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Music Media

Napster Execs Resign, Company Appears to Teeter 229

Posted by timothy from the no-income-will-do-that dept.
renard writes: "The NYT is reporting that five top executives at Napster, including founder Shawn Fanning and CEO Konrad Hilbers, resigned yesterday. This occurs in the wake of their Board's rejection of the latest buyout offer from Bertelsmann AG - as Hilbers says, `I am convinced that not pursuing the offer is a mistake.' Could this be the end for the upstart MP3 indexing service that changed everything?"
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Napster Execs Resign, Company Appears to Teeter More

Napster Execs Resign, Company Appears to Teeter

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  • Revolutions Outlive Pioneers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:20AM (#3522713)
    Napster as a company is irrelevant.

    The P2P architecture pioneered by Napster is what matters.

    Just like 3dfx (which is no longer) revolutions outlive pioneers.

    • Re:Revolutions Outlive Pioneers (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah thanks to their pioneering, we know exactly what not to do. ie. no centralized server design for music sharing

    • Re:Revolutions Outlive Pioneers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stain ain ( 151381 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @12:12PM (#3523753)
      In fact, I think Napster deserves some credit.
      Agreed, it didn't start the music-sharing thing: before CD-Rs and MP3s we all had double decks.
      It didn't start the MP3 revolution either: way back before Napster, lots of people were already encoding MP3s (L3enc first then Fraunhoffer and Xing...) and sharing with friends, normally using burned CDs but also with some useful useful FTPs, where one had to enter 'hidden' directories until the music could be found.
      And it didn't even start P2P, because it is not a real P2P service...
      But still, Napster deserves lots of credit, because it is the single thing that started the revolution, for its simplicity of use, bringing many users that were not computer geeks to the world of music sharing. It is, in a word, the service that made MP3 sharing popular, and now that it is popular, it will remain that way forever, no matter how hard they try. Cheers for Napster.

      btw, if you want to read about what is p2p and what is not, check this [openp2p.com].
    • The P2P architecture pioneered by Napster is what matters.

      Napster didn't do jack shit that was even close to original. On IRC we were doing P2P programs using various scripting languages and what not. The only thing that happened to Napster is Shawn had a nice uncle or grandpa or whoever the fuck he was that gave him the money to try to make it a company so the masses heard of it. There was no original or innovative code that went into Napster. I remember seeing the first Gnapster (sorry Jasta) and thinking it was IRC without the IRC client. Oh, so you have DDC connections with SQL searching while each client registers? Big deal. Back in the days of good IRC pirating everyone just posted a list of files to listen for, and people typed search requests into the channel and if you had it for trade you answered. Sometimes you needed to upload first, sometimes it was free. This worked better than Napster ever did in my experience working with Napster (Although on IRC it was all porn :)) and now Gnutella and Fast Trak have kicked Napster's capabilities all over the net. Napster didn't pioneer any architecture, they just packaged it all up into a pretty end user package and marketed it.

      Putting 3dFX and Napster in the same conceptual group is just wrong. 3dfx came up with new and innovative ideas for openGL acceleration and lost because they got lazy in the market. Name one technology Napster actually created, instead of just wrappering around? (I'll give you a hint, the Napster servers was just a hacked IRC server)

  • Company Appears to Teeter (Score:4, Funny)

    by billnapier ( 33763 ) <napier@pob[ ]com ['ox.' in gap]> on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:20AM (#3522714) Homepage
    Let's just hope it doesn't totter as well!

  • More info... (Score:3, Informative)

    by scrm ( 185355 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:22AM (#3522719) Homepage
    here [guardian.co.uk] and here [bayarea.com].
    • And even more info here, courtesy of Aunty [bbc.co.uk]. OK, so you already read that piece,but remember - for every one who checks the Beeb for stories they missed on Slashdot,there's probably one who does it the other way around...
      • And yet another site reporting [ft.com] this. So we might say this thing was well covered in the media.. ?
        • The Financial Times link in the parent reports that the company would need a miracle to avoid Chapter 7 bankruptcy (i.e., liquidation). That's the real story here... it it's just a possibility that Napster will go away for good, it's virtually certain.

  • Shawn Fannings CV (Score:5, Funny)

    by bodin ( 2097 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:22AM (#3522721) Homepage
    And for those who wants to hire Shawn, his CV
    is published at todays gnuheter:

    http://www.gnuheter.com/article.php?sid=1486 [gnuheter.com]
    • I'm afraid someone who lists their hobbies as : Downloading music; posing for magazine covers; leveling entire industries may find job offers a little thin on the ground!

  • Why Bother? (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheNecromancer ( 179644 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:24AM (#3522727)
    Why should I buy Napster when I just downloaded it from Kazaa??

  • Napster haiku (Score:4, Funny)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:24AM (#3522728)
    Napster spent millions
    Only the lawyers got rich.
    H. Rosen smiles.
  • the napster market share has been taken over by a lot of other p2p applications...

    To try to build back a userbase on the napster name would be a mistake imo

    It would not supprise me if those 5 execs left at the same time to persue a similar product without the history that napster has had

    • the napster market share has been taken over by a lot of other p2p applications...

      To try to build back a userbase on the napster name would be a mistake imo



      Isn't it fortunate that Napster didn't try to patent the basic idea? If they'd done that, the shrivelled husk of the company would still be worth a fortune to the vultures - ownership of that patent would presumably allow the firing off of C&Ds to anyone involved with Gnutella, FreeNet, KaZaa et al. "But Gnutella and FreeNet are decentralised!" Yeah, but surely they ALL require a single central download location for the client software... even if those sites are run by non-profit orgs, the hosting will come from a commercial (ie., sueable) corporation.

      Hmmmmmm, now I come to think of it, perhaps someone should register a P2P patent portfolio and turn them over to the FSF to prevent such eventuality happening?



      • Hmmmmmm, now I come to think of it, perhaps someone should register a P2P patent portfolio and turn them over to the FSF to prevent such eventuality happening?

        Not really necessary. Any kind of patent for a system like this would have "prior art" written all over it, and even if approved (as we all are aware of the PTO's shortcomings), it would be easily fought in court.
  • and Napster will never again regain it's past glory, at least not legally... I'm surprised these rats didn't abandon ship before.
  • Talking about Napster is like talking about Netscape. They are both dead companies that thought the light at the end of the tunnel was daylight when it was an approaching train.

    As far as the actual content of the story, it just goes to show what incompetent boobs were running the show. Too much VC money was flowing through them to allow them to give up, I presume.
    • I think thats a pretty good analysis based on some facts from the article like they still had 70 employees and that Fanning was the CTO. Personally, I don't know of anybody that became a CTO right out of college (or by dropping out of college). Although based on previous articles about the company, it was probably just a token title anyways.

  • Why is this a surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SkyLeach ( 188871 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:27AM (#3522741) Homepage
    The courts killed their market and technology. Napster has been history since that ruling, barring an upset by the Supreme Court, which hardly seems likely.
    • what market is that? the balck market in music?

      napster hurt all of us more than it helped us.

      free comercial music is not a business modle that is even legal. I would not cry if the US government said that

      "any one trafficing in Music that does not allow such trafficing in the copyright agreement over a file sharing system will be put it prison for 5 years nad suffer a $100,000 fine.

      thats all good for all the people who want to use technology in legitimate waays such as moving my CD colection on to MP3 and then throwing it around my personal network and MP3 player or making MP3 CDs for my car.

      a law like that would be desirable over somthing like the DMCA or Disney's bill...err I mean Hollings' bill.
      • fine, that is a nice philosophy, but you have no right to take what some one else made. you have no right to tell some one that they cannot get a contract with a big lable to sell their music. you have no right to decide how that music gets diseminated. you have no right to make decisions on if that person's music should be free or cost money.

        that is what the law protects, a person's RIGHT to make the decisions for their works.

        yes the DMCA goes to far, and yes Copyright terms need to be limited to somthing far withing the liftime of the creator and the audience, but NO, you have no right to break the law and get away with it.

        I again say that punishing those that traffic in music that is not designated to be shared over P2P services for free is a better solution to the problems that the music industry is having than trying to creep into my living room and take control of my electronic equipment.
    • Napster will remain history since:
      • It just handled MP3 files
      • It requires a centralized server
      • Most people are already used to KaZaa
      • It just handled MP3 files (worth mentioning twice)
      The courts didn't kill their technology... they did, by not trying to develop it further themselves. I, for one, will not shed a single tear for the demise of Napster.

  • In other news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Night0wl ( 251522 ) <iandow@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:27AM (#3522743) Homepage Journal
    One boy in South Dakota crys at the loss. Hilary Rosen decides to use one of her four remaining orgasms to celebrate. Next expect use, 2024.
    Rest of population, doesn't really give a shit. Grandmother unavailable for comment.

  • duh! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GutBomb ( 541585 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:27AM (#3522744) Homepage
    Could this be the end for the upstart MP3 indexing service that changed everything?

    I thought it ended a long time ago. we already knew it wasn't going to come back in any way shape or form like the good ol' napster.

  • Ethics? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by supercytro ( 527265 )
    "...thought that it was unethical to continue to work for a company that was so low on funds it would not be able to pay employees' salaries or give them vacation or severance pay should it fold.
    Unethical or just jumping ship before it has sunk? Clearly it was ethics that motivated him to grab his severence pay before the employees...

  • The Brand That Would Not Die (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is kind of like the Amiga situation.

    The Napster brand has changed owners multiple times. Owners with different agendas have tried (and failed) to shape the brand and the underlying technology to their agendas. During this cacophony, the brand has been rendered irrelevantt in a marketplace of far superior competitors.

    Napster is done. It has been rendered irrelevant. Let it die already.

  • Here is... (Score:2, Informative)

    by kylus ( 149953 )
    ...another on CNET [com.com], for those of you who loathe free registration, or whatever :)
  • But in a serious way. This company was destroyed the moment it was decided maintaining the fscking phonebook was illegal.

    Although for a short time it was great, and most certainly changed the face of audio entertainment, we can see Darwinism at work. Ideas and implementations which exist in our current tech world, exist in a hostile world, where the single greatest threat comes from the "subpoena attack". Those devices and implementations which are immune to this attack are the ones which will thrive and survive.

    If it hadn't been for the destruction of Napster, I doubt there would be the flurishing of the Gnutella clients we see today. And IMHO, although Napster was great for music, Gnucleus [gnucleus.com] is a far better tool for sharing information/entertainment than Napster ever was, or could ever hope to become.

  • Napster was already dead (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wackysootroom ( 243310 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:32AM (#3522764) Homepage
    Napster has the distinction of being the first company slain by the serial killer known as the DMCA

  • Could this be the end for the upstart MP3 indexing service that changed everything?

    No, that was March 25, 2002 [newsbytes.com].

  • ...was that they tried to control the content that they were distributing from day 1. If they had been a generic file sharing service, instead of just music, they'd never have been liable for any damages to the RIAA's members... everything would have been in the hands of the upload/downloaders. Sure, they might have had some weird injunctions/warrants to deal with, but they could have claimed all innocence on what was being traded.

    Does anyone have any idea why they did that? It cost them dearly, but I've never understood why they made that distinction. Was it to keep porn off the network? Was it to brand the service? What the hell were they thinking?

    • >Does anyone have any idea why they did that?

      I imagine because it gave them an identity and it gave them a role to play. At some point, they surely were planning to cash in.

      Besides, if you know what you're indexing, it's easier to make special purpose software that is tuned to the content. Or, rather, it's easier to do that if the law doesn't shut you down.
      • At some point, they surely were planning to cash in.

        Here's the real problem with Napster IMHO. No business model - no income. This is why there's no love lost from me now that napster's finishing its death throes.

        How exactly are you going to make a profit with something like Napster? Please don't tell me through ads. It's only now that people are figuring out ads don't provide enough revenue to run a business. Look at Kazaa (nevermind the capitalization thing - that is so stupid). Kazaa had banner ads in its client. Didn't make them enough money, so they resorted to bundling their product with spyware. This will also inevitably fail.

        If Naptster had gone to a subscription-type service (in its heyday, when it actually had music on it), it would have failed. The only reason Napster was successful, IMHO, was that, by default, it would share any files you downloaded. Thus, people who don't dig through options dialogs before using a program ended up sharing all their files, unwittingly. The Tragedy of the Commons is the principle that one should apply here - if you give people the choice between sharing their files (and their bandwidth) and just leeching off others, they'll leech, and they won't even feel guilty about it.

        Now, if you would actually pay for a service like Napster, you would have to evaluate why you're paying for the service and what you're getting for your money. Word would get out that sharing doesn't help you in any way, and in fact can hurt you as it takes away bandwidth.

        If Napster had gone to a subscription service where you would pay less if you were sharing more files, people would begin crapflooding it. Taking stuff from /dev/random, appending an ID3 tag and sticking .mp3 at the end. I can do this with dd and perl, but, for the windows users, all sorts of little utilities would pop up on tucows.com that allowed them to do this.

        If they had gone to a subscription service where you get unlimited bandwidth for paying (and everyone who doesn't pay has a download rate limit), people would end up hacking clients to get rid of the limit if it were client-side, and sharing Napster accounts (perhaps even on Napster) if the limit were server-side. I can think of a bunch of technical things you could do to combat this, but the point is that people would try to find a way around it. And especially if you're paying for Napster's bandwidth you would evaluate whether or not you want to allow downloads.

        Subscription models were possible with Napster as it kept data on its servers; this is not really possible with Kazaa or the other modern p2p networks. However, this is a double-edged sword - the RIAA proved that Napster was responsible for its data since it was server-side, and with a subscription model, Napster would not just be gratuitously providing data, but would be actively selling copyrighted materials. I don't know if there's really a big legal difference here, as the RIAA can force whatever court outcome it wants.

        Also, keeping the data server-side meant that Napster had to pay huge bandwidth bills. With Kazaa, they pay much smaller bandwidth bills as they only send authentication and search queries from their servers, not the actual mp3/mpg/whatever data. Bandwidth is very expensive.

        I'm glad these p2p network companies are dying. However, I don't like why they're dying. They shouldn't die because the RIAA has enough cash to force any legal outcome; they should die because they have no business model. I'd like to see the free market, not the monopolistic RIAA, determine the outcome.

  • I didn't realize Napster was still around.

    Seriously, while I didn't ever understand their business model, I mourn the loss.

    A year ago I could get any mp3 I wanted. I was just getting into a lot of music (that I have since bought on CD), so this was great.

    Even six months ago, when Napster was gone, there was Kazaa.

    Now, even that is gone (under Linux).

    Gnutella is a nightmare.

    I have to say, this is the first instance I can recall where innovation has been squelched by the twin swords of control, legislation and litigation. For some reason, I doubt it will be the last.

    The revolution was fast, but the counter-revolution was furious. Let's start preparing for the next round.

    • Try Direct Connect [neo-modus.com]. I found a few clients on freshmeat but I like it so much that I just boot into windows when I need it (that's not to assume that you have windows installed, just saying what I do).

      The system is more like IRC than any other p2p system I've used before. Plus there's nothing you can't get. There are file format filters to help your searches but the system itself doesn't care what kind of file you're sharing.

      --
      Garett

  • Good ol days (Score:2, Interesting)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 )
    To me, Napster died that summer of 2000 when it was suddenly thrust into the front cover of Newsweek and every other magazine I can think of. I spent that summer creating a database in Germany and /. became an hourly ritual, which is about how fast those stories came about.

    I find it funny that Napster came and went, the FBI raid came and went and it seems to be business as usual as the new Eminem album is leaked as well as a (bad) cam job of Episode II.

    Piracy may never be so widespread and popular again, but it will always exist. Anytime you don't have a free market, a black one will exist.

    • How to make black markets grey (Score:4, Interesting)

      by e-gold ( 36755 ) <jray&martincam,com> on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @09:00AM (#3522856) Homepage Journal
      Directly tip/pay musicians (I've said how ad-infinitum here, so I won't repeat my whole rant now). It's not hard to break the payment-system bottleneck and cut out the middlemen, I've been selling the tools for YEARS...

      http://101574.clicktwocents.com [clicktwocents.com] tips me with my favorite kind of money if you've got any (and around here, I give the stuff away!) but I have 0 musical talent. The Radiators [radsfans.net] are quite good, though.
      JMR

      • Simple...STOP BUYING, STOP STEALING. Let your favorite artists know that you don't appreciate THEIR support of the very mechanism that is serving to systematically dismantle the rights of consumers. Let them know that you believe in this strongly enough to sacrifice any further enjoyment of their work, until they begin looking at alternate methods of distribution. If the people who endlessly complain about the RIAA (and steal as a means of getting even) aren't willing to walk the walk, they really don't have anything to complain about. The festering sore that is the RIAA, and other parties attempting to impose undue restrictions on the use of copyrighted material, will only get worse.
    • Off the top of my head, these are the albums recently leaked before release date:

      Rush - Vapor Trails
      Moby - 18
      Korn - The Untouchables (a full two months before release)
      Weezer - Maladroit
      New Snoop Doggy dog album
      New Eminem album
      15 tracks by System Of A Down (songs in consideration for the next album; they're not even mastered yet)

      Probably more I'm forgetting.
  • Napster - Lasted Longer Than Expected

    When companies appear to die after turning down offers, I wonder, what do you have to gain by not just taking whatever money and running? Ok, maybe they'll sleep better at night, but somehow I don't feel that figures into it all that much.

  • "a sticking point had been Bertelsmann's refusal to indemnify Mr. Barry and Mr. Hummer completely from further lawsuits that the record companies have threatened to file."

    Looks like these guys are a little worried that if they take the money and run, the record companies will hunt them down and beat it out of them.

  • Oh, my (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Scooby Snacks ( 516469 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:46AM (#3522815)
    This isn't intended to be flamebait, but watching Napster now is like watching someone you once knew who was vibrant and healthy who is now just lying there on life support. It's morbid really. Someone needs to have the courage to just pull the plug.

    Fare thee well.

  • Dead but refused to admit it... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by supercytro ( 527265 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:49AM (#3522822)

    There was little point in maintaining the company anyways... from a business perspective, the company possessed little which couldn't or hasn't been engineered elsewhere.

    Arguing from a brand name perspective also falls apart as it has been damaged in the eyes of the market and consumers in a number of high profile media reports.
    Many of the original millions of users had no intention of contributing financially and have since moved on to other products... it was mainly a way for them to leech music.

    This meant that it effectively was running at a loss with little chance of making money from past 'customers' or attracting new customers. The company possessed little valuable assets and legal cases as well as monetry concerns was killing it off slowly.

    The biggest surprise was how it has managed to survive this long...

  • infighting and greed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:50AM (#3522824) Journal
    just idle speculation, but it sounds like it sounds like you have infighting between various factions, such as idealists, business types, and some folks who are now facing the music about becoming another dot-bomb. No one likes being bought out by another company. I can imagine the board room scenes as it spins out of control.

    I hope people were able to salt away money as a cushion for their future.

    • My Idea:

      They don't want to cut their losses. Still holding on to the notion that they might turn it around and get their money back. They'll probably just lose what money they have left.

    • Looks more like a failed negotiating strategy.

      Imagine this scenario: Bertelsmann doesn't want to write off the company as a total loss so they offer to buy it for a pittance. Hummer Winblad (the VC) has the right to block a deal; this is their only negotiating leverage. They tell Bertelsmann that unless they pay more, the company sinks. Not a bad negotiating strategy; the only problem is if Bertelsmann gets pissed and calls the whole thing off (by, as it seems they did here, lowering the original offer. That's a slap in the face in this sort of negotiation.)

      But, no way to really know what happened behind closed doors.

  • Good for Them (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kawlyn ( 154590 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:50AM (#3522826) Homepage
    The NYT mentioned that one of the reasons the executives were stepping down is that they wanted to make sure that there was enough money in the pot so that the employees could get paid. If this is for real that's great. It's nice to see the executive of a company acting in a responsible fashion.

    Having said that, this also makes me kinda optomistic for the future. The future where all the old dinosaurs that are running the world now finally retire, and get replaced with people that have a clue.

  • "Early days of the Internet"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Scooby Snacks ( 516469 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @08:51AM (#3522827)
    By letting people exchange music at no charge, Napster exploded in popularity. That engendered the ire of the record industry even as Napster helped shape the early days of the Internet.
    Where's this reporter been? Let's see... Napster came along about 30 years after the "early days of the Internet". What gives?
    • The Internet is still only ~30 years old. We are still in the "early days." And think about it, when our kids (I'm only 21) use the net, they will be asking us, "What was the Internet like before the government and ACME Corp. screwed it up. You know, in the old days?"
      • ...What was the Internet like before the government and ACME Corp. screwed it up...

        You are allowed to name the beast: Microsoft.

      • You can't really say "the early days" of something based on how long you expect it to be around -- only on how long it has been around. Otherwise we can call this "the early days of humanity", since some people thing we'll be around for billions of years to come (and, of course, if we're not, who will complain that they lied :). Perhaps in another 50 years, we can start calling Napster part of "the early days".

        -Puk
      • > The Internet is still only ~30 years old. We are still in the "early days."

        True, but relatively speaking, in today's context the "early days" typically refers to pre-90's in my book. I know that's a large chunk, but the Internet got much more exciting with HTTP and HTML. Yeah, yeah, it was still cool before that, but only scratching the surface of its today's potential.

        Most of the lusers I help think of "Internet" and "World Wide Web" as synonyms :)
    • What gives is that most of the time "the early days of the internet" == "the first time that the person using the phrase heard of the internet".

      My brother pointed this out to me when citing a cluser's attempt to flame someone for claiming he had been using email for ten years. Something like a biting "email hasn't even been _around_ for ten years!" (this was five years or so ago).

      Probably works well as a general principle. Call it "Moron's Law" and it will become a de facto Principle Of How Things Work...
    • Sure the internet came into being 30 years ago, but do the years from 1972-1990 even mean anything? A bunch of universities and defense contractors on 56k links, with a lot of nodes UUCP only?

      The same is true of the "early days of TV" -- sure, it was *invented* and very narrowly used in the 30s and 40s, but for most people the early days of TV means the early-mid 50s when people generally starting buying and watching TV regularly.

      The same is true of the internet -- I worked at a major University and we didn't get general internet access (IP connectivity of our computers) until probably '90. Dialup wasn't an option until '91 or '92, and generic consumer access not an option until 93-94, and even then it was limited and expensive.

      The "modern" internet as a mass phenomenon (cheap home dialup, most server sites accessed via high speed dedicated connectivity) didn't really start until '94-95 and wasn't even a popular force until a couple of years later.

      Counting 72-90 as "the early years" is legitimate only if you're talking about the six geeks who did something with it then.
  • Can we have a port of the *BSD is dying post to Napster please?
  • "Could this be the end for the upstart MP3 indexing service that changed everything?"

    Napster "ended" when they lost their copyright infringement case...
    • when did that happen then ? - last thing I'd heard was that we were still going through the pre-trial motions.

  • Karma Police (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CaffeineAddict2001 ( 518485 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @09:31AM (#3522960)
    Napster was great.

    If every musicians in the world went broke from napster, I would still think it was great.

    There would be other incentives besides money to create music and life would go on. Maybe there wouldn't be so much of it, but is that such a bad thing?

    If I were a musician, of course I'd be pissed, just like anyone else who chooses a profession thats core business model has become obsolete.

    I'm sure this post is short sighted, poorly thought out and doesn't consider the massive effect entertainment has on the economy.

    I don't care and neither did the thousands of napster users who were told by the recording industry that they needed music in order to live.

    The music they forced down the throats of our generation is what encourages this attitude, now they reap what they sow.

    • Re:Karma Police (Score:2, Interesting)

      by thesolo ( 131008 )
      If every musicians in the world went broke from napster, I would still think it was great.

      Can you name me one musician who ever went broke from Napster??

      The fact of the matter is that the only people in the music business that napster hurt were the middlemen. Not the artists themselves, but the middlemen who take all the money for the artists respective work.

      Under the current system, almost all artists make their money from concerts, not from CD sales. Therefore, even if people downloaded music without paying for the CD, it really didn't hurt the artist all that much. Instead, it offered free advertising for how good that artist's music was.

      I can distinctly remember going to see a band that I liked before Napster really started getting popular. I saw them at a club, and no more than 200 people were there. A friend of mine put their stuff up on Napster (yes, this was illegal). 3 months later, they were playing a larger venue, and the show was sold out. Over 900 people were in attendance. Personally, I think a lot of this was due to Napster. People who had never heard of them could now listen to all their music.

      Honestly, what's better for the artist? 200 people buying their CDs at $15 a pop, of which they might see $.50 to $1 per disc, or 900 people paying $20 a pop to see them play live??
      • A few points... First, in order to produce all this "free advertising" in the form of overpriced CD's, record companies need to be convinced that they'll make a profit. No profit == no CDs == no "free advertising".

        Second, 900 * $20 = $18,000. Subtract the cost of production, and what do you have left? Will this model work for any but the most established artists?

  • Napster was MP3s for the AOL crowd. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @09:32AM (#3522961)
    Remember back before Napster existed? Most people traded MP3s and movies on secret FTP sites. Napster's role in the file sharing market was to extend it out to the masses who couldn't figure out how FTP clients worked. Granted, they made it much easier to find music, but when the AOL crowd gets wind of something and tells their friends, and one of those friends is a reporter or an RIAA worker, then the whole house of cards comes down.

    The legacy Napster did leave behind is the other filesharing networks (Kazaa, etc.) That's good. However, the genie's out of the bottle, and those services are next.

    Time to fire up the ol' FTP client and Usenet reader...

  • Very good comment (Score:5, Insightful)

    by interiot ( 50685 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @09:32AM (#3522962) Homepage
    I think boingboing [boingboing.net] summed it up very well:
    • When Napster was getting off the ground, the labels pooh-poohed it, basically taking the position that anything that got built by average users, ripping their own MP3s, adding their own metadata, serving off their own PCs with their own network connections would suck. Only a centralized system could deliver "High Quality Content," because every file on the network would be vetted and served by a Responsible Grownup from the labels.

    • The new, BMG-owned Napster was very much a Responsible Grownup proposition. Responsible Grownups would centralize the files, take them out of that greasy-kids-stuff MP3 format and put them in a Responsible Grownup format with "rights management" that would curtail your ability to format-shift, time-shift and repurpose the music you downloaded. The system really looked like it was going to brutally suck.

      So I can't really feel too sad for poor old dead Napster. Death was the best it could hope for now. Dead, its name can remain synonymous with revolutions; had it lived, its name would have been synonymous with crap.

  • About a year ago I wrote an article about why Napster should have called it quits then, instead of coming to an end this way. I'd like to take this opportunity to say "I told you so [summersault.com]." But there's a little more substance and principle to it than that, if you check out the article.
  • Something like "Napster's recent apparent teetering was, in fact, confirmed by respected industry experts as an actual corporate teeter. 'This was a genuine teeter, make no mistake about that' said Flughart Frockwiffle. 'This, in combination with other recent news, may well put them on track to acheive full-scale beleaguered status'. Meanwhile, both remaining executives are disputing the analysis. 'This is far short of a teeter by any modern calculation. The teeter standards [used here] are more than 20 years old. That's before the Internet even existed.".
  • my old Pentium 90 that sits in the closet and from which I pulled the CPU out to make it a key chain.

    It is quite amazing to see that even the view of daily activities, like listening to music, improve following Moore's law [webopedia.com].

  • teetering? (Score:4, Funny)

    by mosch ( 204 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @11:26AM (#3523529) Homepage
    Napster Execs Resign, Company Appears to Teeter
    If by 'appears to teeter' you mean 'fell into a bottomless abyss in 1999 and is still screaming, praying for the end', then i agree, it's teetering.

  • Lest we forget (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @12:47PM (#3524006) Homepage

    Bertelsmann poured in excess of $85 million into Napster (that they've declared), and they're getting none of it back, because the fucked up control freak DRM-infected new-Napster technology that it paid for is utterly without a market. That money is gone, burned, buried.

    Now... where are they going to recoup that $85 million from? Pay cuts for their executives? Hmmm, I think not.

    That $85 million is coming from two places. From their artists, and from us.

    You have a think about that the next time the RIAA tells you that you're stealing from artists, and that you'll suffer in the long run. Bertelsmann paid $85 million to come up with a worse system than one 19 year old college dropout knocked up in his spare time. And we're going to pay for it. No doubt they will spin that so that their incompetence becomes our fault for using Napster in the first place.

    • Bertelsmann never believed they could recoup the money. Those millions (really 85 millions? What the hell happened to all that money?) subverted napster, turning it from a beacon of freedom into a corrupt outpost of the MPAA. Had Napster stayed free and loyal to its users there would have been a grave danger of a million fans marching on Washington. Inducing Napster to commit suicide was a good business move.

      Do you believe in death after life?

  • Brief History of Napster (Score:2, Informative)

    by choka ( 542297 )
    On Wired news there's a very brief history of Napster [wired.com], from the cradle to the grave. Interesting read.

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