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Rumors of Napster's Death Greatly ExaggeratedMar 12 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Music
The Bottom Line Napster is dead. Long live le Napster!
It truly amazes me when I read comments here saying that people who download music from Napster are "thieves." I'd like to hear what these same people would call the record companies, which are bloated, disgusting, multi-tentacled conglomerates that charge double for CD's what they charge for music on vinyl, despite the fact that it costs them less to produce a CD than a record. How do they do that? Simple, the same way the airlines set ticket prices. Informal price fixing. Consumer Reports magazine has thoroughly detailed the way it's done in the airline biz. I'm sure the same paradigm will neatly describe the actions of the handful of companies which control 99% of the music released. Think about it. Time-Warner-AOL. Warner/ Elektra/ Atlantic/ DGC/ Interscope/ Dreamworks/ Rhino, it goes on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. They can get away with charging whatever the market will bear, plus a forty percent handling fee. And people call some kid a thief for downloading an MP3 file. The marketing clout alone of these conglomerates is disgusting, and scary. It's well known that when the career of Hootie and the Blowfish tanked, an obedient Time-Warner editorial staffer obliged with a glowing review of the latest trite garbage album from Hootie at al. (this was from their Entertainment Weekly property -- have you noticed how many movies there are that suck, that are put out by Warner Bros., and that sport a lone positive review on the video label, a review from none other than Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly?). Upon carefully observing the behavior of these corporate entertainment megaliths, it would appear that greed causes blindness. Just look at what the big movie companies tried to do to Sony for bringing out the VCR. They attempted to block it. Instinctively, fearfully, reflexively, they lash out at anything which looks like it could, in any way, loosen their grip on the distribution of their copyrighted material. They couldn't project their thoughts a little further out of the box, to the day when video sales would tip the balance sheet in favor of some of their worst dogs. Right now, the major entertainment conglomerates are doing everything in their power to keep you from enjoying the fruits of the technological revolution which swept music and video production ten years ago and more, but has been kept out of your hands. The technology was there for high-definition television more than ten years ago. A consortium was ready to go ahead with implementation back in 1986. Only now, 15 years later, is H/DTV just beginning to gain some momentum. Much of the delay has been brought about the corporations which hold television broadcasting licenses. They, along with the cable companies, would rather enjoy the advertising revenues from the five standard-definition channels they can fit into the amount of bandwidth it takes to carry a single, high-def video signal. They're getting this spectrum space free. It's controlled by the government, by the Federal Communications Commission. Why should they be allowed to maximize their profits on this free resource at your expense? Why should you be denied a high-quality video signal, a video signal which will allow you to come closer to sharing the original artistic vision of a movie director, just so the TV broadcasters can make even more obscene profits? The cable companies are even worse. After having been granted monopoly positions by your local governments, the cable companies are doing everything they can to hold up the introduction of H/DTV. They are refusing to agree on a standard for digital cable boxes. They are working with the movie production corporations to keep you from exercising your right to make high-quality copies, for personal use, of the high-def signals which you will receive, and no doubt pay a premium for, over the cable systems. Again and again, these conglomerates are fighting tooth and nail to keep you from fully enjoying, and employing, the technology for which you are paying. Did you drop $1,500 for the Sony DVP-S9000ES DVD player in order to benefit from Sony's SACD audio technology? That's nice. Innovation is great. Some people are willing to pay a healthy fee for innovation. But those same people deserve to enjoy more than just analog output from SACD. That's right, even though almost all currently-produced receivers can accept a signal in digital form, through either a coaxial or an optical input, the S9000ES, and all the other SACD products, are limited to analog output. Why? So you can't make high-quality digital copies. After all, Sony is also one of the giant music monopolies, so they're not going to do something which they think risks their copyright. The problem with Sony's thinking, and that of all the other music conglomerates, in terms of the danger of people freely copying music, is that it's wrong. It's like the notion that people who do a lot of taping with their VCR's are going to ruin the movie industry. I do quite a bit of taping, mainly of high-quality programs produced by PBS. I also make copies of movies which are broadcast on TV. I'm fully within my rights to do so, to make copies for personal use and for the enjoyment of family and friends. However, I also rent movies rather regularly, averaging about one per day. I haven't really seen the exact statistics on renting, but I'd imagine that most people average less than 300 rentals per year. So, am I that VCR operator who's going to bankrupt the movie corporations? I think not. If people really wanted to circumvent the chain of distribution controlled by the movie production companies, it wouldn't be all that difficult. In New York City, you can get a video copy of any newly-released Hollywood movie. The fact is, people actually enjoy the experience of going out to see a movie. Just because the bootlegs are there doesn't mean they're going to put the movie system out of business. Likewise, illicit copies of movies that have come out on video are not that difficult to obtain. But most people enjoy the experience of going to a video store where (hopefully) they can enjoy a dependable variety of titles. The lesson for the movie companies is that they need to understand the people who purchase their products. To use one of the loathsome phrases of the marketing departments, they must come to know the "end users." Rather than trying to stifle every innovation, in the desperate fear that somehow this will finally give the bootleggers that golden opportunity they've been looking for all these years, they should celebrate these innovations as a way to better serve the people who finance their business -- the customers. Ha. Fat chance they'll ever start to think like that. It's the same with music and with Napster. I'd be very interested in seeing a scientific study of the buying habits of people who download large numbers of files from Napster. I'll bet that, just as people who make regular use of the taping function of their VCR's also rent large amounts of movies, the people who are regular downloaders from Napster are the very same ardent, hardcore music fans who actually make the bulk of purchases of pre-recorded music in this country. In fact, Napster is probably the most amazing marketing tool that will ever pass before the eyes of the RIAA. Yet, foolishly, the recording industry can't see Napster for the goldmine it is. They drop millions of dollars on magazine ads, and spend millions more trying to get editors to run reviews of their music (unless, in the case of Time-Warner, they also own the "entertainment" magazine and can just order the editor to run a story). Through Napster, people can check out bands they've heard about. They can download MP3 files to their heart's content and find out if the music's truly worth an investment of their hard-earned cash. Basically, Napster cuts out the gatekeepers, the record reviewers, the magazine editors, and all the other "experts" who, in the past, mediated between the consumers and the producers of music. Of course, it's a lot easier to pressure a critic into going along with a media hype campaign than it is to tell somebody their ears are deceiving them. For the record companies, one of the downsides of Napster is that it lets you be your own critic. No longer can a Time-Warner lie to you and tell you the latest Hootie and the Blowfish album is wonderful when you can hear for yourself that it's really, as they say in Paris, garbage. If you get into a band from MP3 downloads, the day will come when you'll want the real thing, the full-fledged fidelity of a CD. Maybe, someday, if the record companies ever wise up, you'll even have a chance to pay a bit extra for a SACD player, and SACD's to go with it, and actually enjoy the full potential of your music system, hearing the music through a direct digital link rather than through the filtered-down connection of your system's analog inputs. Would the record companies ever get that smart? Nah, probably not. Until then, vive le Napster! *** *** *** On a side note, rumors of Napster's death appear to be greatly exaggerated. It reminds me of this giant howling northeaster blizzard here in the Northeast which was supposed to be the "storm of the century" (even though the century's only a year old). Two inches of snow a bunch of rain. Worse than an ad-libbed G.W. Bush speech. I can't count the number of times, day after day, I've heard something along the lines of: "Napster users are engaged in a frenzy of downloading as they rush to beat the deadline set by the California court." I'll be back to hear the rest of the news as soon as I check on my download.  |
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