The Rise and Fall of Napster
It started as an accident. Shawn Fanning was just experimenting and thinking of an easier to go through a search engine for music. What was a simple idea turned out to be a phenomenon in the Internet world. The creation of Napster led to many problems and brought about new issues that involved the entertainment industry and piracy laws. Napster is a software where a compilation of all of its user’s files are held in a central unit and each user is able to use its search engine to look for a song from another person’s computer.
The issue surrounding this problem arose when the Recording Industry Association of America claimed that Napster was basically giving out free music and was not paying the fees to issue “free” music. Napster claimed that all the music was shared among its users and were shared from computer to computer rather than a free website issuing free files for all to download. With the innovation of new technologies today, new problems will always come up due to better ways of getting things done. The same incident happened with the “new and improved” VCR. After fighting some battles, it was made legal for consumers to record from their own home and uses it for personal matters. Again, this situation is similar, but with more strings attached.
Napster was thought to be similar to the VCR problem, but with the piracy laws and the government still trying to find ways to regulate the Internet, it became a more difficult battle for Napster to fight. Recording artists were losing money in the sales of compact discs and they were blaming it on the rise of file sharing. Although the radio does entertain the public with its free music, they do have to pay the fees to play the music. They make their money but advertisements and sponsors. Napster used the excuse that people record off the radio for free, but they cannot burn the music they hear. What Napster did not understand was that the music is offered free because the radio stations do pay for it, and they have the rights to issue the music at the level of their pleasure. Napster was simply taking it from the artists and giving free music.
This had an effect on both the consumers and producers of music. What turned out to be a result of the matter was that the prices of music were climbing and consumers were not buying as much. They resorted...
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...er was unintentional, but it brought about an enormous worry for many people. The right or wrong answer does not lie in the hands of the “upper class,” but in the minds of each individual who cares about the issue. Many think that Napster did nothing wrong, but when given the facts, it is almost as if Napster was stealing candy from a baby.
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The Internet—as it did for almost everything—has radically changed the way people get music. The Internet has cut into the music industry's profits. It reduced the demand for CDs, increased the interest in singles and let people decide whether they want to pay for the new Prince album. This alone could be offset if all of the people pirating music would go to their favorite artists' shows. However, the hard economy has rapidly cut into people's ability to spend on luxury items and concerts rank right up there with sports in terms of practicality.
In 1998 a university dropout, Shawn Fenning, nicknamed napster, spent days without sleep in his uncle's office producing a new music-swapping programme now known as napster. Napster is an MP3 file sharing programme that lets you connect to millions of other users world-wide and swap music with them for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, even Napster itself as a programme is FREE and is available to ANYONE with a PC and the Internet.
But at this point in time, streaming was around for many years. In the early 2000s, Napster was one of the biggest names of digital music. Napster started off by two young programmers Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. Sean Parker almost a decade later helped Spotify receive funding and contracts with labels. Their vision was that users should be able to share music computer to computer or “Peer-2-Peer”.
In this case, there are three main effects of Napster on the recording industry. The first one is that it caused a large decline in record sales in a short time. According to this case, the spending on recorded music in U.S dropped 4.1% in 2001 and the industry’s top 10 albums also sold much less compared to the year before. The second effect is that it cased the sales of CD burners, blank CDs and digital audio players increase and nowadays, most new computers come with CD-RW drives installed, which means people can easily store downloaded music, share music with friends and take it with them anytime as well. The third effect is that it increased the cost of recorded music. Once people can download free music through peer-to-peer software services, they have less incentive to buy original editions, which will make recording industry spend more to fight against copyrights and invest more in new artists and new music. Overall, these three effects make the recording industry go through a hard time.
Shanahan, J.L., 2001. The consumption of music: Integrating aesthetics and economics. Journal of Cultural Economics 2 2, pp. 13–26
...insella, N. Stephan. ?In Defense of Napster and Against the Second Homesteading Rule?. LewRockwell.com. 4 Sept 2000. URL: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/kinsella2.html
“Unsurprisingly, major record companies took issue with large-scale distribution of their music for free, and sued Napster for direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement of copyright in order to protect their intellectual property” (Washington University School of Law). Despite the fact that people and companies are violating copyright infringement, many people think that copyright infringement isn’t such a bad thing. They feel copyright actually helps the artist’s exposure by giving people a convenient way to listen to their music. This interpretation is unreasonable. Artists should not be embezzled and filched of their musical products.
According to the text A Gift of Fire, Napster “opened on the Web in 1999 as a service that allowed its users to copy songs in MP3 files from the hard disks of other users” (Baase, 2013, p. 192, Section 4.1.6 Sharing Music: The Napster Case). Napster was, however, “copying and distributing most of the songs they traded without authorization” (A Gift of Fire, Section 4.1.6 Sharing Music: The Napster Case). This unauthorized file sharing resulted in a lawsuit - “eighteen record companies sued for contributory infringement claiming that Napster users were blatantly infringing copyrights by digitally reproducing and distributing music without a license” (Communications Law: Liberties, Restraints and the Modern Media, 2011, p. 359).
As with any new technology, there are many different aspects of the Internet that have only begun to be explored. One particular aspect is the transfer of music over the Internet. Although it is still in its formative stages, the ability to transfer music over the Internet has become incredibly easy, and in some cases, free of charge. The music industry itself has only just begun to attempt to compete with web sites such as Napster. The point of concern, though, is that sites like Napster are hurting the music industry by making free music available virtually to anyone with an Internet connection.
Introduction: In the past, music has been a costly business, where only people with a lot of money could enter and be successful in the industry. Changes in the music industry, coupled with new computer technology, have made it much easier for people without a lot of money to compose, produce, and distribute their creations. In order to get a better understanding of the music industry in comparison to 2014, one has to look at its history. There were many things that happened from the 1980’s onward, and they brought on a significant impact towards the music industry.
There are several competitors who have modeled their distribution after Apple. However, Napster 2.0 takes a very different stance on digital music distribution. They charge customers a monthly subscription fee and allow users to stream and download as much music as they want. However, if customers want to copy music to their mp3 player, or burn songs to a CD, they music pay extra. Napster also uses Microsoft's WMA format for their DRM scheme which makes Napster incompatible with the iPod. Both Apple and Napster are United States based companies and therefore must abide by our laws. However, a Russian website called allofmp3.com offers DRM free music....
The story really begins with Napster and its free software that allowed users to swap music across the Internet for free using peer-to-peer networks. While Shawn Fanning was attending Northeastern University in Boston, he wanted an easier method of finding music than by searching IRC or Lycos. John Fanning of Hull, Massachusetts, who is Shawn's uncle, struck an agreement which gave Shawn 30% control of the company, with the rest going to his uncle. Napster began to build an office and executive team in San Mateo, California, in September of 1999. Napster was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provideddirectories, effectivelywhile actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a user-friendly interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download. Napster became the launching pad for the explosive growth of the MP3 format and the proliferation of unlicensed copyrights.
The music industry impacts the lives of people from around the world. With the implementation of technology, the influence of the music industry has spread to affect anyone with access to technology. Streaming services have contributed to the increased popularity of music. While there are positive effects to being able to stream music and have multiple ways of listening to it, the music industry suffers from the lack of revenue and illegal activity associated with technology. Technology has had both positive and negative effects on the music industry by affecting how people access music and how music is produced
with one solution. In the meantime, Napster is a huge force in the dynamic of music today and
The music industry started in the mid 18th century with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Through the decades there has been a great increase in this industry; however, the revenues for this industry have declined by half in the last 10 years. This has been caused by music piracy, which “is the copying and distributing of copies of a piece of music for which the composer, recording artist, or copyright-holding record company did not give consent” . After 1980’s, when the Internet was released to public, people started to develop programs and websites in which they could share music, videos, and information with...