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Napster May Be Gone. But The Spirit Lives On.Jul 25 '02 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line The lesson that can be taken from this is: the music business is a no-win place.
By now, the dust has settled. If you go to log on to the Napster website, you will find a sign that announces "Work In Progress" as well as a couple of links to learn more about the site and current news. The "current news" dates back to May and is about the agreement signed between Napster and a German business. Napster goes legit, which is another way of saying killed in this case. How did we get to this stage? Here's a quick look back at the whole mess and an explanation of why things went the way they did. We're the renegades! I myself first found out about Napster not too long after the controversy over the site and software had first started getting underway. I logged in and looked around without downloading anything right off the bat. After a while I checked out a couple of interesting songs, although I never burned anything from Napster nor did I download a whole album (that eats up quite a bit of hard drive space you know). Shawn Fanning, a college student, developed Napster. The system was designed as a means of helping users find and download the MP3 files they were looking for, as well as share ones they felt like sharing. Music for the masses is an accurate description. The system actually worked and paved the way for newer ones such as Gnutella. Unfortunately, they soon ran into a snag. That snag came in two forms. First there were certain artists such as Metallica and Dr. Dre who claimed that Napster was taking a massive chunk out of their royalties. Then came the Record Industry Association Of America (RIAA) who leveled a similar charge. The artist's complaint was quite understandable. After all, these bands had worked hard to write and record this material. Music is what they do for a living and they depend on the royalties generated by album sales. However, it was not likely that anyone would be downloading whole albums off of Napster. After a little of that, the hard drive on the thief's computer would crash. What many Napster users used the service for was as a means of sampling albums by artists and then deciding whether or not to buy them. The RIAA's complaint was different. They claimed to be worried about the artist's bottom line. That claim was totally false. The bottom line the RIAA was worried about was their own bottom line. A House Built On A Shaky Foundation Cannot Stand At the time that Napster was starting to get underway, the record industry was going through a period of high sales. High sales that were being generated with the help of increasingly stagnant music. The biggest music of the moment was increasingly bland pop targeted mainly at teens and pre-teens, many of whom had unlimited access to their parents wallets. The problem was, the record industry was basing much of their business plan for the next few years on this trend and that is not a very strong foundation as we can clearly see. When the boy band thing finally ran out of gas, so did the record industry's business plan. At the same time, prices for music (Which had started to rise to high levels in the late 1990s) were starting to really go through the roof. Walk into a FYE (formerly Camelot Music) or Specs and pick up the new Radiohead album. The price sticker attached to it usually reads about $18.99. Factor in the sales tax and the cost of a new CD at most chain record stores now adds up to about $20.00 (Like Dave Barry often says. "I am not making this up"). The record industry calls it business. I've got a better name for it. It's called highway robbery. So all of this set the stage for one of the most controversial legal battles in history. I won't go into a full litany of the legal battle here, just sufficient to say that Metallica's song title of "Fight Fire With Fire" was appropriate for this one. We have seen the enemy and he is us So in the battle between the Record Industry and Napster, who emerged as the winner? The answer is: nobody. Napster was not shut down as the RIAA wished. Yet it's currently more or less a shadow of what it once was. In a previous essay under this topic, I expressed hope that Napster might help move the industry away from its corporate mode toward a more artist/listener feel. The likelihood of that happening now is about as likely as Bill Gates dropping all of his money out of an airplane over Washington State. The RIAA did not change its "whatever sells is best" tune. In fact, it kept on peddling teen-pop and rap-metal to a public that was starting to grow weary of them. Today however, the industry is in a shambles. And while Napster may be dead, there are thousands of imitators that have emerged in its wake. Sooner or later something will come along to take its place. Let's get to the point. Let's roll another joint The lesson that can be taken from this is: the music business is a no-win place. Neither side, be it artist, music fan or RIAA is ever going to come away totally satisfied. Yet it would be possible to reach an agreement that might come close if artists and execs made an effort to work with the fans and find out what they want. That's wishful thinking I know. But it's the closest thing to a solution that might actually work. The one positive in this is that now the music business is more aware of technology and how it works. That might be helpful in jump-starting things somewhat.  |
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