| Product: |
Napster |
| Date: |
15.06.01 (65 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Free Music
Disadvantages: Not Terribly User Friendly, Many bands now blocked
Most people who listen to even a little bit of news will have heard about MP3s and Napster. But what are they how do they affect the normal person in the street and what is its future in the music industry? Well here goes….
What is MP3?
MP3 stands for Moving Picture Experts Group, audio layer 3 (No wonder it was abbreviated). What it describes is a way of squeezing high quality music files into chunks small enough to download easily over the Internet.
A normal audio CD is packed with sound data above and below a human’s threshold of hearing, and a typical three-minute song would take up huge amounts of a computer's memory. One method used by mp3 to reduce file size is by removing the noise we can’t hear. Songs can therefore be packed down into a more manageable size without losing any sound quality.
In a very short time MP3 has gone from a cult Internet idea to a commercial reality. You can go to any high street electronics shop and pick up a portable MP3 player for just over £100. Download MP3s from the Internet, load them on the player and off you go - with your own personalised music play-list in your pocket.
Napster
Napster was created by an 18 year old American, Shawn Fanning so that people could share their music, and was the first mainstream mp3 success. It is a program that allows computer users to swap music files with one another directly, without going through a centralised file server or middleman. You input the name of the song you are looking for, the program returns the users with those songs and you select which user you want to download the song off. It is that simple. . For its users, Napster has become another appliance, like a toaster or washing machine. Call it the music appliance: log on, download, play songs. The simplicity of the program is part of its genius.
Napster had not been the first mp3 site, the format had been round since 1987. Many sites before it had supplied mp3s, but be
cause the files were held on a central server it was easy for them to be shut down. The difference with napster was that the site never actually stores mp3s, it simply connects 2 computers together, lets them see what mp3s the other has and allows them to download files from each other. In this way it also side steps copyright violation. Well, almost.
Napster was subsequently sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), not for violating copyright itself but for contributing to and facilitating other people's infringement.
The recording industry
MP3 has given new freedom to people to download the tracks they want, play them on their CDs, put them on portable MP3 players, or burn them onto normal audio CDs for playing on a traditional hi-fi system. There are dozens of free software packages on the Internet that make these things very easy to do.
And this is why the record companies are concerned. They have the legal rights to songs - and MP3 is an excellent way to make illegal copies of them, depriving both record companies and recording artists from the money they would earn out of CD sales.
The problem is the recording industry has very little power to stop MP3. At first it tried to ignore it, but with more and more artists emerging into the limelight and making use of MP3 themselves (Public Enemy, They Might Be Giants, and David Bowie to name a few) the subject is becoming ever more important.
Powerful record industry groups got together to try and thrash out a solution. The most popular idea has been to create an alternative to MP3, one which achieves the same technical ends but can be copy-protected.
Sony is one of the key players in a project called SDMI (of which more later).
But none of this has stopped the growth of MP3, and the explosion of websites offering files for download.
The band's view
One popular use of the technology is generating exposure for up-and-coming, unsigned bands.
It's far cheaper to make an MP3 and put it on the Web so Internet users can hear it at leisure, than it is to cut a CD. This way, life is easier for everyone - even the A&R people - the record company talent scouts - can get a good idea of a band's sound by downloading something from the net.
For many new bands, MP3 is the key to allowing more people to listen to their music. Because mp3 is free more people are prepared to take a chance on smaller bands. From my own experience if I had to pay for the music I download I would have a much smaller archive indeed. If you have to pay good money for your music then you do not risk buying something you might not like.
But it's not just bands that benefit - MP3 is a golden opportunity for the record industry to revive flagging sales. There is now so much music available that people don't want to have to choose, especially if they do not know any of the songs on a particular album.
What MP3 will do is re-vitalise the record industry the same way the audiotape did in the 1970s.
The music industry were terrified that audiotapes would stop people buying albums, but instead they just enlarged the listening audience. People made copies of albums on tape, gave them to their friends, who often went out and bought the same music. MP3 is just a digital version of the audiotape.
What we could see in the future is that companies will give away some of their songs for free, then charge people for the rest. The record industry still balks at the prospect of doing this, but in the long term it will make them more money and could be the only way to stem the mp3 mania.
The Future For MP3
The result of the court case against napster is that the music of the bands concerned (Dr Dre, Metallica etc.) cannot be shared on napster. It has been said that the IP addresses of anyone trying to download these files will be recorded and bad things will happen to you (not too sure about that b
ut it is probably not wise to try it). The blocking of certain bands is only a temporary measure though. Eventually Napster will be shut down.
Will that be the end of mp3s?
Don’t bet on it.
Where Shawn Fanning and Napster went others have followed. Already there are several sites like Napster where you can share mp3s. My personal favourite is Audio galaxy, but there are other sites such as Gnutella and Freenet which allow you to download all types of media and are much more difficult to shut down.
But MP3 will not rule the roost in the long term.
MP3 has certainly kicked it all off, there's no doubt about that. .But there are other formats that have twice the compression. Does that mean a new format will come along? Perhaps not for a while, as seen with the war between Betamax and VHS the most popular format will win.
The future of mp3 will come down to whether or not the music industry can prove that mp3s breach copyright laws. It is perfectly legal for consumers to copy music for their own enjoyment--i.e. Non-commercial use. American Congress even declared, in the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, that it is perfectly legal to make recordings and lend them out to people, provided it is not done for commercial purposes. It is unlawful, of course, if it's done to make a profit. This rule does not necessarily apply to mp3s however. If the music industry can prove that this rule doesn’t apply, then mp3s as we know them will soon die out. We will still be able to get digital music; we will just have to pay for it.
And there's the crux of it all. The recording industry wants to ensure it can continue to make money, and to do that it has to have control. Cue the SDMI - the Secure Digital Music Initiative. This is a global collaboration of music and technology companies, whose membership includes Sony, Microsoft, Philips, HMV and America Online. What it wants to create is a v
iable - controllable - alternative to MP3. A system that can distribute compressed music files over the Internet, but in such a way that illegal copying is made very difficult, or even impossible.
It doesn't necessarily want to destroy MP3. The SDMI web site declares the organisation's intent to allow "a variety of competing technologies and download formats to be used."
But it adds that the goal is a specification to "enable copyright protection for artists' work, and enable technology and music companies to build successful businesses."
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