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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.
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.
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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