What was napster doing wrong

Though a few artists, like Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy , defended Napster for making music more accessible, most of the music industry hated it because its popularity meant they were losing money. The 20th century music industry was predicated on the idea of selling physical recordings of music—records, tapes, or CDs live performances were a secondary source of income. Napster was a company with a popular software in search of a revenue model, one it would never get the chance to find.

Napster was eventually shut down in due to lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the US music industry. A US court found Napster was facilitating the illegal transfer of copyrighted music, and was told that unless it was able to stop that activity on its site, it would have to shutdown.

They are now used by a small, but profitable, music streaming service owned by the media company RealNetworks, but the product is unrelated to the original Napster. But peer-to-peer music sharing did not just disappear. The global music industry would fight the softwares through the s.

From the abyss, Spotify appeared. Daniel Ek, the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, has said that Spotify, launched in , is a direct byproduct of his love for Napster, and his desire to create a similar experience for users.

He would avoid the trap that Napster fell into by getting music labels to agree to have their songs on his platform. At least this is the story Ek tells. The authors of the book Spotify Teardown , an academic examination of rise of Spotify, say something very different happened. The book, written by a group of Swedish media studies professors, historians, and programmers, contends that Spotify was simply an opportunistic application of a technology that Ek developed, rather than effort to save the music industry.

Ek, who had been the CEO of the piracy platform uTorrent, founded Spotify with his friend, another entrepreneur named Martin Lorentzon. Both—Ek at 23 and Lorentzon 37—were already millionaires from the sales of previous businesses. The name Spotify had no particular meaning, and was not associated with music. Although LA rapper Dr. Dre filed a similar complaint a few weeks later, the Bay Area thrashers were largely left alone to test the water as the tip of the spear.

It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is. And that is morally and legally wrong. Less so was the decision to track the details of more than , users — mostly college-aged kids with limited income — who had accessed Metallica material and to demand that Napster block them from the service: a request with which Napster complied.

For good measure, some of the universities whose networks were used to access files, including Yale and the University of Southern California, were also named in the lawsuit. Metallica were no longer countercultural icons, but fat-cat faces of an outdated music industry. The battle-lines were drawn with musicians as well as businessmen picking their sides.

Others more viciously went on the attack. Opponents questioned whether it was fair that only those kids privileged enough to have computers should have access to music for free.

Meanwhile, a silent majority of artists sat back in the safety of silence, waiting to see how the stand-off played out. Alas, the Recording Industry has captured the issue, and have aligned many artists at its side. Now, the recording industry is poised to capture the technology, and retrofit the existing distribution channels to the web. To be sure, musicians will have less power on the web, and that is why Napster is bad. Vinnie Van Go-Gogh.

Sunday, July 16, Related Campaign:. Up Front New website coming soon. There is an ossified narrative that record labels were too arrogant and lazy to see the digital revolution coming, and deserved their downfall. But the story is also about the slowness of a generational handover of power. But it was a Sisyphean struggle to get the boards to really listen. Alison Wenham was heading AIM, a newly formed trade body for independent labels, when Napster appeared.

As the new millennium began, in San Francisco, a power struggle within Napster was threatening to pull the company under. John Fanning did not respond to multiple requests from the Guardian to speak about his time at Napster.

But at the time, breaking apart the CD was never going to land well with labels, and Richardson stepped back in May Napster had swiftly become a cultural talking point. By October , its creator was on the cover of Time magazine.