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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.
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:
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.
Option b could be the only possible money maker for them. Any unique content found on Napster will cease being unique to Napster moments after it's published. C. is right out, since it's difficult to shut down everyone's computer... I can't think of any kind of value-added service that they could apply to their content to make me want to pay, aside from better indexing, organization, and cross referencing (a la audio galaxy).
They're screwed.
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?
Possibly user-added ratings of some kind...? User commentary, something that would create a real community around the music. Or, some kind of mechanism for recommending music that you would like. For example, I like a particular style of Irish music. If Napster could come up with a way of RECOMMENDING music to me based on one particular song or set of songs, or perhaps based on the fact that I share certain likes with other people, that would be a worthwhile service. Then napster wouldn't be a file-sharing system... it would be a file-recommendation system... and with millions of files out there, a recommendation system would be worth its weight in gold. Its value would increase with every additional person in the system, too...
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.
...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
As reynaert pointed out, there is also an open source client (called giFT) for FastTrack, the protocol that Kazaa/Morpheus/Grokster use.
;)
;)
I'm reposting it since reynaert gave a bad link to it
I haven't tried out giFT yet, but I use Kazaa occasionally, and the number of files and users on the network is astounding (~half million!) You can also regularly find movies on FastTrack that are still in theaters, but don't tell anyone you heard it from me
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.
Possibly user-added ratings of some kind...? User commentary, something that would create a real community around the music. Or, some kind of mechanism for recommending music that you would like. For example, I like a particular style of Irish music. If Napster could come up with a way of RECOMMENDING music to me based on one particular song or set of songs, or perhaps based on the fact that I share certain likes with other people, that would be a worthwhile service. Then napster wouldn't be a file-sharing system... it would be a file-recommendation system... and with millions of files out there, a recommendation system would be worth its weight in gold. Its value would increase with every additional person in the system, too...
Possibly RIAA-added ratings of some kind. RIAA commentary, something that would create a fake community around the music. Or some kind of mechanism for recommending the music that the RIAA would like you to buy and upload. For example, I like this particular profitable music. If Napster could come up with a way of FORCING music on me based on one particular database or set of demographics, or perhaps based on surveillance of me and other people, that would be a profitable service. Then napster wouldn't be a file-sharing system... it would be a music-marketing system... and with millions of user-provided files out there, a marketing system worth its weight in gold. Its value would increase with every additional prisioner of the system too.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
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