home use law, and the fact that monitoring the sharing of files is invasion of privacy, but no they didn't do that.
I've thought from the start that Napster should have cut a deal with the corps to be thier digital music distribution channel, but it didn't happen that way, instead the RIAA and Napster got nasty with each other and the Napster users are hurt.
But on the Good side, someone else will know not to make the same mistakes as Napster, and eventually, a stable file exchange system will develop.
The problem Napster has is that there is no solution which retains the user's right to copy any music they buy as many times as they like FOR THEIR OWN USE, but prevents them from giving it away to all their friends.
Basically what the record companies need is a technology that allows them to sell music to a user once and that user can then use that music whenever and wherever they want personally. This is fair use, and pretty much what people have at the moment with music stored on physical media. With electronic copies, it is so easy just to copy the bits the whole things becomes unworkable given the fact that people WILL steal music (ie make a copy to give someone else) because it is a soft crime that doesn't leave you feeling bad.
What the technology has to prevent is the creation of more instances of that music for other people.
The only solutions are:
(i) Make everyone have their own personal key (like a social security number) that is required to access their copy of the music. This doesn't work because someone can just give their key to another person (assuming it too is digital). A physical key - like a dongle - has possibilities here but is too cumbersome at the moment to catch on.
(ii) Prevent anyone from accessing the "bits" and control the software. This is what the music industry is trying to do at the moment but it is doomed to failure because there are so many places the "bits" are available - right down to the interface at the sound card. The only way to achieve this is having hardware only decoders with a 'secret' key and a secure algorithm. Even then it is only a matter of time before someone extracts the key and the game is over.
What it comes down to is there is no solution - no matter what the RIAA tries to do they are screwed unless they control 100% of the hardware that can play music. This is simply not a feasible situation for many reasons - most of the commercial and not ethical.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
You're assuming that napsteresque trading is always a legal trade. Lets be realistic - 95% of the trading that went on in the free-range napster days was far, far from legal.
:P
You said it yourself in your title. "Napster going legit". I quote:
legitimate adj. Being in compliance with the law; lawful: a legitimate business.
and then your statement, paraphrased:
"Napster is no longer/becoming less relevant"
indicates to me that your mindset likely also acknowledges that the majority of trading on napster is or rather was indeed, illegal.
The core of this discussion is apparently not wether or not you can share files (Obviously you can. If illegal activities werent being executed on a horrendus scale, the gov't wouldn't care.) it is wether or not you can walk into the proverbial store, grab a CD, and walk out without paying for it.
Napster is the perfect example of a situation where one can get something for free. quite often illegally, and with no accountability. Somewhat like having a descrambler on cable.
If we have indeed found a way to make napster legitimate, i'm more than willing to pay for my entertainment. the way it tends to be in a capitalist society where most forms of entertainment is considered a product.
Napster is a tool. Like any it can be used constructively or destructively. The object on which it acts is the Music industries microeconomy. Napster "Generates sales" to some extent, but many people download songs from artists they would never, ever buy albums from. Do they listen once then throw away? no.
Bands-in-a-box, which are increasingly popular nowadays, tend to operate on the principal of put one or two good singles on a CD. Throw fluff for the rest (to satiate the need to pay songwriters who are contractually obligated to produce sales of $xx.xxx in songs in exchange for pay of $xx.xxx.
Most people don't want the fluff. Most people arent willing to pay for the fluff. This pisses the recording industry off. This pisses the songwriters off (I happen to know a songwriter or two, living in nashville.) There is a bigger picture.
LLAP
It's the perfect model: the users pay you *and* for the bandwidth to share the songs they already bought.
Can we all stop pretending that we already own the cd's whose tracks we download from napster? That is utter bull shit.
I use(d) napster for the following: downloading full CD's that I do not own, and never will, so that I could burn them to audio and listen to them in my car. Everyone I know did the same thing. Now that Napster is worthless, we use other means of doing the same damn thing.
Stealing? Yep. Copyright infringement? Sure, why not. But for everyone (taco) to claim that they only downloaded tracks that they had a legal right to is completely ridiculous, and no one is buying it.
---
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Likewise, Napster is wound-licking after it lost the MP3 wars. It has no chance, because they're failing to realize that the only reason people used Napster was because the common man finally realized that he could get music for free. Now that the comman man knows that, he's not going to go back to paying for it.
Got Rhinos?
Nobody would buy, copy, or download a single Briney Spears song if the record label did not
1: Hire studio rats to program the synth-pop music she sings over.
2: Hire a producer and recording engineer team able to make a child singer sound "sexy"
3: Produce expensive videos that wave Ms. Spears's two most obvious selling points in front of the camera.
4: Get it played on the radio (in this case, her records come from Disney, who is a top-5 player in almost every radio market)
To suggest that Ms. Spears is somehow entitled to 100% (or even more than a small percentage) of the revenue generated by her "art" is to ignore who is doing all the work.
The answer is obvious: Ignore major label music entirely. Turn off the radio, stop watching MTV, and allow yourself to lose touch with popular culture. (People are supposed to do that when they start growing up, anyway.)
The truth is, it has already started happening. Concert attendance has been plumetting over the last 10 years, because nobody seriously thinks any band really matters anymore. The biggest draws are leftover bands from the era when people actually cared (like U2). It seems to me that most people no longer consider their favorite music to be an integral part of their identity the way they did in the past. While the latest release from Weezer might be mildly entertaining, nobody is going to worship them the way throngs of stoners once went apeshit over Led Zeppelin; nobody is going to follow them from city to city the way caravans followed the Grateful Dead. Rock n Roll has become a dead religion.
This year, I heard that a band called "Destiny's Child" won a bunch of awards. From the TV blub, they look kind of cute, and seem to be a band that sings shopworn 3-part harmonies over shopworn hip-hop beats. At the time, it occurred to me that I have not heard more than a 20-second blip from any of their songs. So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen divas and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
the users pay you and for the bandwidth to share the songs they already bought
Maybe I'm just slow today, but I can't make sense of that sentance. Could someone parse it for me? Who or what is the antecedent to "you"? For what are users paying "you" in addition to paying for bandwidth?
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Not to mention a perfect model for the industry. If Napster is (as much of us believe it to be) a great promoter of music in general, and the users are the one footing the bill, the industry is basically having promotion of its commodity done FOR it, all expenses paid.
This is pretty much like going to the store and forking over 18$ for a Nike T-shirt, paying for a company to brand their logo on you. If they can pull this off, they're geniuses. Evil genuises, but genuises nonetheless...
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Real peer to peer filesharing, such as gnutella, is really about making changes. There's no entity in the middle trying to make money off of each copyright violation.
I'm not against file sharing, but I think its bullshit that some corporation thinks they should be able to serve as a middle man and make money off of negating another companies property rights.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware