My thoughts on the Napster controversy

Okay, let's get this out of the way first...

Napster is not the good guy.

Oh, sure, the record companies may consist primarily of evil corporate guys in suits who are trying to make bucketloads of money by controlling the distribution of music. But guess what? The guys at Napster are looking to do the exact same thing. They might patrol punk-alterna-nerd Shawn Fanning out in front of the cameras to show you how edgy they are, but behind the scenes, the guys running the show are the same old middle-age high-fiving white guys in Dockers that have been running companies since the beginning.

Don't believe me? Just ask these so called defenders of free expression to open up their system so it'll collaborate with other pieces of software. They'll send you a nasty legal letter faster than you can say, "Copyright infringement." And while their arguments of, "We're really just intending Napster to be used to promote small local bands. We can't help it if a few bad apples download copyrighted material!" might sound good when you're trying to rationalize why Napster should stay in business so you can download the latest Dave Matthews album, you've gotta admit it sounds an awful lot like those tobacco companies insisting people smoke cigarettes for the taste.

But, sure, Napster may be just another corporation looking to make money. And I think, once we stop some of these logic-stretching, self-delusional arguments, it's safe to assume that Napster is hurting CD sales a bit. And while all of this may be true, it's also safe to assume that 1) The record companies have nobody but themselves to blame for their current situation, and 2) Shutting down Napster is probably the last thing they want to do.

Let me pull back a bit and explain why.

When I asked my law-school friend who he thought were the good guys in this case (I like my battles dumbed down to good guys and bad guys), he immediately replied, "Well, the consumers are always the good guys." Given that I'm a consumer, I agreed with his assessment. So let's accept that the consumers are the good guys and that we want the same thing we've always wanted -- to listen to the music we want whenever we want.

Before the Internet, our only options were to listen to the radio or shell out large amounts of money for CDs that consisted of 1 good song and 15 tracks of filler (yeah, I'm still bitter about buying that Mazzy Star album).

Then the Internet came around, and with it came some new and innovative ways of listening to music. One of my favorites was Imagine Radio.

Imagine Radio had a great system where you could design your own radio station -- you specified what genres you liked, but then (here was the great part) you could tweak your list so that it only played bands you wanted to play. Like Foo Fighters? Give them a rating of "Play these guys a lot". Sick of Sublime? Give them a rating of "Don't ever play this band again." It was great.

Great, that is, until the music industry stepped in.

They didn't like all of these options Imagine Radio was giving people. Letting people choose what bands they wanted to listen to? Letting other people know what bands were on your playlist? This was heresy! More importantly, it might hurt record sales! So they hit Imagine Radio with all these rules and regulations to essentially make them as bland as your average FM radio station. Imagine Radio, which had since been bought by Sonicnet and became a tiny little division of Viacom, had no choice but to give in. And we were left trying to find other options.

That's about the time .mp3's started gaining popularity, and trading .mp3's with your friends became a cool underground hobby. Finding .mp3's initially wasn't an easy process. Either you had to trade them with your friends, or you had to track them down through ICQ. But soon companies started coming up with innovative ways to record and play .mp3's. For instance, mp3.com had a "locker" sort of system. You would place your CD into your computer's CD-ROM drive. This would then be used as proof that you owned that CD. Later, when you were at a different computer (say, at work), you could then play that song off of mp3.com's network. It was a pretty neat idea -- there are times at work when I wanted to hear a CD that I had left at home, or vice versa.

But, of course, this system was shut down almost immediately after it was announced. The record companies just viewed it as a way to encourage copying of CDs. My friend has a CD that I like? I stick it in my CD-ROM drive as proof that I "own" that disc, and voila. Instant CD copying. (Granted, I could still have taken his CD, ripped and encoded the songs myself, but that would have been much more work.) So, one big lawsuit later, mp3.com's music locker was taken away, and once again consumers were left trying to find other options.

That's when Napster came around. I think you all know how this one works. And, not surprisingly, the record companies are trying to shut it down. And now we're hearing about new systems out there on the horizon -- systems that are completely decentralized, meaning that there's no single computer you can go and shut down to disable it. You'd have to disable every computer on the Internet that's running it. Granted, most of them have some problems (they're slow, not quite finished, and difficult to use), but these are temporary problems that won't be around forever.

Noticing a pattern yet?

Somebody out there creates a technology that brings consumers closer to their goal of listening to their favorite music. The record companies shut it down. And soon after, a newer system pops up that's even scarier; that's even more decentralized; that's even harder to control.

Think about Imagine Radio. What if, instead of trying to cripple it with rules, record companies had embraced it? It could have been their greatest marketing tool ever -- they could have recommended bands for me (ones they happened to be promoting at the time). They could have told me when bands I liked that were touring in my area. And, most importantly, it could have fulfilled my need to listen to the music I like while still enticing me to buy the occasional CD. If IR had really caught on, would people really go through the trouble of filling up gigs of hard drive space with mp3's? Hard to say. And we'll never know.

So while record companies are trying to shut down Napster, they don't realize that Napster might be their biggest ally. If they supported Napster, made it an official way to download unlimited music (for a small monthly fee, of course), they would still have a centralized system to record how often songs were downloaded (to divvy up the profits fairly) and, heck, deliver some personalized advertising if they want. (Some people think this is evil. I don't particularly mind it.) Napster would be glad to play along -- they'd get a share of the profits, and get pretty close to that monopoly on online music distribution they've always wanted.

The fact of the matter is, record companies had better embrace Napster now, before one of these other decentralized systems catch on. Because those can be truly frightening to the record companies. Not only are they virtually unstoppable, they're virtually untraceable -- there'd be no way to record who's downloading what. And there's no big company behind it all. They're generally open source projects -- meaning that any programmer who wants to contribute / improve / update the software can. They just gotta write some code. While Napster would be happy to partner with music companies for the purposes of generating some profit, the guys behind most of these other projects are just doing it for fun. Some of them are probably looking to actively hurt big corporations. And, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, they have the power to do so. Big time.

At the time of this writing, BMG has signed up with Napster to start (legally) distributing their music over Napster's system. Napster's talked about charging customers a monthly fee for use of their service. So maybe the record companies are starting to see the light. On the other hand, the other companies have continued their legal actions to shut down Napster, and it's starting to look like they're winning. I'm beginning to suspect, however, that they're not really interested in shutting down Napster -- they just want to have some leverage at the negotiating table. (i.e. Before the lawsuit, it was Napster saying, "Partner with us, or else we'll copy your music anyway." After the lawsuit, it's the record companies saying, "Partner with us, or be liable for millions of dollars.")

We'll have to see what happens. I kinda hope, for the artists' sake, that the record companies and Napster do work something out. I'd be happy paying a monthly subscription fee if I knew that some of it eventually trickled down to the artists themselves. On the other hand, Freenet's new music sharing project is incorporating a way to make payments to artists themselves, cutting both the record companies and Napster out of the mix. I might be okay with that, too.