Metallica: Napster's Biggest Booster (Napster - Should Music Be Free To Share?)

Member Name: ladybahnsidhe

Product:	Napster - Should Music Be Free To Share?
Date:	27/02/01 (55 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great publicity, incredible marketing tool

Disadvantages: Loss of control of what music people hear

Metallica has been Napster's best friend. I kid you not. I cite as evidence the enormous jump in users in the few days after the Metallica suit was announced.

There's an old saying in the Public Relations field -- there's no such thing as bad publicity, and the case of Metallica v. Napster proves it beyond the shadow of a doubt. I first logged onto Napster in late January of 2000, shortly before the Metallica suit hit the headlines. An average night would have a few hundred libraries online with a selection of a few thousand songs. Then Metallica announced its intention to sue Napster for copyright infringement. Overnight, user numbers soared into the thousands. College campuses banned the use of Napster on network computers -- not because of copyright issues, but because the downloads were eating bandwidth and slowing network operations to a crawl. Napster went from unknown to infamous overnight. Literally.

None of which addresses the question -- should Napster be allowed to offer its service for free? The U.S. Circuit Courts have decided the answer to that is no. While I won't disagree with them, I will offer that the record companies may be making a huge mistake in battling Napster rather than befriending them. Napster's enormous user base (at this moment, as I write, there are 6,611 users logged into the server I am connected to) represent a marketing tool matched only by radio stations and the music channels.

The question is: if the consumer can get a product for free, will they pay for it? My own observations are: yes, they will, especially if you consider that the 'product' being sold here is not only a few tracks off a CD, but the artist's music, popularity and presence. I personally have 'discovered' the music of half a dozen artists I had never known before, and based solely on word of mouth and Napster exposure, have gone out and bought their CDs and/or bought concert tickets. Napster ma
kes it easy for me to discover new artists that I like -- not only with their new artists feature, but with the ability to review the libraries of others who seem to share my taste in music and to chat with others and hear what they think is worth listening to.

A few quotes to support my position, taken directly from the Napster web site:

"Napster: It is the future, in my opinion. That's the way music is going to be communicated around the world. The most important thing now is to embrace it, and that was the spirit by which we did this co-promotion."
- Dave Matthews, Dave Matthews Band

The amount of time companies spend stressing about getting a record on radio, you would think that the idea of some big, global listening post would make perfect sense
-- Damian Harris (owner of SKINT) (Fatboy Slim's label), NME

"Stealing our copyright provisions in the dead of night when no-one is looking is piracy. It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster. There were one billion downloads last year but music sales are way up, so how is Napster hurting the music industry?
-- Courtney Love, NME, 6/29/2000

"We have just finished a tour, we played in Barcelona, the next day the entire performance was up on Napster and three weeks later when we got to play in Israel the audience knew the words to all the new songs and it was wonderful."
-- Colin Greenwood (Radiohead), NME, 9/28/2000

What recording company's PR department wouldn't love to have such a platform at its disposal for publicizing new releases? And yet.. they threw it away.

In the end, it is all a moot point. The U.S. Circuit Court has decided against Napster. The industry scuttlebutt is that Napster is considering hammering out a deal that would offer their service for a monthly subscription fee, from which they would pay royalty/licensing fees to recording artists and comp
anies. Such a scheme could only work with a large user base -- which Napster has, in part thanks to the Metallica suit.

My suggestion to Shawn Fanning? Send Metallica a dozen roses and a thank you card.

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