Tag: Napster

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The Music Industry is Stupid

Yeah, I know. Kind of blunt instrument, that title. Sometimes, though, you want to call a spade a spade.

The music industry, fresh from their legal victory over Napster (although, true to copyright tradition, they settled out of court rather than wait for an actual finding), have decided to offer their own alternative to peer-to-peer file-sharing programs..

Logically, you would think that they would put all of their music on one site and allow people to sign up, and pay, so they could download the music they wanted when they wanted. You would think that they would be sensitive to the persistent charges that they rip off artists by making sure that everyone knew that they were paying the artists a fair share of these fees. See? It’s not about us. It’s about making sure the artist gets paid…..

You would think that. Well, maybe you wouldn’t.

The Dixie Chicks and many other performers are hopping mad. Seems that, firstly, the music industry isn’t asking permission of the artists to put their music up on the web site. They are acting as if that permission is already included in all the other egregious rights that they have extorted out of their artists. We’ll see you in court. (They now specifically include these rights in new contracts young, naïve artists are forced to sign if want industry support. If they had to add this clause, they obviously didn’t really think it was implied in their existing contracts, did they?).

Secondly, it turns out that the artists will be getting a mere fraction of a cent for every download. A big fat nothing. The music industry claims that it is just SO EXPENSIVE to distribute music over the internet. By golly, it’s so expensive that about 20 million people have been doing it for free for five years.

The music industry is also, apparently, including charges for CD covers, promotional copies, and distribution in their calculations. Of course, with downloading, there are no physical CDs, or promotional copies, or art work, or anything.

This is going to kill Morpheus? Ha ha ha.

The line-ups:

Pressplay: Universal and Sony

MusicNet: BMG, EMI, and AOL Time Warner with Real Network.

I am not sure, at the moment, if these companies will even be giving each other access to each other’s catalogues. If they don’t, they might as well fold their tents up right now. People are not going to be lining up to pay $20 a month to two or three or more different on-line services just so they can hear the music they want to hear.

The music industry is stupid. We know that. It took them years and years to respond to Napster. It will take bankruptcies and court rulings to finish the job.

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Alt-Napster

Do you know what the music companies want to offer you as an alternative to Napster?

They want you to pay them $10 a month for a subscription which allows you to listen to 75 songs on your computer without actually being able to download the file. You will only be able to access these files by being on the Internet. My guess is that they will also probably demand your credit card number and hit you up with advertising constantly while you are connected to their site. They will probably collect information about what you listened to and sell it to other companies to hit you with spam.

So they’re adding insult to injury by making you pay to be advertised to and exploited. Furthermore, it looks right now like the music companies will not cooperate and offer each others’ catalogue at a single centralized site, so if you have any kind of diversity to your musical taste, you will have to subscribe to multiple services at $10 or more a pop. That still excludes independent labels and most of the back catalogue.

It sucks. I don’t think people will buy it. In fact, it has prompted me to seek out alternatives to Napster. Right now, I’m trying Bear Share.

As you probably know, the music industry will not be able to shut down the alternatives to Napster because they rely on peer-to-peer networking instead of centralized catalogues.

They will deserve what they get.

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My Music

You have undoubtedly heard about the injunctions and the motions and lawsuits and all the legal technicalities of the Recording Industry Association of America’s battle with Napster. The lawyers must be advising the RIAA that they can have an impact on music piracy– and their bottom line– by winning a few court battles against the software giant.

What is most interesting is not who is in court today, but who is not in court today. Napster, my friends, is a scapegoat. Why did the RIAA not file the same motions, injunctions, and lawsuits against Microsoft? Why is Creative Labs sitting there untouched? Why is Yamaha unscathed? Who gave a special blessing to Samsung? Winamp? Music Match? Audio Catalyst? Sonique? Creative Labs? Philips? Iomega?

If you read the advertising for Windows ME and XP and whatever other version of Windows Microsoft is promoting these days, you may have noticed that Microsoft thinks you want to play music on your computer. It has incorporated all kinds of features to allow you to easily and conveniently rip, download, store, and play MP3 files. You can even store them in a directory called “My Music”! Microsoft is obviously trying to profit from the consumer’s demonstrated interest in pirated music.

And Microsoft isn’t the only corporation benefiting from the digital revolution in music. Yamaha makes speakers that are designed to be used with computers, and almost certainly used to play illegal music files. There are now players from Rio, Sony, Creative Labs, Iomega. How come all of these companies are off the hook?

Could it be because they have better lawyers than Napster, the tiny little upstart, does? Could it be that the RIAA is being arbitrary and selective about trying to enforce it’s copyrights? Could it be that the law is an ass, and the RIAA are even bigger asses?

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Napster

I have followed, with some amusement, the misadventures of the American legal system over the insidious, corrupting, devilish program Napster.

Napster allows users to “kidnapster” music files from other users on the Internet running the same application. You log on and type in a search string and the Napster finds MP3 files on other users’ computers and allows you to download them onto your computer and listen to them.

Well, right is right and wrong is wrong. Is it wrong to “steal” music over the internet? Yes. Is it wrong to rip off young artists? Yes– but that’s what the music industry does better than a million internet users. Is the current system of distribution of music unjust, unfair, and grossly inefficient? Yes. It will die of it’s own contradictions.

I watched the debate and the court proceedings with amusement because the judge that tried to shut down Napster made a ruling that is ridiculous and will only bring scorn and ridicule to the legal process.

Here’s why:

1. Though shutting down the Napster site will temporarily stop people from using Napster to download MP3 files, there are dozens of other programs that do the same thing. When the Napster site was temporarily shut down last month, the Gnutella site had so many hits that it too went down. Shutting down Napster will have almost no effect on the distribution of music over the internet.

2. Sony has announced that it will sell music over the internet for $2.98 per cut. This is a bad joke. This is obscene. It is more obscene than millions of users sharing their music over the internet without paying the artist. This amount is so ridiculously high that it will only serve to increase the scorn and hatred of the music industry out there among computer hackers. If the music industry is going to sell music over the internet, the price is going to have to be about ten cents a cut. At this price, the music industry will– believe me– still make piles of money, because they will sell 100 times as much music as they currently sell.

3. The other programs that do the same thing as Napster don’t do it in the same way. Napster still requires a “server” which a judge could order shut down. Other programs, however, function in a more decentralized way. It may be impossible to shut down these systems by shutting down a small number of servers. A zealous judge would have to shut down everybody– which means it won’t happen.

4. Even if Napster, and Gnutella, and all the other programs succeed and prevail, the music industry will survive, and it will continue to sell music through music stores. In the first place, MP3 is not really a very good music format. The new generation of DVD’s will provide better quality sound and there will always be a market for disks. In the second place, even though it has long been possible to record music off the radio and television programs off the TV, the markets for CD’s and video tapes continues to grow. A lot of people just want to get the disk or tape in their hands.

5. The music industry will cease to have a cooperative monopoly (something the banks and oil companies already have) over the sales and distribution of music. Anyone can get on the internet and distribute and promote his or her own work.

6. Video is next. The fact that we cannot, at the present time, watch television programs when we want to, rather than when they are scheduled is, when you think about it, absurd. If Monty Python is on at 2:00 a.m. and I want to watch it, and the television station showing it wants me to watch it, why shouldn’t I be able to move that program to a day and time when it would be convenient for me to watch it? Furthermore, why can’t I watch programs that aren’t scheduled whenever I want to? Want that Dick Van Dyke episode from 1964? The news footage of the Munich Olympics hostage crisis? The Beatles appearance on Ed Sullivan? Someone should have it on file somewhere. If the television industry was smart– and I don’t think they are– they would put up web sites right now and announce plans to make the entire back-catalog of television programs available as soon as it is practically possible to make them downloadable. They would publish the specs for creating the compression algorithms necessary, and make it freely available to all.

Yes, I know, we already have the means with which to “time shift” television programs: the VCR. However, even after twenty-five years of development, most people still don’t use it regularly to tape programs they would otherwise miss. What do they use it for? To watch pre-recorded tapes rented, at outlandish prices, from a video store.

That should teach us something. For one thing, it indicates that there will continue to be a market for CD’s and video tapes in spite of new medias. For another, it indicates that a large number of people will never learn to master some new technologies.

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Pushy Annoying Software Turning the Internet into Television

I just installed Music Match, an MP3 ripper and player. It’s a nice piece of software. I got it for free off the internet. No, I didn’t steal it: they’re giving it away. Of course, you can buy an upgrade for $29. But the version you get for nothing actually does pretty well everything I want it to do. Thank you.

However… after I installed it, it started harassing me about upgrading. But, okay, there is a little button I can click to tell it to stop harassing me. However, then it started bugging me about going onto the internet to download more information about the artist whose CD was in the player– Leonard Cohen. Go away. Then I ripped some MP3’s. It did not ask me where to put the files. Why not? If I ordered a pizza, do you think they would hang up before I gave the address? Right. And then they would deliver it to My House in My Neighborhood in My City. And I would have to go out hunting all over town until I found that house, so I could have my dinner.

No, I prefer to say: deliver right here, this place, this location– so I can find it. Put it in this drawer, so I can keep things organized. But Windows wants you to store your pictures in My Pictures because it thinks you are incredibly stupid and haven’t the slightest idea of how to organize anything.

Music Match crashed, by the way, on a Windows 2000 system. Windows 2000 crashes– don’t believe people who tell you that Microsoft has finally put out a reliable product. Microsoft products are full of bells and whistles. They make a lot of noise as they crash and burn. I have had Windows 2000 crash while running Windows Explorer, a Microsoft program. Nothing else.

When I did humor Music Match and told it to go ahead, find some information on the internet for me, what did it do? It called up Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I don’t use Explorer. I use Netscape.

Music Match is by no means the only software out there pushing you around. Almost everything you install nowadays starts trying to sign you up for Internet access or spam or web portals or whatever. How convenient, right? How nice. It does it all automatically, even if you don’t want it to. Quicken has been harassing me for three years to use their investment services. Go to hell. Sorry– I got mad, after the 1,477th time.

Microsoft, by the way, doesn’t think “spam” is a word. It highlights it with a squiggly red line, as it does words like “honour” and “labour”– legitimate British English spellings.

Anyway, my point is this: we are getting inundated with rude software that knocks on your door offering a valuable service and then takes over your cyber-house. In the process, it uses up valuable resources on your computer, including drive space and CPU cycles, and wastes your time clicking on messages boxes you did not ask for. And if you do accept any of their offers, you are likely to get either spammed or ripped off.

This is all part of a concerted plan I identified years ago: the plan to turn the internet into television. Television invites you to be a passive moron, watching with a vacuous expression, buying whatever they sell you, blithely accepting vulgar interruptions of every program every few minutes to hawk some valueless piece of junk to you.

The internet used to be different. But the corporations have taken it over. They see it as a true wonder of the modern world: a new way to sell things. A new way to manipulate people. A new audience of suckers for these vampires to sink their teeth into.

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MP3’s

Let me make it clear, first of all, that I have no desire to save the music industry. The music industry consists largely of blood-sucking vampires who abuse, deceive, and exploit raw talent. A pox on all of their houses.

But, I do want artists to be paid for their work.

It is clear that there is no way to stop people from using the internet and their computers to freely copy music. It’s too easy. Even if you wanted to pay for the music, it is easier to download a copy from the internet than it is to buy a CD at your local record store.

But if the music industry can no longer sell enough CD’s to pay their artists, how will the artists be paid?

Here’s my solution: the government should impose a surcharge on all personal  internet accounts. The surcharge will be collected by all Internet Service Providers and remitted to an organization managed by representatives of the musical artists community. All artists who wish to be paid for their music will have the option of joining or not joining. This organization will find a way to track the volume of downloads for each member artist. Based on these numbers, each artist will be compensated directly from the fund.

The amount of the surcharge will probably only have to be about $2 or $3 a month or less.

The beauty of this plan is that the government is not required to monitor anybody’s downloads, or try to regulate internet usage. All it has to do is impose the fee and ensure that the money is funneled directly to the artists (and not to the parasitical music industry itself).

The only problem with this proposed system is that someone will have to develop a way of monitoring downloads and tabulating the numbers for each artist. I rather think that the makers of Napster, faced with multi-billion dollar law suits from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) would be more than happy to comply. As for all those people who are paranoid of government intervention, it should be stressed that the monitoring is done by the proposed artists’ agency and not by the government or the recording industry.

There. Done. A remarkably simple and effective solution. I hereby copyright it.

All I ask is mere .01% of the take.

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Napster Hamster

Is Napster the Death of the Music Industry?

If you are not familiar with a program called the Napster, these are the salient facts:

The Napster creates a sub-network of users on the internet. Anyone who is logged on and running the program can become part of the network. When you join, the Napster scans a directory on your hard drive for MP3 files (you specify this directory when you set the program up). It then makes a catalog of these files available to all the other users of Napster on-line at that moment. While it’s doing that, you can use the search function of Napster to scan the MP3 files on every other user’s hard drive. When you find something you like, you click on it and download it to your machine.

The music industry is dead.

As I ran the Napster and did a search for some Tom Waits, I remembered something I read a while ago about the music industry going after some university servers that were carrying a lot of “illegal” MP3 files. The representatives of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America –or Vampires Anonymous) went to the administrators of these universities and forced them to delete the MP3 files and take action against the students who posted the files.

The “action” consisted, generally, of a very stern warning.

The RIAA had some mild recourse in this situation: there was a physical server upon which the files resided and from which they could be deleted.

But there are no servers for Napster. Or rather— there are thousands of servers. They appear, and then they disappear, when the user logs off. They could be in Anchorage or Vancouver or Minsk or London or Bogota or Moscow.

At the time I logged on, there were 1500 servers and 200,000 songs on line.

There is no way that the RIAA is ever going to be able to shut down such a network. There is no way the police can possibly track down and arrest all of those users. There is no way the government is going to impose protocols or software encryption programs on the internet to prevent the distribution of music. No one will accept it. No one even accepts that the government can tax the internet. There is a deep consensus out there– in government and academia and business– that the internet cannot be regulated and no one should even attempt it. Even if you could try to shut down all the servers in the U.S., traffic can be simply routed overseas.

There is no way that anyone will be able to prevent people from rapidly distributing “illegal” copies of any recorded work whatsoever, and that will soon include video. There is no way to convince these people that they should not do it. For one thing, many of them don’t care about right or wrong when it comes to copyright. For another thing, many of these people are mighty sick and tired of the music industry gouging them on the price of CDs and Hollywood gouging them on the price of movie tickets.

And, finally, some of these people are aware of how the music industry and Hollywood gouges and cheats their own artists.

It’s all good free enterprise, you know. For all the talk about morality and values and ethics, the United States promotes the idea of free enterprise capitalism above all else. Is it really such a large step from Microsoft’s or AOL’s marketing practices to stealing music and video? Come on…. Microsoft has been robbing people for years by negotiating deals with vendors that require them to pay for a copy of Windows for every computer they sell regardless of whether or not the purchaser wants it. That is “theft” by any other name. What has the Department of Justice done? So far, a big fat nothing.

It might be possible, in the future, for the music industry to encode CD’s in such a way that they cannot be copied. Well, no they can’t. First of all, that would only last a few weeks, at best, because the hacker community would quickly find a way to defeat the encryption that is used. Secondly, people will not want to buy CD’s that cannot be copied. Thirdly, no form of encryption will actually prevent someone from playing the CD– of course–and as long as it can be played, it will never be too difficult to convert it to an MP3 file.

Consider that the music industry has already won a major concession from the government. In the future (if not already), all blank tapes and CD’s are going to be “taxed” to return some of the “lost” royalties to the music industry. Think about this. Blank tapes and CD’s. Precisely at the moment when the media has become irrelevant, the government proposes to tax it!

The Napster doesn’t require a tape or a CD. All it requires is some hard drive space.

I’ve been saying for years that the music industry will never be able to sustain it’s current marketing strategy in the face of new computer technologies. The Napster, and similar programs that are sure to come along, might well be the last nail in the coffin.

Good bye Sony. Good bye Warner Brothers. Good bye EMI and Deutsch Gramophone.