Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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'?
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
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?
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.
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!
...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
Kinda like XM satellite radio being launched today in Dallas an San Diego - $10 a month for something you can already get for free, PLUS you have to pay for an expensive new radio. Yeah, like many people are going to go for that!
Yeah, look at what dismal failures DSS satellite and cable TV are! Who would pay for TV?
Oh...wait...
Seriously, tho, where I live (Denver) the local radio (all run by Rear Channel, of course) is so piss-poor I'm considering sat radio.
I'm sick of inane DJs and identical playlists of mainstream butt-rock that Rear Channel stations continuously spew.
The only decent channel I have heard is KVCU out of Boulder, but they're low power and half the time I can't get reception.
I heard somewhere tho that XM has commercials, which, IMO, sucks if I'm paying for it.
Sirius (a competing sat radio company) says theirs is commercial-free, so I'll prolly look into that.
C-X C-S
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.
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...
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
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
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.
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