Napster

The Rise and Fall of Napster

So who remembers Napster?

It would probably be fair to say that all of this recent debate over file sharing and copyright law as it pertains to the internet all started with Napster. Until Napster became a household name, nobody ever really thought about the legality of trading music on the internet.

We always knew that, well, it makes sense that people would trade music on the internet. After all, haven’t you ever taken all of your favourite songs from your favourite CDs, copied them onto one tape, and then handed that tape to a friend as a gift? When we think about it like that, it really doesn’t seem like a big deal, and most artists would probably be honoured to be on such a tape, as that shows that you admire their work strongly enough to think that it makes a suitable gift, or sums up your feelings for a loved one, and that’s really the end goal most artists have in mind anyways: To express vital, universal feelings.

So what’s the problem they all had with Napster?

Well, where Napster and similar programs really rubbed copyright holders the wrong way was simply the scale and scope of the whole the project. If you arrange a dozen songs into a mixtape for your girlfriend or boyfriend, that really doesn’t put any kind of a dent on the record sales of the individual artists. This is, of course, even more true if you are only using the tapes for your own personal enjoyment, wanting to listen to your favourite songs all in a row without swapping CDs out. With Napster, though, it really doesn’t come down to people giving each other a dozen songs here and there as a gift, rather, Napster is literally a whole bunch of strangers swapping hundreds and hundreds of songs back and forth on a regular basis.

Some of the more prolific Napster users would even leave their computer online while they went to work, downloading dozens of albums at a time so that they could have something to listen to when they got home. Remember that the Napster era was before the age of commonplace broadband modems.

The way Napster started was actually fairly innocent. Shawn Fanning, a student of the Northeastern University of Boston, came up with the idea and got the service up and running in June of 1999. The program allowed people online to easily swap MP3 format songs back and forth. The problem was that the vast majority of the songs that wound up being traded were protected by copyright, and so, Shawn Fanning wound up being held responsible for the innumerable copyright violations committed by the people who used his program to trade illegal, pirated music.

What really put the first nail into Napster’s coffin was when the band Metallica discovered that a demo of one of their songs, “I Disappear”, had been making the rounds on the Napster network, even though the song hadn’t even been officially released. The song eventually wound up being played on several radio stations throughout the country, which led Metallica to discover that not only was their unreleased demo making the rounds, but in fact, their entire catalogue of music was being passed around for anyone to download. Metallica immediately filed a suit against Napster and many of its users.

Thanks to this attention, and attention from other musicians and music companies, Napster was shut down for massive copyright infringement in the summer of 2001, after just about two years of service.

Shutting Napster down hasn’t stopped anything. Today, we still have rampant piracy of music and other media.

What are musicians and music companies to do, then?

One argument is: Nothing. It really doesn’t affect sales that much.

But we all know that that’s kind of a cop-out answer.

Rather, if there’s one thing that music companies can do to curb media piracy (though probably never really end it, just as no amount of policing will ever “end” theft and robbery), it is probably that they should simply be ‘hip’ to the possibilities provided by the internet.

Today, more and more musicians are releasing music through services like iTunes, which offer per-song pricing, which can be very reasonable in comparison to actual CD prices, and with the benefit of being sent right into your computer, without having to wait for the CD to ship or take a trip to the store and so on.

But honestly, as long as “something for nothing” is an option, you’re going to find that a lot of people just won’t play by the rules.