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Napster Signs Indie Deal
A reader:"The BBC News site has a story about Napster signing a deal with 150 record companies to distrube their music over the net." Interesting to note this piece though that the usage has totally dropped off the face of the earth.
For more in-depth discussion of these issues, check out InfoAnarchy. Slyway is a good guide to what's currently the best way to obtain music, movies, and software.
Despite him getting his facts messed up, it is true that Napster usage has slacked off tremendously: a search for "funk" yielded no results on several servers a week ago, which I felt was a telling sign. There's no more funk in the system. Go home.
[singing] ...the day / the music died...
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
I don't believe that napster ever was *really* used to find new music by bands users had never heard of...
Actually, I know several people who did exactly this. (To be fair, I didn't, I used it for sampling.) They didn't "type some random words", they used other techniques. One friend would type in "jpop" to find Japanese Pop music and discovered a number of artists. Other friends would search for an artist I liked, find a user sharing that file, and look for unknown artists the user also shared. Neither technique worked great, but they did work, and my friends found new music.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
i used to use it to listen to find all the stuff done by someone i liked.
:) AND i paid to go and see their tour when they came to detroit ($50 each for me and 2 friends). There was no chance of that happening without napster. And ironically it was Dr Dre who was one of the movers against napster!
for instance, i heard eminem on the radio, downloaded some of his stuff and related stuff like NWA, Snoop Dogg and so on. Now I'm a gangsta-rap fan!
stay frosty and alert
Actually, I think there is a difference. The factory CD player in my car wont play CDR's. I've tried Maxell, Imation, and multiple brands of generics. I've varied the recording speeds, and tried various tricks with closed and open sessions. Heck, I even tried using CDRW's. Nada. The player can't read the disks and just spits them back out at me.
On a whim, I finally bought a 3-pack of Imation music CDR's and gave them a try. It worked perfectly, the first time and every time after that. Even more, my home theater system used to occasionally have problems while trying to seek through the music tracks on a burned CDR, and those problems have disappeared also. I'm not quite sure what the difference is, but there's apparently more to the "music" CDR's than RIAA royalties.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
The incentive is very simple. When you hear music you like, you'd like to hear more, right? Well, the artist isn't going to be able to make more without your money. So you give them money. Maybe in exchange for a fancy package, maybe just as a pure donation. But one way or the other, if you want the music to keep coming, you need to support the artists.
The point is, you'll be paying not to get access to music in the first place, but in support and appreciation for what the artist provided you with freely.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Recently there were very few files shared on Napster because of their name filtering. People just left. Gnutella has been steadily growing though. I definitely say Gnutella is the future. I doubt Napster will be able to attract all those people back if they introduce a paid service. Gnutella has a pretty good chance of staying alive, and staying free.
just my 2 cents
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
>>(the price of a blank CD is what now?)
It depends on whether you buy a plain one, or the 'music' CD-R that has been specially optimized for recording music and playback in traditional CD players (read as: we sent a kickback to RIAA members)
Funny. My plain-jane Maxells work just fine without the extra $.20 tax.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Is it just me, or did napster already distribute music from over 150 companies over the net? ^_^
That wasn't distribution, that was 'aiding and abetting' distribution (remember, they weren't hosting the music at the time). Maybe this time round they'll be a traditional download service as well (e.g. 10% of Napster users actually end up being bots with addresses like indydist3.napster.com)?
deus does not exist but if he does
Hey! I thought Taylor series were supposed to be infinite.
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
Why does mr_gerbik have panties to throw at the monitor?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Sure, it takes a little more knowledge to post and retrieve large binaries, but I don't see that as doing much more than keeping the AOLers and other lamers away. I'd like to see the RIAA just try to shut down the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3* hierarchy worldwide. They might roll a few weak-kneed domestic ISPs, but it'd be funny to see the reaction from some ISP in Bumfuckistan to an RIAA C&D.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
The point of the tale: once you're getting paid it is no longer about fun anymore. By the last day the children felt that they deserved to be paid and so they were no longer willing to do for free what they used to do for fun.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There once was a taylor who moved to the South and opened a store. The Klu Klux Klan got wind of this and sent some children to yell nasty names and curses outside his store. The taylor saw that these children would drive away his business so he quickly dashed outside and said to the children "I will give each of you a quarter to keep swearing at my store." The children happily agreed, took the money, and continued swearing. The next day they came back and the taylor said "oh, I'm afraid the quaters were just for yesterday, today I will only give you a dime each." The children were a little upset but they took the money and kept swearing. The next day the taylor only offered them a nickle each, half the children left but the other half were happy to swear at his store for a nickle. The next day even more children gave up because the taylor would only pay them a penny each and on the last day none of the children would swear at his store because the taylor refused to pay them at all.
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I'd like to see CD volume sales figures from this spring. If the RIAA is to be believed, the 2 order of magnitude decrease in Napster usage should translate into a CD sale increase. Granted it won't be proof of causation, but the short time of the change will rule out the long-term market fluctuations which distorted data about CD sales as Napster rose to power over 2 years.
My bet is on no significant change, and I'd love to see a decrease.
Napster indexes music, it lists it, it allows you to search it's indexes, it provides forums to talk about music, and it gets blamed for pirating software, then taken to court, and now pays an undisclosed amount to distribute music -- something it doesn't do anyways!
They forgot signing me in to the deal. It is I the user that is supplying all the real product, why with my harddrive space sending out files over my bandwidth. Where is my cut?
This sure is not the same ole Napster I used when it first came out. Napster was ALL about free trading.
Napster is dead. R.I.P.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
It seems to me, if I'm understanding this correctly, that I'll be able to legally purchase imports and indy records from Europe without paying insanely inflated prices and without the traditional long wait.
Personally, this is extremely exciting to me as it fills a market niche that previously has been suffering in the brick and mortar methodology. It no longer matters where I am, what the local stores are willing to risk stocking, or what the popular music of the day is on the radio. I can get the latest releases of the bands I actually want to listen to quickly and cheaply and those bands will probably see (I'm assuming) some portion of that money.
Two thumbs up for once.
No Zen is good zen
"The agreement covers music from more than 150 record companies, including artists such as Stereophonics, Moby, Ash, Paul Oakenfold, Underworld and Tom Jones."
If anyone can save Napster, its Tom Jones! When I heard the news, I threw my panties at the monitor!
-gerbik
When asked about falling user numbers, Mr Barry pointed to falling record sales in the US generally© He added: "We have been complying with the court injunction©©© As we move into the new service, hopefully we will be able to jettison that baggage, hopefully we will be able to move forward©"
The falling numbers would have nothing to do with the fact that there's hardly any music on napster anymore, right?
I like to search for live Phish stuff ¥which is perfectly legal since you can't charge money for it but for some reason, it's all blocked, making napster completely useless to me© They went with an overly broad filtering method, and killed the service©
Well, on to freenet and gnutella©
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
What, me worry?
"If I wanted to pay, I wouldn't be using Napster."
Yes, but it's a matter of time before Morpheus becomes as big as Napster
326895 users online, sharing 29106K files (125698.0 GB)
125698.0 GB. That's over 122 TB. Looks like Morpheus is already waaaaaay bigger than Napster ever was (even after you consider that Morpheus allows more than just MP3s to be shared).
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DOOR!!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
That was the part that I don't quite get, to use napster you had to know either the song or the artist; which if you are looking for new indie music which you hadn't heard before... well you were screwed (there was the "featured music" but can anyone honestly say that was their primary use of napster???) They are going to have to change some major things to the client to get something like this going.
I don't believe that napster ever was *really* used to find new music by bands users had never heard of; sure they could find stuff but who's main use of napster was to out type some random words in and download music you never heard of. I'm sure it was done, but I'd guess it was next to nothing compared to everything else.
I just switched to Ogg Vorbis and Napster is going to make a comeback? Oh, we'll have to pay them to share stuff? Oh. Um. Back to oggenc'ing I guess.
I do not have a signature
less sales of singles...
the price of singles has gone up here recently, don't know about anywhere else...
you can prove just about anything you like with statistics, the RIAA know exactly how to report the latest figures with the best spin.
but the bottom line is that they don't want to change the way the music industry works, with maybe one good song bundled with a stacks of songs you don't want. there's no reason we can't have burned-to-order cds... some places already sell them.
download-proof albums like Metallica's Download This that really stymied Napster, and not the RIAA lawsuit.
When you offer a product you can compete on three properties. Price, Quality and Convenience. So if you product is cheaper, better and easy to get than your competitors you will win. Obviously firms might just be better, or easier to get, you dont have to compete on all three.
The problem with this model is you are not guaranteed proper quality. Why should I pay to get MP3's that may or may not be good? Why should I have to pay to spend my time searching around trying a few downloads to get a good MP3. When it was free, the cost to the consumer was the time spent finding good MP'3.
Now I am going to get mighy pissed off doing the same plus having the right to pay to do it. This is a problem on two levels. When the service was free people would leave their napster clients on all the time. Thus the amount of MP3's available to share was large. The problem now will be people might only leave their clients open when they are looking or stuff, so the total number of MP3's available will fall. If its a subscription based service, thats even worse, because who here is going to subscribe to EVERY month of the year. I would rather subscribe maybe once every other month of the year, and go nuts downloading stuff so i save money. So basically you should expect to get less files shared. Which is a deterent to using the service in the first place. Napster will find it difficult to gain from the previous network externalities is enjoyed when the service was free.
Basically they have to design a model where NAPSTER serves the files. I know its not P2P, but without doing that they cannot guarantee quality or convience. I would happily pay to go to a central server, knowing all the songs will be there, all in various qualities, and all be available when I want them. Suddenly Im not paying for the right to go and find MP3's but im also paying for the improved quality and convience in finding them.
So basically, unless you pay the users as well in a P2P app, to provide bandwidth , hard space etc, it will fail miserably.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
The entire napster idea was great in its original state because of the sheer volume allowed for great redundancy. If I wanted to get a certain song, I could download 3 different instances and when they completed compare the length and fidelity to ensure it sounded as close to a CD as possible.
The new napster could have a sustained volume of the old eventually, the problem is that if I am now going to pay the artists (which is definitely a necessary action), I want the recording to come FROM the artist. I want to make sure that when I pay for my song I get a rip from the master recording or a full digital copy, not someone's 5 year old Sound Blaster value recording an analogue track from a dinged and scratched source CD.
The problem with this model is that all of the sudden you have to distribute these high quality mp3s and in various bitrate/size combinations to satisfy all of the various user types out there. To do this you either need to setup servers or give all versions to the most active users hoping that the music is of the genre that he/she listens to.
In the end the business looks very similar to the original server-based content delivery model that Akamai employs currently.
I'm amazed. Basically, the free nature of the service accounts for about 1,743,000 extra users. There isn't a single person in marketing who can't figure out a way to turn that demographic into a source of revenue?
You've got news websites out there giving away their content for free all the time and they're still alive -- and they don't have nearly the amount of dedicated traffic that Napster had in its heydey. What is it that is handcuffing Napster now?
They could advertise albums and shows, offer live show ticket sales and take a cut, set up some form of voluntary payment system which will lead to value-added service (customized server-side database options, notifications, rebates on ticket purchases or album purchases, better cient software), generate a good server-side file-sharing engine and license it (a la google), have high-quality custom-made CDs that'll get shipped to your home within the week, and those five are just off the top of my head.
(Oh yeah, and consider some kind of middleman elimination to get rid of the recording studios -- any system that charges $20 a CD, gives only a fraction of that in royalties to the artist and basically costs less than a buck to make, DEFINITELY needs to trim the fat, and is upping base costs everywhere. I think Napster would find it easier to offer a free service if they didn't have to help pay for mansions in Beverly Hills for people who don't even make the music.)
Subscription-based services fail when what you're trying to charge has already been offered for free. So many sites tried doing this before and then reinstated the free services when the community dropped off -- I remember when Starwave got bought by ESPN and tried to make you have to sign up and pay just to see things like basketball stats... you can bet that didn't last long. Turn Napster into THE primary industry marketing machine, and you've got a chance. Otherwise, the underground will keep swapping and the music companies will just keep missing the boat, not to mention the point.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I sympathise with you Napster. Keep trying and perhaps your show will go on.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
But maybe this is how it will happen: As production means get cheaper and cheaper (the price of a blank CD is what now?) and the barriers to product entry have more to do with product awareness and promotion (e.g., huge advertising budgets and back-door payola like the major labels do), Napster can now provide a viable, viral marketing alternative to the media-saturation tactics of the majors. Smaller, lower-overhead operations may soon have a significant advantage over the corporate behemoths.
Samizdat killed the radio star, babe.
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
Sadly, Napster is now little more than a security test platform for the recording industry. I remember when on typical evenings there would be nearly a million files available. Now it tends to be under 40,000. A 95% drop in activity underscores the fact that Napster isn't really serving the public any more. Instead of developing better and better filtering techniques, which the record companies will own when they divvy up Napsters assets, it would be more in the public interest if they just closed up shop.
Get 40 downloads for only a penny!
Napster is in with the record companies, and is now becoming a record company.
How long before it's a buck a rip, $16 for a full album?
--Blair
That's an incredibly insightful tale. I'm not sure how it applies, but damn is it ever insightful.
--
324006
Napster, once the bad boy of music sites is finally going legit, something they really should have done in the first place. Now they are signing licensing deals - the opt-in system.
Now the question is, will the users come back in droves, or will it be an easier-to-use version of mp3.com? First, Napster is destined to be a pay site. A lot of Napster's user base were teens looking for free tunes. Another question is that these are indie labels they're dealing with now. most of those teens were looking for mainstream, big-label music.
However, it does give the indies a portal for distribution over the net, exposure that the "big labels" are unlikely to take soon. And Napster can now work on removing the stigma of a "piracy site".
Only time will tell for sure.
Is it just me, or did napster already distribute music from over 150 companies over the net? ^_^
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Distrube: a combination of distribute, rude, rube, and ruse, emphasizing DIS-ing the user and making reference to a Rube Goldberg device.
The creative brainpower astounds.
m00.
Not only is Napster completely deserted by users now, charging for songs will only get rid of those last few poeple. With the the .com crash I'm honestly suprised that these companies are dumb enough to invest even MORE money in what is obviously a dead end venture. Napster is now just a black hole, sucking up any money anyone is willing to put into it.
Napster, in it's present state, could have some redeeming value if users were not left to 'blindly' search for their desired tunes. If users had the ability to browse the database of material, rather than just their own search results, we might stand a chance of finding some satisfying--albeit unfamiliar--music.
.sig is protected by international copyright laws.
Last time i logged on, there were still some 70-80Gb of data available, but 70-80Gb of what? Stuff i can never find unless i know precisely what to look for, or stuff i can find if i get really creative with the name, and hope some user out there has successfully done the same?
Doubtful we'll enjoy the thrill again, of accessing the massive data free-for-all that napster once was, but napster is tossing out the 'baby' of a gargantuan selection along with the 'bathwater' of it's legal troubles. Given the ability to browse the database, we might still be able to find some musical gems among the Irish traditionals (maybe), religious music (don't look at me), or show tunes (as if) still available on the network. I suppose they'd rather take us for AOLers or MSNers and lead us by the nose to the highest-promoted-artist-of-the-week.
Use of this