Hollywood vs. Napster, post mortem
From Rolling Stone’s obituary for the music industry, June 19, 2007:
Even worse, the record companies waited almost two years after Napster’s July 2nd, 2001, shutdown before licensing a user-friendly legal alternative to unauthorized file-sharing services: Apple’s iTunes Music Store… Rosen and others see that 2001-03 period as disastrous for the business. “That’s when we lost the users,” Rosen says. “Peer-to-peer took hold. That’s when we went from music having real value in people’s minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value.”
From my column in Salon, July 27, 2000:
What will be the impact of the court-ordered shutdown of Napster? These projects — small, underground efforts that grew unnoticed in the shadow of Napster the company — will be flooded with energy… From the recording industry’s point of view, it is slaying one enemy only to seed the field with a thousand new opponents — opponents who are, not incidentally, its own best customers…
The recording industry is in for a long, fruitless siege if it sets out to shut down each little Napster clone or slap a writ on every individual who uses Gnutella. Ultimately, if it wants to stop people from engaging in Napster-like behavior, the only thing that could work would be to shut down the Internet itself. Good luck.
Instead of going to court, of course, the music industry could be figuring out ways to use Napster to sell more music. After all, here’s a piece of software that cultivates people’s taste for new music and that appeals to the most dedicated fans. What a sales opportunity!
But by treating Napster as the copyright antichrist, the industry is simply insuring that the vector of Internet technological development will move rapidly toward a lawsuit-proof, free-for-all distributed network of file-sharing…
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June 29th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I had to guffaw when I read the RIAA rep claim that the lawsuits weren’t “punitive”. Oh please.
Like many others, I believe the point where the industry nuked itself was the RIAA lawsuits. At that point, instead of being another party to the transaction of acquiring music, they turned themselves into an opponent of consumers. At that moment, file sharing became not only a way to get music, but a way to stick it to The Man.
June 30th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
I agree with Carlos that lawsuits were instrumental in getting the record labels to become evildoers in the public’s mind. A couple of simple, effective steps could/should have been taken by the labels to “harness” P2P. First, emulate the French model and levy a tax on the ISPs, paid for by the users on their monthly Verizon, Comcast or AT&T bill, and redistribute the collected funds to the artists according to their downloads, akin to the radio model. Second, develop subscription models where users “rent” and “rent to own” music via $9.99/month plans for all current and back-catalog music. Let’s hope for the movie studios that they’ve seen the light and will embrace what users want, ie simplicity and not try to fight P2P and ultimately lose just as music plainly has.
July 1st, 2007 at 7:53 am
Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of guys, idiots who believe that suing your own best customers is a solid way to ensure their loyalty. Every time they try something new, I just shake my head in disbelief. I’m quite fond of Pandora. It allows me to find new music I would otherwise miss (given that commercial radio is such an astonishing waste). Pandora says it’s now in the the fight of its life as the recording industry wants to increase the price it pays for each song so high it will put Pandora and other Internet radio sites out of business. Once gone, that’ll be another avenue they will have shut down, making it harder for me to buy their product. I love music, but hate the industry. I look forward to when I can have the former without the latter.