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 Gramaphone.
