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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.
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 If you are referring to the old file sharing program it has long since been replaced by better models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...
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?
You need the volume of users.
You can write your own file sharing app, but if no one else uses it then you're sharing with yourself.
Napster must be hoping that the brand name will lead to enough people using the service that they will find what they want.
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.
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
Does Napster even have the volume of users it needs any more? Certainly almost everyone has gone to other services by now.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
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?
How is this off topic?
the Pacer is Dead, Napster is Dead, both have tarnished images now, both have been replaced by better items...
NOT offtopic...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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.
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.
PULL!
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
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!
Well... starting up your own indie-Napster is certainly possible but will be sued into the ground as soon as it becomes more than a "Just-us-buddies" service. I wouldn't say Napster is the pimp, rather they're the whore. They will charge users, give a good chunk of that money to the RIAA and other fuckheads, then spend what's left on angel dust to help cope with the guilt.
The big problem, as we all know, is that Napster is centralized. Centralized means there's just one weak point to smash (with lawyers) and everything comes down fast and hard.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Spartan and well put, but subject to misinterpretation.
Are they still planning to rent out their Luser's hard drives? That would be as lame as can be, pay someone to use your equipment without even letting people post what they want. Sorry, no sale. I can't imagine the once flourishing community of enthusiastic volunteers bending to this kind of deal. They will get around this.
All good cons depend on the greed of their victims. Volunteers don't care one way or another. You can tell the difference by the strings attatched.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Here is an idea how this model might work:
Say you charge 5-10$ each user to ise the service and download stuff. Now how about if you create a rewards program. Here is the explanation.
- If you share many songs and if people download your songs, you get a discount from your monthly fee depending on the bandwidth you contributed. Rewards can depend on the number of songs, quality, diversity, etc. If you are a good community member, you end up using the service for free. This should attract students at dormitories since they don't pay for bandwidth anyway.