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?"

Comments

Screw you, Metallica!

[Anonymous Coward]

nc

Re:Screw you, Metallica!

[Dexter Herbivore]

You know what saddens me the most? NONE of the music executives/Metallica goons looked at Napster and went, "Holy shit! This is the way of the future, let's investigate this distribution option and adapt it to our own purposes".

Re:Screw you, Metallica!

[nametaken]

The only thing that the industry should have learned from Napster was that customers really want convenience and speed.

Right, and perhaps just as important, that people didn't want a $16 CD of shitty filler to get the one song they heard on the radio. But the industry didn't learn those things. Instead they were dragged, kicked and screaming, into the iTunes model. Meanwhile file-sharing never died... it got better, and legitimate music purchasing has had to get better to compete with it. Everything has gotten easier, cheaper, more organized, with better quality and consistency. In every way, people won.

Now it's TV's turn. That industry refuses to look five years in the future, so they'll be forced, just as it was with music. People don't want all the garbage that comes with the one thing they like, and they won't tolerate the obscene bill and mandatory advertising.

Today you can spend $35 on a computer, add a free software plugin, and immediately call up any television show you want in HD, no commercials, on demand, for free. It's only going to get better and that industry is going to have to compete or die.

Buggy whip manufacturers have to evolve and it's seldom voluntary.

Re:Sound familiar?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

National Medal of Technology for Fanning, Parker?

[theodp]

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!

Re:IF.....

[gmack]

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.

Re:Sound familiar?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Early napster=trove of unreleased material

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

First Chance

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:riaa's failure to adapt to the marketplace

[AmiMoJo]

They wouldn't be making any money. That's the point. They are no longer needed because artists can get their music directly to the fans, no physical reproduction or distribution necessary. They are also terrified of Amazon and Apple who could easily become the next big music labels and crush them.

In the UK we have one high street chain music retailer left, and half its stores just closed as it went into administration. Soon the only places selling physical music will be supermarkets, who are big enough to screw the BPI and all the music labels who are part of it.

We are seeing the desperate thrashing about of a wounded animal as it gets ripped apart.