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Napster: the Day the Music Was Set Free
theodp writes "Before iTunes, Netflix, MySpace, Facebook, and the Kindle, 17-year-old Shawn Fanning and 18-year-old Sean Parker gave the world Napster. And it was very good. The Observer's Tom Lamont reports on VH1's soon-to-premiere Downloaded, a documentary that tells the story of the rise and fall of the file-sharing software that started the digital music revolution, and shares remembrances of how Napster rocked his world. 'I was 17,' writes Lamont, 'and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame (OMC's How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. I installed the software, searched Napster's vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive.' Sound familiar?"
Clearly proofreading very wasn't very good.
Audiogalaxy
Now acquired by Dropbox :(
nc
I remember using Napster on dial-up (don't think broadband was available or at least not affordable or common). It basically took the same amount of time to download a song as it was long, i.e. 4 minutes to download a 4-minute song.
That is really the bigger story. Even now, instead of making money hand over fist printing digital money the riaa would rather create artificial barriers and ridiculous price points for online distribution. If Apple had not dragged them kicking and screaming into the mp3 drm-less world they would have probably broken their cartel by now.
I used to use Napster and subsequently Audiogalaxy back over 28.8k dial-up and it took around 20 minutes to download an MP3 (always at 128Kbps bitrate). These days, I can get a 1080p Blu-Ray rip in that same 20 minutes. It was always a joy seeing a new track had been completed.
The thing I loved about Napster was that there was loads of cover songs and live performances on there and it was so easy to use.
Then when it all came tumbling down thanks to Metallica et al, seeing all the replacements pop up all over the place. Kazaa, Limewire etc all full of viruses and dodgy bitrate files.
These days, it's not worth the hassle to go pirate music anymore so I just pay for Spotify Premium. It is probably closest in functionality to Napster and has a great selection of mainstream and random tracks.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Nope .. not at all .. I have paid for every bit of music that I own, starting with LPs & singles, cassette tapes, CDs and even downloads. (Yeah I know I'll have to buy the White album again)
And I prefer music organized in an album .. with a theme .. and good liner notes .. and artwork!
Now get off MY lawn
People like you are more annoying than thieves because you love to march around, pound your chest and for no reason at all constantly have to announce to everyone how you dont steal. Youre as bad as people who do bad things and then find jesus because all they do is march around and shove stuff down the throats of anyone within earshot when in reality no one ever asked or even cares.
Because really now, what exactly was the point of coming and proving how righteous you are to a bunch of strangers? Is your ego so huge and your self esteem so low that you feel the need to just blindly push your self righteous bullshit on us?
Want to screw with the USPTO? Nominate Fanning and Parker for a National Medal of Technology and Innovation, "the highest honor awarded by the president of the United States to America's leading innovators." Funny thing is, they probably deserve it!
Strangely enough I cut back on album purchases when Napster died since I had no way to find new stuff I like and nothing I like was ever on the radio. Thankfully YouTube finally replaced Napster for my sampling needs but there were a few years in between the two where I bought absolutely nothing music wise.
I'd say the RIAA out right blew their own leg off.
Dude, everyone knows Fanning stole Napster from Seth Green while he was napping...
On top of all that, he also is direcly funding the RIAA and MPAA finances so they can bribe more politicians and harm the free internet, yeah people like him are clearly guilty of funding terrorism.
What I liked best about the early Napster is that collectors shared a trove of unreleased and rare material. Demos, live cuts, b-sides, non-album tracks - almost anything I could think of, I'd type it in and download it. I got digital versions of stuff that would have taken me man-years to digitize from the originals I had (LPs, cassettes, etc), and stuff that would have cost bazillions to buy from dealers. Remember, back then in the late 90s, the current practice of adding rare tracks like b-sides to CD releases of LP records (which were usually about 40 minutes long, giving plenty of room for extra tracks on the CD) was just beginning, so a lot of this material was very, very rare. As Napster got more popular, all this stuff faded away quickly to be replaced by stuff you could buy in stores on CD. I've always thought that was one of the greatest tragedies of file sharing.
Napster was the first and last chance that the music industry was GIVEN to embrace digital distribution, they instead chose to embrace the legal system. The result was that Napster (Not a P2P service but a centralized & controllable service) was shut down.
Who'd have thought that the largest market demand possible would cause someone to develop a product?
Then came P2P, which they are suing the operators of Search engines / Indexers.
The came distributed P2P so they are suing the users.
Next comes anonymous & encrypted P2P
Sneakernet worked best for me . . .
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
But still enough of a hypocrite to actively participate in something yourself that you apparently *DID* know was wrong? Hmmm. Okay... good to know.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Easy world-wide distribution of digital media was the intended link; perhaps not so clear upon re-reading. ::-)
I used to get them from DCC bots on IRC back in the early days. It was so well managed there was even a search script that worked across all the bots.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
On top of all that, he also is direcly funding the RIAA and MPAA finances so they can bribe more politicians and harm the free internet, yeah people like him are clearly guilty of funding terrorism.
You are making a big assumption that I buy/bought my my music in the US. You do know that there are other places in the world don't you?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Remastered is just code for "we fucked the dynamic range to make it louder"
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Sony didn't try to ban the VCR. Sony invented the VCR.
They turned into "the bad guys" when they became a movie/music company later. At the time, it was Sony vs. the TV networks.
Hilariously, they were the same company that tried to prevent the rise in the CD-R by refusing to allow any of their DVD/CD players to play burned media until well after it was a common practice. This seriously impacted their audio equipment sales and policies like this probably resulted in the company being so financially screwed today. So, Sony has been on both sides. They succeeded by being on the side of piracy(by fighting the networks copyright) and failed by trying to fight it later(as part of the RIAA/MPAA).
Napster totally sucked unless all you wanted to do was generate a high file count in your MP3 collection. You might as well just record the radio in that case. The rips were awful quality, the labels were often wrong, and the version of the song you got was often not the one you wanted.
The one exception might be that you could find rare live versions or alternate versions of a track in some cases that were previously harder to find. If that had been Napster's focus — sharing music that wasn't available on CD — then it would have had a reason to exist.
I think iTunes is better in every way. Yes, you have to pay, but it is a small amount and you get exactly what you wanted, you never have to pay again as you download for life to whatever devices you want, and in many cases today, almost all of what you pay goes directly to the artist. If you don't like a song enough to pay for it on iTunes, then listen to it on the radio or as part of a monthly subscription service of some kind. If you like a song enough to pay for it on iTunes, you'll have it forever.
The one time I don't have mod points...
This was similar to my experience. I bought about an album a month before Napster, while Napster was around I bought at least an album a week, and after it went away I dropped back to about two albums a year. I'm now back to buying the equivalent of about an album every other month through iTunes.
So, a decade later and I'm still spending a lot less money with them than I was when Napster was around. Multiply that by everyone else who acted in similar ways, and it's not so hard to determine the real reason for their declining income.
iTunes is 256 kbit/s AAC — when you factor in that iTunes doesn't skip, doesn't get scratched, today's iTunes music is higher-quality than CD. People make the mistake of assuming laboratory conditions. Instead, go into someone's home and take a CD off the shelf and it will be covered in scratches, the CD player will be making up bits to fill in the gaps, and it will likely skip at least once per hour.
And you may not know this, but it is Apple that generates the ISO MPEG-4 AAC audio file from their own master archive, which includes many songs and albums in lossless 24-bit 96kHz or even 192kHz audio — the actual audio from the studio masters. The actual mix that the producer made. Going forward, Apple will at some point release iPods, iPhones, and iPads that have 24-bit audio support (Macs have all supported 24-bit audio for many years now) and they will start releasing music in the actual studio master format, so you hear exactly what the producer made. There are frequencies in 96/192kHz audio that you hear with your internal organs, not your ears.
Vinyl is not a truer copy, unless you're listening to something that was recorded onto vinyl, which stopped in the 1950's. Since then, music has been recorded onto analog tape, digital tape, digital hard disks, and digital solid-state hard disks. For more than 10 years now, the typical studio master has a much, much larger soundscape than even CD can reproduce. Putting that soundscape on vinyl gives you an even smaller picture of it. And most vinyl recordings have too long of a running time, which reduces the audio quality considerably. And vinyl always has scratches, clicks and pops, that are not part of the original recording. It's not really the vinyl that people are nostalgic for, it's the old amps, which were made not to be accurate, but to be musical. We see some of this coming back with Beats headphones, which were not made to be accurate, but rather to be musical.
> Remastered is just code for "we fucked the dynamic range to make it louder"
That is not true of the “Mastered for iTunes” masters and remasters. The primary instruction from Apple in the Mastered for iTunes documentation is not to crush the dynamic range, because that can be done by Apple when they generate the AAC (or other future format) consumer audio file, or by the listener on the playback device via SoundCheck — but the dynamic range cannot be put back by Apple or the listener if it is fucked in the original master. A full dynamic range is the single most important reason to do a Mastered for iTunes remaster.
Apple's master library supports up to 32-bit 192kHz audio, which has a much larger soundscape than CD, and they look at it as an important cultural resource because in 10 or 20 years, iTunes may be the only one who has some of those masters, because of the temporary nature of many music artists, their record companies, most music retailers, and so on. So Apple basically pleads with audio producers to give them a timeless master: the highest-quality recording you have, with the full dynamic range of the recording intact. One that they can use today to generate AAC, but also use in a few years to generate a 24-bit 96kHz version for the consumer.
Essentially, Apple is asking music producers NOT to master their stuff. They're saying “give us what you were listening to in the studio and we'll give as much of that to the consumer as we can today, and even more tomorrow.” The post-processing of the mix gets done by Apple, same as with YouTube you can upload a 4K and they will make every kind of tiny, low-bandwidth version.
On CD, if you crush the dynamic range, you should louder than the next CD. But with an iPod with SoundCheck turned on, everything is the same loudness, and a crushed dynamic range comes through simply as a crushed dynamic range. So we are moving out of the loudness-above-all era of music. It will take some time because it is expensive to remaster and nobody in music has any money, but at least there is a way forward articulated by Apple via Mastered for iTunes.
I know you meant well, but your post is fact-free.
Nobody tried to ban the player piano — the issue was that the player piano makers did not want to pay artists for the scrolls. They expected to make money off the music without kicking anything back to the people who made it. Many songwriters had the equivalent of a platinum album on piano roll and were fucking homeless.
Sony did not try to ban the VCR. They tried to stop the manufacture of VHS VCR's because they were too much of a copy of Sony's Betamax VCR's. Has nothing to do with content except that having 2 kinds of videocassette (or 2 kinds of anything, such as next-generation DVD) is really, really bad for consumer sales and fucks up the whole market for everybody. That is why content creators are RABID supporters of ISO MPEG media standards. Every time there are 2 formats, consumer content sales crash and it hurts everybody.
DAT and MP3/MP4 are the best examples of Sony fucking it up.
In order to “protect content” they ruined DAT by disallowing digital-to-digital copies, which were necessary since DAT tape is fragile, and therefore a DAT recording would break and be gone forever because it was unprotected by backups. Considering that most DAT users were musicians and audio producers, they destroyed a lot of content, not protected it.
And they pushed their crazy “protected” ATRAC format and Mini-Disc instead of MP3/MP4. Brutal mistake when consumers were already buying “unprotected” CD audio.
No need to worry about Sony since they are going out of business any moment now.
Napster was the future, 12 years ego.
If we had sane copyright durations (aka 28 years with possibility for an extension) then the music industry should have been forced to adopt the new technology and make music available more convenient, faster and cheaper. No, copyright is not to ensure a business practices through technological innovations and no, not to ensure profits.
If anything copyright durations should been shortened with each new technology, because the time-to-market gets faster and the costs are lower.
How many jobs does this insane copyright durations costs? How many new distribution technologies are killed because of lobbying of one stakeholder? How many innovations are not invented because of the not available public domain and not available fair use?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Back when everyone had 56k, our school had a full T1. Every computer in the lab had napster installed. We would stay late every day downloading and burning. We actually started a computer club just to make it seem legit (we also LAN partied starcraft with a single cd). Our IT guy at the time was kinda my mentor. While the other kids were downloading music, he was teaching my how to download movies from FTP servers on irc trackers. You might have to wait in queue for the FTP server, but once it was your turn, you'd DL an entire movie in minutes. Those were the good 'ol days.