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Napster Clawing Back
D Anderson n'Swaart writes: "As the BBC reports in this article, Napster is set to return shortly, as a subscription-based sharing service, a concept facing a less-than-rosy future. The report gives a brief history of Napster, and the current state of the various lawsuits that were brought against it. The briefs: Napster is going to have to fork over a total of around $36M USD, $10M of which is downpayment on future royalties." And whatAnotherAolUser writes that the company "agreed to pay $26 million to settle a copyright lawsuit with songwriters and music publishers, and to make royalty payments to the writers and publishers once it started a fee-based service." Guess it depends where you start counting.
Please, please let it be. It just wants to rest peacefully.
why would we want to use it when it there are plenty of free ones there?
and it is easy enough to write your own if all the free ones disappear?
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
will I pay for music I can steal somewhere else.
who is this Napster of which you speak? If you are referring to the old file sharing program it has long since been replaced by better models
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
around $36M USD, $10M of which is downpayment on future royalties.
Too bad for Jason, no champagne for him.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Note that the $26 million settlement is only with publishers and songwriters; there is still the distributers (aka RIAA) that have ligitigation against Napster that must be overcome before Napster can continue with the subscription service.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
producing the Pacer again
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Who will pay for a subscription to Napster when there are a multitude of other free services around - like Gnutella, for example? Unless and until Napster either (a) has unique content which cannot be obtained anywhere else, (b) has some kind of value-added service that adds value to content readily available elsewhere, or (c) other services are shut down, won't a subscription-based service be a losing proposition?
With 100 more like it out there.. is napster really missed...
Between mp3 search engines , and other file sharing programs, i seem to be getting along with out it....
and i don't think i will start paying just to use it again..
Cruise TT
What if Napster's subscription service never makes if off the ground due to "technical" difficulties. Do they still pay the $26 million?
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
Steven Wright
Napster has gotten its name dragged through the mud by just about everyone. The music industry hates it because it's name is synonymous with free downloading of MP3s. Users hate it because the filters have all but destoryed its usefulness. The one thing it has is a brand name -- everyone knows Napster, and they know what it represents. Even if they use a different program for downloading MP3s now, most people still use "Napster" to refer to a generic file sharing program.
So let's get this straight. In return for the money you pay to Napster, they're going to give you a catalogue of mp3s you can download, right...?
Nope, they're still going to let USERS, paying for the system provide the actual files - so the users will be providing the service. Napster will just be getting lots of money (at least that's what they want) for being a middle man.
Can anyone say 'pimp'?
For the record industry to find out that a pay for play music service has no place on the Internet: a place where I can go to Morpheus and be downloading them for free within a few minutes.
Why is Napster even attempting this? It's a complete waste fo time and money. It's going to be a dismal failure. I hope the RIAA takes note of this and starts looking for REAL solutions to the "problem."
Execute? [Y/N] _
Come on, can we get any more obvious? Napster is dead, and the world is a better place because of it.
If they were smart, they would have called it a day and declared bankruptcy. As long as there is free music out there, I don't see them finding $26 million worth of demand for subscriptions.
At least they didn't take the typical dot-com role and just close shop.
A year ago I would have said nobody will pay for that service. But now I think enough time has elapsed and enough other free services have gone under, that they maybe be able to get a user base going again.
I'm frustrated enough right now with the dot-coms and the ever slowing gnutella network, that I may just pry my wallet open to get something I want, when I want it, without having to pay for stuff I don't want.
Like the aging rock star attempting make a comeback, Napster finds itself no longer the front-running trend-setter that it used to be...
...Rather it is now the aging fossil trying desperately to re-capture that one shining moment in the sun that it once enjoyed. And it is finding that the adoring fans that once chanted its name have since moved on and have not looked back since. But still, it must try, for it has to know.
"Oh I see. You resort to brute force when you can't get something by arguing for it..." - Xellos
Wow, the mension of Napster brings back all the nostalgia of the dot com era... NYC skyline has changed since then... time passes.
M0571y H@rml355.
At some point, shouldn't we just look at an organization like Napster and just say "Let it die, already."
Napster had already become little more than a joke without it being a pay service, now to add a monthly fee onto that is more insult than anything.
If it were still in its original form, sure... it'd be a great success, and tons of people would subscribe. But with it's currently mangled useability? I can't see it happening.
Dammit Sean, just write something else.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
When I decided I wanted to watch Excel Saga fansubs, I found the early episodes (1-9) on Morpheus.
When I was looking for the LOTR trailer this morning, I found it on Morpheus.
If it works *nearly* that good for Audio files (And yes, you can share OGG's with it), then it has Napster beat hands down. It even appears to be free of the spyware that infests the other Kazzaa clients.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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?
...I'd pay for something like Napster. Really.
Problem is, others don't seem like they will. Napster, as well as any P2P software is completely dependant on the people who USE and SHARE the stuff. So, I'd be hesitant to sign up until I knew there were plenty of people who were already subscribed (and dial-up'ers don't count). I'm sure others are thinking the same thing, they don't want to pay for a service that only 200 people would use, but they're not willing to sign up until there are more people. So Napster doesn't get people to sign up because...people havn't signed up. Kinda makes it hard for them to get back on their feet, but that's the reality of it.
So...if enough people get the ball rolling, then this could be good for them. If not...then who knows.
Now, here's my question. If you are PAYING Napster to use their software, and they are PAYING the RIAA royalties, does this finally make it "legal" in their eyes? Can a college/isp/company/etc fire/kick off/expell someone for downloading MP3's anymore if they're doing it through this system? Are ISP's still going to monitor my usage to see if I've downloaded any MP3's (I just hate that people label an audio codec automatically as something illegal, instead of its possibly content), and send me one of those warnings?
Nobody cares about Napster. The only thing anyone cares about is what Napster can do for them. Some of us cared about Napster because it allowed us to quickly and easily download music *before* addressing concerns of money or morality. Some of us cared about Napster because (before they aborted the lawsuit and "settled") we thought Napster would be an excellent test case in establishing that providing tools and directory services that can be used for intellectual property theft is totally, totally legal unless you yourself are directly stealing intellectual property. Neither of those things apply anymore to Napster.
Therefore, nobody cares. In order to get on the new napster, you'll have to download a totally new client; it's about as much trouble to do that as it is to download Morpheus.
If someone comes out with a service that contains the entire RIAA catalog, and i can pay an hourly fee and get whatever music i want at a high quality (not random lofi Xing rips like you got on the old napster), i'll be interested. Napster probably isn't providing that. Napster is definitely not providing what they used to provide. Napster has no place in our hearts and we feel no sense of obligation to them, as from day one they have acted as nothing but shifty opportunists, and the service and file sharing app they intially provided was something that could be written by almost anybody with a modicrum of understanding of the MFCs and TCP sockets.
So napster's not dead yet. Neither is 3D0. OK. So what?
Not only will many artists still be making sure they're not on napster, but napster will fail once again due to the fact while it'll be a paid only music software, while software such as audiogalaxy and software that allows downloads of files and videos and all that, such as morpheus are now reigning all popular.
However, now that the recording companies are able to make a profit out of napster, perhaps they'll pursue morpheus, audiogalaxy and all these other companies to make sure that napster is unrivaled.
by burning their office buildings to the ground.....oops, i forgot it's not cool to say that anymore with all the terrorist shit that happened. okay, how about spray their buildings with liquid nitrogen?
What's going to happen with the others sharing services? Will they keep working? I would be afraid of such a fee!
Will the programmers be intimidated with such a value?
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
University network administrators around the country are reporting unprecedented bandwidth availability due to the sudden shortfall in Napster users. :-)
The "Napster" name is still very well know. If you say "LimeWire" or "Morpheus", most people have no clue what you're talking about. Say "Napster" and everybody knows it's about getting music. In the popular press, these terms are synonyms.
When there's an agreement, it will be with a big artictle in every computer-related publication. It will most likely even be on the TV news. All saying "Napster/music downloading is now legal".
Napster will start a mass marketing campain. Paying computer magazines and ISPs to include their software on their CDs. They probably won't have problems with including it anyway, as it'd be legal. Combine that with paid-for nice reviews, and banners and the usual stuff, and you'd be suprised how quick the comeback of Napster can be. Even as a paid service.
...Marriott Marquis Theatre, NYC for October 25th. Ye know, the theatre badly needs some Huffman compression for that day...
These are the practical things that would catch the attention of Joe Consumer.
Oh come on now, Napster has been compromised completely.
.ogg I'm finding. Gnutella clients are fun as well, when I have all day...)
The MPAA got everything it wanted. It convinced people that the industry thinks file sharing is "bad" when actually all they wanted to do is be able to control it increase revenue another 100%. Why should they change their distribution model from plastic and shrink-wrap to online digital when they can have both?
You want an outlaw metaphor? Here's your outlaw metaphor:
SILICON VALLEY- A.P.P
The once proud rebel leader Napster has been abducted by MPAA/RIAA forces and subjected to financial/litigious torture and bizarre mind-altering terror, the result is that Napster is now an MPAA/RIAA loyalist, under complete control, sent back into the world to confuse and pervert the young and feeble-minded. "We will have them sucking on our teat again in no time", an account executive from Sony was quoted saying...
"Led Zeppelin_stairway_to_heaven.nap", indeed... they can take their encoded header and ram it verily (and often) directly inside their collective colons.
There are so many better file sharing apps available now that I am sure I myself am probably not even using the best one. (I'm digging morpheus because of the wealth of
Now I use Morpheus. Works great and I can get pr0n with it too!
From the BBC article:
Under the NMPA settlement proposal, Napster would pay $26m for all previous unauthorised music that has been swapped using its software, as well as a further $10m in down payment on future royalties.
Does this mean that Napster has just agreed to pay the royalties on all the songs I've downloaded? Gee, thanks! What a swell bunch of guys!
You're using her as bait, Master!
So what copyright's did Napster break? Did they go out of there way and copy someone else's protected material, or did they do nothing more than make it possible for millions of users to redistribute copyrighted material.
So if we can sue Napster for make a vehicle withwhich one can break the law, can we sue Smith & Wesson for several thousand homicides in America?
This bothers me.
Anyone care to guess how much of these settlement millions received by the music industry giants actually gets paid out to the artists they are purportedly protecting? Probably enough to buy a bagel with cheese...and not even very good cheese, at that.
...IF I had some kind of guarantee that there will be songs available. If Napster provided the songs to download, that'd be one thing. Relying on the selflessness of others, however, is not a winning service.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I have to admint to using Napster regulalry for months downloading and allowing ohers to upload well over 3000 titles, many I ripped myself and others that I got from other Napster users, however none of them are even close to CD quality some of them are partial chunks -o- songs that in general only gave me an idea of whether I wanted to go buy the damn CD or not!
That Napster should now have to pay 36 Million for what I already paid for in most cases and cannot even use with a reasonable level of sound quality in all cases, should be a CRIME!
Napster helps sell millions worth of CDs and pays the Music industry for that service!
What a rip off.. I am almost sorry I ever used the service now.
The new version of Napster will not be using MP3's, it will be using a new proprietary format called .NAP. This will of course include all the rights management feature that you know and love. Why would anyone use this? I have no idea.
As an aside, a service that I would be willing to pay for is My.MP3.com. I loved that service when it was fully operations with ALL my cd's. Since a lot of my CD's have been removed and that it randomly asked to put the cd's in again I find it useless.
I own over 200 CD's and I bought quite a few from listening to music I found off bearshare (and previously Napster). Why don't they get it?
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;
If I'm going to pay for it (which I would), I want guaranteed quality of both audio encoding (ie 128K encoding from CD source, not 64K FM radio junk) and bandwidth.
.mp3 list that you could choose and download, from their server, from verified mp3 files.
I am not going to pay for a service that still depends on the user's providing questionable files over 56k modems or even cable modems/ADSL.
So, what Napster would have to do is have a master
Now that's a service that I would pay for.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
People used napster because it was free, now with gnut becoming more stable we don't need it anymore. It was a fresh idea but it wasn't meant to last. We all know that violated the "artist's" copyright (and "stealing" the 12 cents they get per album) is illegal, with napster the riaa has someone to target and you saw what happened. Now with NSA backdoors, hacking being considered terrorism, and what have you its more important then ever to develope more reliable p2p technologies. Make it harder for the government to stop these things. Can't we go back to the days before napster when we traded mp3s with people with people we meet over mirc?
Carpe meam simiam!
the records, they successfully beat back the attempts to make individuals have free music. This is the bizarre concept in the whole world. Why would you want free musik
I keep reading these posts that say "who wants to use napster? there's *free* ones we can use now!"Sure, there are plenty of free services that are similar to napster.
In my experience, they all suck in comparison. Napster was so much better than any media sharing method before or since.
I've used pretty much all of the free media sharing services. Not only are they much, much slower, there's not as good of a selection, especially of the more obscure songs.
They're OK for what they are.. but to compare them to what napster was is pretty inaccurate, IMHO.
Sure, napster is dead now and we make do with what we have left, but if napster could rebuild itself to even a fraction of what it was, I'd certainly be willing to give them a few bucks.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Paying for the free whores!
The same math that claimed multibillion dollar losses to piracy will dictate that your affluent geek dollars are worth less than a teenage girls. If you hear tell of such a system, ask a sucker friend who has it to show it to you before you shell out.
Forgot a step: Rape everyone, THEN burn it to the ground.
der dee der.
I think it is important to distinguish between the file sharing application and the network that it serves. Napster's interface was so so, but the network beneath it was great! Tons of .mp3's due to pure volume of usage.
Some of the gnutella tools are great in their interface (way better than napster, IMAOO) but the underlying network just doesn't have as many users as Napster did. Napster was in the press every day. Hell, I had uncles and aunts that have never used a computer calling me up and advising they were using it! It was simple, simple is bliss for 95% of the PC population.
My point? Free is better (gnutella), but lacks the organization of a for-profit model. Hmmm, sounds like a very common thread around here...
I know I might sound like someone that thinks they are all that and a bag of chips, but I think napster could have done a better job at staying free. I really don't like the idea of paying for it, and I don't think anyone else does, either. Napster was a great thing, and probably made stores sell MORE cd's rather than less. I download a mp3, I listen to it, and if I like the song I buy the cd, just to support the author and record company. Atleast I used to. I have seized to do so. 1, because the record companies refused to listen to the authors who WROTE the songs that the record companies purchased, and 2, because they didn't notice any changes in the cd's being sold. It's only obvious that it will sell more cds than usual because it's kind of a 'Try before you buy' sort of thing. I'm a picky guy and I know the difference between an mp3 and a real cd. They are pretty close, yes, but the cd is higher quality. It's like a game company releasing a demo. They have a demo for different parts of the game so you can try everything out. One can get close to playing the real game but has to open another demo to continue. It's not the same.
Not only do I not agree with napster for not fighting hard enough, but I don't like the way they had a central server. That's a big nono. I like other places like limewire or freenet, just because they can't be stopped. Peer to peer file sharing is the only way to go nowadays.
We all must admit that napster did a great thing for us all, it started a whole new thing for the world when it comes to file sharing, but things need to be improved. We never stuck with the model T or the 286, we kept moving and improving.
And that's all I've got to say about that.
--Ben Oman
TheBlueOne
I don't think anybody's listening to you.
Did I miss the Napster IPO or something? Where are they going to get these huge sums of money to pay off these fines? I mean really. I see Napster agreeing to pay huge amounts of cash out to various people to settle all of the lawsuits. To date, they haven't collected any money from their users. Did they really get that much money from private investors? Are the investors really stupid enough to keep pouring money down this sinkhole? You would have thought that the bottom dropping out of the dot.com business would have brought these guys to their senses, but I guess not. I propose that all future Napster payout stories get filed under the "More Money Than Brains" department.
I switched to Limewire right after the Napster decision, and I've haven't really missed Napster since. Plenty of selection, and prompt returns on queries.
My take on all of this is that Napster shouldn't have ever been incorporated in the first place. VC's aren't exactly your enemy, but they sure as hell ain't your friend.
He could've probably made money if he had given away the server code, and sold the client for $10 or so, instead of whoring for Hummer-Winblad. It would have been harer for the RIAA to get to him.
There's no reason you need to form a huge ass company to do these kind of things. Making cars, I can understand. Need a huge ass company to build a jetliner. But not for software like this. And really, in the future, it isn't corporations where the new stuff is going to come from. All the new stuff will come from somewere else. Welcome to the New Era.
Did you think Napster got into this market to be a charity?
It's pining for the fjords!
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
It was a new, and refreshing phenomenon. Back when Napster was a thrice a day Slashdot phenomenon, I couldn't block the whole Music category because I liked to hear about non-Napster related music things. Not that there were many, but a blanket Jon Katz style ban wasn't appropriate.
Now that it's rising from the grave, can we make a special "Napster" category so I never have to hear another goddamn thing about this particular silly company again? I'd love to hear stuff about filesharing and music licenses, but Napster's death and resurrection do not interest me.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Yeh there aren't too many talented bands making it to the airwaves, but that's not exactly anything new. Pop crap has always dominated the charts. Even when inventive bands like the Police were at their pinnacle (I'm NOT talking about Synchronicity) there was Whitney Houston. Before that there was Pat Boone. Pop will always be at the top of the charts, and it will always suck. Water will always be wet. Lah lah lah.
There are a ood few other services like Napster that would be free. Why would I go back t Napster when I have to pay. And especialy if they will only have a limited amout of music.
My 2 cents plus 2 more
On second thought, if any of you folks in the RIAA are reading this, I will be filing a patent on this "process", so don't try it without paying me royalties.
That is all.
Napster (Jesus) hath paid (forgiven) us for all of our downloads (sins).
Shall we now crucify it?
Jesus paid for all our sins by being crucified. So if Napster made a deal that by disbanding they pay for our downloads then your analogy would work.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Unfortunately your argument falls apart early on because the line "pay the musician" implies that the product is, in fact, music.
The crap on a platter served up by Ms. Spears most certainly does not fall into that category. Since what people are really paying for with her is hype, and since the record labels do an admirable job of stirring up hype, I have no problem with them taking a large cut of the profits.
OK...
The only selling point.... The music we would download from napster would be completely legit downloads. No worries about wrong doing right?
Now for the nagative side of things...
First off, to keep everyone from distributing these nifty little music files it will most likely come in a protected propietary format. To play you must and most definately will pay. Napster will play it and maybe media player. Remember way back when... there was an article about napster licensing/writing some protected media format. Perhaps someone else can dig up the article.
Assumming they go for a protected media format(now dubbed pmf) there will most likely be a windows only client. I really hate OS lockins. Especially since I stream my mp3's to my workstations. (icecast/mp3) This pmf will probably not work with your existing mp3 player periphreals. (No more music for the car)
Just as everyone has pointed out. We are again likely to see a peer to peer network sharing. You have to pay to share your music.
Maybe I'm wrong, but these assumptions are based from logical guesses (human nature/greed).
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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)
1 and 2 get union wages today, and will get union wages tomorow no matter who pays them for their services.
3 and 4 are leaches and only make a living due to the disgusting control of music production, distribution, and broadcast the RIAA has. Barf. I got sick of buying my culture from those losers, so I stoped doing it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
IMHO, this Napster "pay-per-month" subscription model has very little chance of commercial success for several reasons.
1) The user base has already migrated to better networks (i.e. Kazaa, Morpheus, etc). The content available through these networks is free (as in beer) so it really makes no sense why everyone would "jump" back on Napster to pay for this very same content.
2) The whole idea of community and sharing is what made Napster popular. You were (by default in the software) sharing your music files with others in exchange for getting music files from them. The users provide the bandwidth, the storage, and the content. What exactly Napster would be providing in this "new business model", besides a simple directory service, is beyond me. Is Napster going to host MP3's on fast, high-availability servers and actually shell out some cash for bandwidth and storage space? Or is this another "let's charge for stuff that other people are giving away for free" business model?
I really don't see why anyone would pay to share their music files especially when there are better alternatives and really Napster isn't providing anything in exchange for that $10 (or whatever it may be) monthly fee. Plus, in the mind of most of my peers (college students), Napster has "sold-out" to the music industry and is probably the LAST place anyone would go to get music on the 'net.
I know they certainly won't be getting a dime from me.
I've installed giFT and it works really well. The developers are having to reverse engeiner the Fast Track protocal so the giFT deamon isn't nearly complete yet, although the giFT project is currently the most active project on sourceforge.net
Right now giFT can fullfil your searches and you can download files. Its still difficult to share files and you can't download from firewalled users.
Overall it works quite well, a good search will net you ~1 MB of results (just the html page)
Do you think those lawyers are going to accept their cut of exactly 0$? :)
The fact is, that if I'm patient enough, I'll be able to get whatever I want to hear from Gnutella or one of the others.
What the RIAA could offer (if they ever got their heads out of their asses), is to be the RELIABLE source. It would be worth five bucks a month to me, to know that that I could connect to their service, and know that the music I want will ALWAYS be there, optimally encoded for the particular bitrate, and that the connection won't fail when I have fifteen seconds of the song left to get.
I will NOT buy any service where the music is buggered by watermarking it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
tell her to stop wasting my oxygen.
Actually, she just converts it into CO2, no oxygen is actually destroyed. With some sunlight and a plant, that oxygen comes back, good as new. So don't be so hardon Britney. She's harmless. Do not fear her.
The distributed ones (eg: Gnutella, probably others) will continue to run, since you as a user have almost as much claim to owenership of the network as anyone else.
The centralized ones (eg: Napster) can [be forced to] change their policies at any time.
So, is the convienence of a centralized (read: eventually for-pay) system worth sacrificing the security you get by knowing that gnutella cannot be charged for.
There's only one way they'll ever get me to pay for one of these services.
a) Flat rate per month.
b) Anyone can publish any file. Period.
c) Take the amount of money I pay per month, subtract a nominal amount for operating expences (~5%), and split the rest up among the owners of the files I download. Say I pay enough to have $16 to go to the artists per month.
If I get 10 led zepplin tunes, 5 bjork tunes, and "Troopers", led zepplin's distributor gets $10, Bjork's gets five, and the guy working out of his basement to produce troopers gets $1. The people running the network get marketing information that record companies could only dream of until recently.
Of course, this would undermine most media companies as we know them, but it would be fair to everyone concerned. The media companies could continue to exist as advertising/promotion firms, but artists could choose to bypass them, and still reach an international market.
Napster was only good because it had a critical mass of users which meant you can find anything, anytime.
I doubt whether their pay service will get anywhere near the critical mass. That obscure live recording of that weird ass band will be available on Kazza or winmx, but not on Napster.
Also, what if I want to download other file types while I am downloading MP3s? Won't be using Napster.
Napster died a long time ago. When code gets a CEO you know it is doomed.
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
That's called Amazon.com... No that I buy anything on there either. But it's always good to keep a browser open to Amazon next to your Limewire window... -p.
there's no place like ~
I've said it before. Napster was once a great thing, but for the past year it's been little more than a testing platform for the copyright ownership industry. The best thing Napster could do for the world of file sharing would be to give up and shut down.
I set up a giFT server (Check my sig) and couldn't be happier with it.
The CGI doesn't do downloads from multiple sites, but I may modify it.
I did a quick hack to change the look and to filter out VBS, EXE, EML and other obvious virus files. It works great and has the added benefit of being very open.
Since Fast Track uses HTTP for transport, you can also use other tools. The other day, I found a user who had 88 great songs and the connection was excellent for my 64K isdn. I just opened a terminal and did a 'wget -R' on his address and port number. 15 hours later, I had all 88 songs.
I'll make my mods to the CGI available if anyone's interested. (Maybe even the logo I drew...)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
WinMX is an excellent replacement for Napster.
You need to use it with an updated server list. The default list is pretty
useless.
Instructions
http://www.trippynet.f2s.com/nservers25.dat.
You'll have to rename it to nservers.dat
Choose the final option, "ignore". It may prompt you for a default login
and password. You can enter anything for these values.
section and start searching.
Notes
WinMX searches on several networks at once, so results tend to trickle in
rather than hitting you all at once like with Napster. This can get annoying
since it sorts new results on the fly which means that previous results will
jump around in the list. You may wish to let it go for a few seconds, or
until you get the results you want, and then hit the "stop" button to
prevent new results from coming in.
Also, set your defaults for screening files. I go with "cable or better" for
connection and a bitrate of 128 k (only). Some audiophiles find this
insufficient and go for a higher bitrate, but to most ears, the only
difference is the larger file size and download time of mp3's with high
bitrates.
WinMX will find everything you search on, much like Napster, but the
connections aren't quite as reliable. If you get "connection refused" or
most other errors in red text, forget it and move in. If it says "busy, but
may join queue", you can join the remote queue by right-clicking on it.
WinMX will update your status periodically to tell you your position in the
queue.
It also works for other file types, like pictures and videos. You can :)
probably guess which types of multimedia are most commonly traded
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahaha....
woooooo....hahahahahaha... wooo... oh man... I really needed that after last week... hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Pay for a dead service, with compulsory rights management, proprietory file formats all so the RIAA can make money? hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Pay $1.00 per song? Isn't that what I pay now for 15 crappy songs and 1 good song on a CD? hahahahahahahahaha
Oh man, these people are trippin'... $0.25 or $0.50 per song RIAA... NO "rights management", no tracking, and I want high quality...
Until then - there's Gnutella, Freenet, Morpheous, iMesh, Grokster, etc...
Pay for Napster... hahahahahahahaha someone pinch me...
MP3 suck in quality.
Napster weren't going to survive in their original form. They had to deal with record companies in some manner, and they've certainly cut the best deal they could to provide a useful service now. And yes, in a very real way the have just paid the royalties on all those songs you downloaded with their service. They have in fact put in a lot of work to give you a useful service, AND THEN paid out millions of dollars so that it could be free for you (after the fact.)
Everybody who benefitted from their service owes them some thanks at least, myself included. Anybody who wanted to show their appreciation of the gift they gave us might show them a bit of loyalty now, when they need customer loyalty.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
Did I miss something here? Won't the MP3s you download through Napster only be playable on the PC you downloaded them to? Did they work around this? Or are there "copy proof" (ha!) formats out there?
The telephone version is Daniel Johnston singing his song with Yo La Tengo. The Brit version is the Pastels. Now go out and support these artists by paying for the music, ya cheap bastard.
Don't read this!
hehe.... maybe I just have a good memory, but I think you've posted this exact comment before :)
Does anyone know of any kind of graph or statistical data on the number of concurrent Napster users for, say, the past year or two? I think that would be something to see. The gentle downward slope... Especially if you could correlate the data with the dates of court decisions and the like...
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
After the XM story was posted after this one, it looks like alot of people agree with me.
Since when have slashdorks been a valid predictor of anything?
I mean, if the Slashdork Prognosticator(tm) was accurate,
Bill G would be living in a box, linux would be
on the desktop, and all software would be free.
C-X C-S
am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen divas and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?
As everybody who has viddied "A Clockwork Orange" knows, Ludwig Van brings you to serious acts of ultraviolence.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
ping napster.com
Unknown host napster.com
if it wasn't late, I'd download the gutenberg webster dictionary, and then parse it for 7 letter words and then narrow it down to the 7 and maybe 8 letter combos it would start with and then match from there on the repetition pattern within.
or your sig is just nonsensical. I'm also currently too lazy to do the check to see the liklihood of it being english or even in the right format for such words.
mmm, sleep.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Okay, forget programming, I just did the shift analysis on the shorter words and then finally it hit me:
Someone set us up the bomb
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
which would mean you shifted the alph so that d was the first char and then moved on from there... should have taken me 2 mins to break, but I was thinking too big from previous harder ones....
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.