Napster Documentary: Culture of Free | Retro Report | The New York Times

College students are making good use of the Internet, the latest software makes it too easy for students to access their favorite songs. The main challenge was whether this could scale to a large number of users and I thought okay if this code works. This is going to be huge and I had a moment where I wondered if it is morally right for technology to be advancing. This is going to happen anyway. Now you have a generation of people who expect their music for

free

, they don't care what it is. I Have Good Intentions, It's Very Hard to Change In 1998 at Northeastern University, a freshman, Sha Fanning, began developing a computer program called Napster in her dorm room.

She asked Ali Idar, a veteran programmer she knew through her uncle, for help and my response. Did you need to focus on your studies? Fanning did not follow Ali's advice. She abandoned it to focus on the program and teamed up with fellow teenage programmer Shawn Parker to launch a beta version when it began to spread through chat rooms that traveled to the Bay. Area to grow the business initially. I was skeptical. Oh my god, I'm sitting in front of 28- or 19-year-olds. I changed my tune once I learned that there are already 40,000 people using this, it was one of the first large-scale peer-to-peer. file-sharing programs that allowed users to access music files stored on the hard drives of other Napster users. 40,000 wasn't a big number, but it was bigger than I thought it was going to be initially, which was zero because people weren't willing to do it.

Opening up their hard drives, I realized that people's emotional attachments to music, their general interest in music, was more than enough to overwhelm any kind of concern about security or privacy, and in the '90s , consumers' emotional ties to music were equivalent to large amounts of money. Mind you, when Puff Daddy's record label made two music videos with elaborate helicopter chases in consecutive years, except the CD boom was from '84 to 2000, you actually had to drive your car to Tower Records and buy a CD for $18 to get the song you liked. and that was a good model, it made the industry tons and tons of cash by selling millions of chumba W albums with a good song, it was an economic boom that was practically the end of that era because very shortly after Napster really took over the public.

Awareness and consumer realized that they could get the music they wanted to listen to for

free

. It was on college campuses with high-speed Internet that Napster really took off in the fall of '99, so how many MP3s do you have on your computer? About 600, maybe. like a 100 or something like that, 6 or 7000 Napster Napster Napster is called old file sharing seen by some as the wave of the future it was very exciting we knew we were building something that was going to be great ladies and gentlemen the creative Napster Sean Fanning when The first time I heard about Napster, I remember my impression of having two different elements, one is that this is incredible, it is revolutionary and things will never be the same in the music industry and the other is that this is going to destroy the industry record company, it is no longer necessary. go to a store and spend money and months after the rise of Napster, the recording industry began a long legal battle to stop it.

They are waging a war in the courts over who controls what artists create. We heard that we couldn't survive. Before, when we had 700,000 members and 17 million members, we firmly believed that digital distribution was going to bring the industry closer to its customers and that, instead of killing it, they would take advantage of the value it brought, but to the record companies. With artists ranging from Tony Bennett to Metallica, this new technology in the wrong hands is simply theft. The infringement-based business model is not only morally wrong, but also legally wrong at the time when the Recording Industry Association of America was

report

ing around $15 billion a year in revenue in the United States alone.

Anyone with enough money could go and make a record, but it didn't guarantee you access to stores, which was the only place where you could really buy that record, that was the power of the music business, distribution, selling it, publishing. Napster hijacked our music without asking. A chorus of studies shows that Napster users buy more records as a result of using Napster. Hank Barry, a lawyer came to act as CEO when the fight escalated, we were trying to negotiate with the labels we were trying to fight the court case and trying to keep the system running at the same time.

We had a limited amount of time to get it done and we just didn't get it done within the time frame we had. The free music service run by Napster was ordered to stop playing music in July 2001, after more than a year of legal battles. The internet startup, which at its peak had around 70 million registered users, shut down its entire network in response to court orders that we accurately estimate. that the courts would say you just don't have the right to give away all this stuff, so maybe we were a little smug and confident in the belief that the courts would say it's not that and people would stop doing it.

We did not do it. Truly a factor in consumer adoption, the youthful lack of respect for copyright and anonymity would combine to make him quite unstoppable as a model. The industry may have crushed Napster, but the idea had taken hold and a flood of other downloading services took its place. free and it's easy and you know it's wrong, yes, but a lot of people do it, almost everyone does it desperate to stem the tide, labels take their chances and sued almost 20,000 people for using illegal downloading software. Legally downloaded music is the same as going. at a CD store in town, but CD sales continued to plummet, closing record stores across the country, an industry in crisis, so when Steve Jobs came to the table with plans for a new CD store online music, major labels finally gave up on what they had fought so hard for.

It's hard to maintain distribution, you only had two options: don't do a deal with Steve, in which case people continue emailing the mp3s to their friends, or do a business with him and he has a store and then you can sell. things things this week Apple Computer launched its iTunes music store and they hope this is a response to some of the piracy that will occur online over the next few years. Digital sales increased by more than a billion songs, but today even the iTunes model is under threat. Due to the shifting sands of music distribution, download sales are declining as online streaming services like Spotify gain popularity and the industry falters.

Corporate brands see marketing opportunities with energy drink company Red Bull even starting their own record label who knows in 5 years if someone will no longer be buying music, but maybe they will be streaming it, which is seen on Spotify and on the YouTubes of the world. Those numbers keep going up and up, and a recent study found that the most popular way for 12- to 24-year-olds to discover new music is the online video website YouTube. It used to be that the only way to do this free music sampling was through illegal downloading. Now there are other ways to try music for free.

Consumers also use YouTube to upload and share music, some of which they didn't own the rights to when YouTube started. My opinion was that it was actually worse than Napster. This should be easy to close, but after legal challenges, the company emphasized its efforts to try to stop infringement by offering the copyright owner the opportunity. to remove a video or run ads against it, the growth of music on YouTube has been 100% organic and driven by the community, by the artists, by the fans, the part that was not organic was YouTube's association with the music industry to allow the use of copyright.

Some works in the music industry say that YouTube's money-making potential has yet to bear fruit for many artists, but today the industry is largely embracing online platforms and their communities as a form of distribution. that cannot be ignored and they are not just some, many, many records are made by people in their garages, basements or bedrooms and the distribution is there, they will make a video, they will post it on YouTube and, if it is good, people will find it. You will find in Lemore and Ryan Lewis boosted their career without a record label when their video went viral on YouTube, you have artists like M lemore who was able to reach millions and millions of fans before hitting the radio.

It would have been very difficult for you to achieve this if you went back all the way to 9 for many other streaming services hurt their bottom line. Royalties are small fractions of what artists once earned from sales, and some musicians have had to deal with this new reality more than others. I haven't seen a lot of money from record sales, Spotify and Pandora and all that. It's great, but again, the amount of money I received is very small, we are very happy to be here with Miss Emy L Harris. Robert Ellis is a singer-songwriter who has released critically acclaimed albums and tours with artists such as Willie Nelson and Emmy.

Lou Harris for the last few years we have been touring practically non-stop. I think we did 290-odd days last year. I would say touring was probably 100% of my income as a kid if I had told myself what I was doing now I would think I would be making a lot more money than I am yeah music is that important yeah no more than ever. I think the challenge is finding ways to monetize that importance that Napster might have hurt recordings. music sales but it is the industry's responsibility to figure out how to extract its value from each generation this happens in every industry the Rocky Mountain news published its final edition Blockbuster Video there are no more borders it is going into liquidation music was the first industry to really had to confront the idea of ​​free content, music was at the forefront whether you liked it or not.