Nipping Napster in the bud? (Napster - Should Music Be Free To Share?)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Napster - Should Music Be Free To Share?
Date:	06/02/01 (21 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Music companies don't force napster out of business

Disadvantages: Some music stil free

Why do people want to be famous? Do people actually want to be famous, or are they confusing it with something else? People make music to make money, it’s as pure and simple as that. Fame and all the other trappings of being in a successful music act are just fringe benefits (or curses, depending on your point of view) but being a musician is a job, like being a banker, or a car salesman etc.

Napster has been a means for many thousands of people to quite happily swap mp3 files for quite a while now, but who are these people? I know a lot of music fans, and most of them are of the opinion that they would far rather go out and spend their money on a CD (Minidisc or LP whatever). This means that they would have something that they can hold in their hands than have what basically amounts to a bit of code that is a lot more fragile than something which is “hard coded” like a CD or LP.

I too am of this opinion – yes, I do have mp3’s on my computer, but I only play them when I am using my computer doing other things. I have used Napster as well to get some files, but the files I have downloaded are either not yet released here in the UK (which I would then buy on release) or have spent a while looking for hard to trace, or deleted records. Maybe this is where Napster and the music industry could work together, allowing free distribution of already deleted music whilst keeping reigns on current music.

I don’t blame Napster for this music piracy – it’s a tool that has been put to a certain use, which happens to be illegal. If you go around to a mates house and copy onto tape one of his or her CD’s, do you then go off and sue the manufacturer of the stereo for copyright infringement (or whatever it was the American music companies sued Napster for last year)?

At the same time, I think the music companies should take a long hard look at their pricing policies. Napster is popular for a rea
son, and that reason is that people are fed up putting money into the so-called “fat cats” music companies’ pockets. The price of music in the UK is insulting to the public, and the rise in popularity of both Napster, and shopping over the internet should be a wake up call to both High Street retailers, and music companies who are still not acknowledging the high prices of their products.

With Napster supposedly starting to charge monthly for it’s service, Napster users are no longer anonymous – people will have to state their user name and their credit card details which means Napster staff can pin point who has been online, for how long, and how much they’ve downloaded.

So, to recap – certain music should become public domain (e.g. deleted material), but music which is still on a music companies catalogue should be regarded as their property, and as such shouldn’t be distributed freely.

Summary: