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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.
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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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?
"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
"If I wanted to pay, I wouldn't be using Napster."
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...
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
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http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated