| Product: |
Napster |
| Date: |
24/11/00 (38 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Free Music
Disadvantages: Its on the way out...
Mp3 has really taken off in the last year or so, and there are now SO many floating about (both legally and illegally) that it is a nightmare finding those that are of any use to you at all. The main reason that they have become so popular is because they offer CD quality audio with a compression rate of 10:1 over tradition wav format. Great news, and this is why the explosive rise of the MP3 has come about so phenomenally quick.
Napster started off as a small-scale software project that would allow the few members it had effectively share what mp3's they had. This worked fine, and as the software developed into a very effective method of locating and transferring mp3's the number of members rose enormously, and with it the number of mp3's available. The range of music became SO phenomenal that the media started to cotton on to what was quickly becoming a phenomenon, and the faster news spread, the faster members joined. Before you know, Napster became the single biggest resource of MP3's on the Internet, and widespread music was available for all. There was, however, one major problem - 99.999% of that music was illegally encoded, and those who 'borrowed' and shared this music were not legally entitled to own it. This lead to major court cases with Napster being sued left, right and center, an inevitable result really. This is of course absurd that Napster could be sued for copyright infringement, as they NEVER actually host a single MP3 file. The reason for this is that the MP3's are transferred directly from one users Hard Drive to another with Napster and its servers merely the means of connecting the two. One user acts as the source MP3, while the other downloads the music 'on the fly'. Napster argued this point in court, but as the court cases piled up the pressure got too much....
Recent developments have seen Napster agree with the record companied that the previously FREE service will now switch to a subscription
only access basis, whereby users will pay a monthly or annual fee for the right to exchange music, with the monthly fee paying the royalties on that exchanged. At the time of writing, this was not implemented, and merely plans to avoid the millions of court cases pending, but this stands to reason that it is the only viable way of Napster covering their ass. Only one problem though - who is actually going to pay for mp3's that they can get from 1000001 web sites for absolutely free? I suspect millions of their users (including myself) will no stop using the service, which could see it brought to its knees before it gets off the ground in its new form.
One thing is for sure - mp3's are here to stay, but whether Napster remains as the primary method of obtaining them that I seriously doubt!
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