Post-Napster, Or Not? Sharing, Stealing And The Future Of Music On The Web

Whew! Covering the online music scene for my day job (hitsdailydouble.com) is exhausting.

Wednesday, July 26 marked a fateful day in the history of the music business. On that day in San Francisco, a U.S. District Court judge, Marilyn Patel - in accordance with a request by record-label plaintiffs - ordered an injunction against online file-sharing service Napster. The company subsequently won an emergency stay of the injunction in Appeals Court.

Even so, the appeal may well fail - or Napster could lose big at its trial this fall. What then?

Some 20 million users, according to various reports, use Napster to search for MP3 (compressed audio) files of songs and download them to their hard drives. It was a simple process: Log on, enter the artist or song title (or even style of music) you wanted, select the files you sought (color-coded by the connection speed of the user offering the track), click and voila! Your digital music library swelled a bit more.

From there, the tracks could be loaded into portable MP3 players like the Diamond Rio, uploaded to online storage lockers like those offered by Myplay or turned into .wav files and burned onto CDs that would play in conventional home, car and portable CD players.

It was so simple - and such fun - that Napster rapidly accumulated an incredible user base, far surpassing big-budget corporate Net enterprises without spending a dime on advertising. One small problem, however: The Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the major labels, saw all this "peer-to-peer" (i.e. user-to-user) file-sharing as piracy. Major artists as diverse as Metallica, Dr. Dre and Aimee Mann complained that Net surfers were stealing their music.

The industry was hardly uniform in its views; some artists, such as Limp Bizkit and Offspring heartily endorsed Napster as a democratizing force. Bizkit even allowed Napster to subsidize their free tour. Meanwhile, some provocateurs within the record biz felt such services could help sell records, and some polls seemed to bear this out.

Napster argued that individuals sharing their music collections fell squarely under the heading of "fair use," like making tapes of one's CDs to play in the car.

Even so, Judge Patel sneered at Napster's contentions and ordered the company to disable its file-sharing apparatus. The stay granted on her injunction gives Napster a few weeks to put together an argument contesting it.

If Napster is ultimately ordered to stop offering its file-swapping service, where will users go to swap music? Scour offers a similar service in its downloadable "Scour Exchange" software, though that company, too, faces a lawsuit. Gnutella is an unincorporated entity that offers freeware from a number of sites; it's still unwieldy, as users must configure the system to have direct access to other users. Other file-sharing exchanges and applications like Imesh, CuteMX and Napigator offer varied results.

Meanwhile, MP3.com suffered a similar court judgment recently, though it offered what seemed the last best hope for selling CDs into the future. Users were able to insert CDs into their computers and, using the company's "Beam-It" software to confirm the factory codes on the discs, stream the music at any location with Web access. Best of all, affiliated online retailers offer an "instant listening" option, whereby once a CD is ordered and credit-card info confirmed, users can hear the music immediately.

Unfortunately, until MP3.com concludes its negotiations with the major labels, the service is inactive. But being able to hear one's entire CD collection from anywhere - and even hitting a "random" button to transform that collection into a streaming radio station - is pretty appetizing.

I'll be back with an update on digital music as soon as I get some sleep.

--Simon Glickman

Oh how appropriate is this month's MASHtoon?