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October 2000

Flee from Fleet!
Recent mergers harm consumers.
by Shai Sachs

The Death of Winter
Global warming: scarier than you thought.
by Julia Silvis

Napster Got My Gnuts
The mp3 debate gets out of hand.
by Brad Hershbein

Talkin' $acrifice
Americans don't appreciate public service.
by Nikhil Jaikumar

Feelin' Important!
PERSPECTIVE's voter registration guide for Election 2000.
by the PERSPECTIVE staff

Introspective
Starvation Chic
by Liz Thornberry

Salmagundi

Scraps

Backpage
Scooterdo's (and don'ts)
by Julia Silvis

Last December, I plopped into my chair and began searching the Internet for some mp3 music files. I clicked on link after link only to have the download conk out or, arguably worse, have a "file not found" message appear. These mp3s were supposed to be so cool, but how cool could they be if they were next to impossible to obtain?

At this moment, my neighbor happened to pass by and hear my grunt of frustration. "Dude," he said, "you should check out Napster." A short while later I had downloaded the Napster software from their website (napster.com) and was picking up titles by the Beatles, Billy Joel, Mozart, and, yes, Metallica. I, and many other college students, had found a fix to the mp3 craze. Fast, easy to use, and most importantly, reliable, Napster spread as the newest fad all over college campuses.

Compared to its spread through the higher educational system of the US, the Napster craze spread slowly through the rest of America. The allure of free (yes, free!) music within minutes, the ability to grab almost any song ever recorded…well, I must admit, I got hooked. Let the other people spend their $20 on a CD in the store. I would get the songs I liked—hundreds of them—without paying a dime. It was music heaven. Until Metallica got mad.

Since Napster’s inception, there had been a slowly increasing spiral of complaints by bands and, more vocally, record labels over the question of copyright infringement. Thousands of people downloading near CD quality music they did not own irked the labels and some artists. These complaints, however, only sparked further interest in the mp3 locator software. As the number of college students using Napster escalated, some colleges (not ours) even banned Napster due to the incredible network bandwidth usage that its traffic caused. Then Lars Ulrich, drummer and spokesperson of the metal band Metallica, made a media splash in June by filing a lawsuit against Napster on the grounds that the service violated copyright laws. That’s when things then became really interesting.

Lars could probably not have made a more boneheaded move had he tried. First, he and Metallica succeeded in convincing Napster to cut off all the users who had traded Metallica songs within the last few months—all in all, some 50,000+ people (including me). Wonderful. Metallica pissed off 50,000 of their fans—not the best PR move. Yet this snafu pales in comparison to the real monster that Metallica helped unleash: their high profile lawsuit bought more publicity for Napster than simple word of mouth ever could. Of course, Metallica is not the only royally stupid party involved. A few other artists, such as Dr. Dre, and the big recording labels that compose the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), also set their guns for Napster. The week the lawsuit went to trial, Napster traffic more than doubled as the news coverage and hype hit the country. Wonderful way to protect your "intellectual property," boys: convince even more people to download copies.

Even so, I can understand why they’re concerned. A combination of technology—notably the mp3 compression format, high speed internet access, and peer-to-peer network sharing—and ingenuity in the form of a kid who wanted to share the music he created with friends has started a paradigm shift in the music business. Napster freed the music, not only from the medium, but from other songs. No longer do you have to buy an entire album if you just like one song on the CD. Music copyright violation (and I use this term loosely) of old generally consisted of dubbing cassette tapes. While record companies and artists were never thrilled at the ability to do this, cassette dubbing represented only a small risk to them, as it was slow and of relatively poor quality. Because of this, the big labels sat on their haunches, hawking the digital fidelity of compact discs instead of the older cassettes. In fact, consumers so eagerly jumped at the quality advantages of CDs that the labels charged a premium for them despite their cheaper manufacturing costs (any CS person will gladly explain how it costs pennies to make a CD). But that’s natural, right? Supply and demand. Yeah, we know better. A few weeks ago some 30 states filed a class action lawsuit against the big five recording labels charging them with illegal price fixing of their product. Seems the big ol’ boys gave advertising kickbacks only to those stores that charged a certain price or higher on their CDs. Little independent retailers trying to compete with the big chains were left in the cold. Instead of competition and an incentive to strive for a better and more efficient product, the recording labels, acting as a cartel, kept selling overpriced CDs, seeing how much they could raise the price of a CD before sales dropped.

So the record companies don’t exactly deserve our sympathy. And big business has never been exactly popular with the consumer anyway. But what about the artist, or the songwriter, or the mixer? Unless they’re big stars they don’t make that much money off each CD to begin with, but they still depend on that money. And while Jay-Z’s "Big Pimpin" lifestyle may not fill our hearts with sentimentality, few artists actually live like that. Frankly, I feel torn. I want musicians to be compensated for their work—they deserve it and it’s the basis of our capitalist economy. All the same, I refuse to go out and spend $15-$20 on a product for which the artist will only receive a lousy buck. Enriching corporate middlemen, those who choose who and what to hype, seriously bothers me. I know I’m not alone in this feeling—rooting for the underdog is an American standby—yet the fact that CD sales are increasing nationwide (partially because of the strong economy, but still in refutation of recording labels’ fears) indicates that plenty of people are willing and even eager to pay relatively outlandish prices for something you can often hear for free on the radio. It simply took Napster to make people realize how much they were paying—there’s a big difference between twenty bucks and zero. And we can’t ignore the boon that Napster is to independent musicians who can’t snap up a label easily; free and widespread dissemination of your music allows for a loyal following to develop. In this way, the artist can reclaim some of the power from the recording labels.

As for the sudden explosion of freeloaders, many of whom stubbornly epithetize "Napster Rules" to the exclusion of all other things (such as reason), I’m not that worried. Maybe because I’m an Ec concentrator and realize the market forces at bear. For one, the complaining consumers represent a minority—record labels charge what my vocal freeloader colleagues and I call outrageously high prices because most people are willing to pay them. Even despite Napster. The music may be free, but a series of problems undermine its convenience: guilt, slow internet connections, lack of cheap portability, and no guarantee of quality. For all the media attention Napster has gotten this summer, the actual effects have so far been quite minor (other than my expulsion from the service, of course).

The "so far" is likely to change in the near future, however. People will become increasingly more capable and comfortable with technology, broadband connections will become more numerous, portable mp3 players will drop in price. Already each of the big five recording labels has started its own website specifically for downloads of its music, albeit for a fee. The labels should have taken this step months ago and alerted their customers rather than bringing a lawsuit and advertising for their enemy. Their delay could prove costly. Other peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, many of which allow any type of file-sharing (not just mp3s) have prolieferated. These Napster spin-offs are not run by a central server. The most popular of these programs, Gnutella, makes a much harder target for copyright infringement—no company to sue, no members to be able to block. Think of Napster as a large island where everyone has to check in to trade music; Gnutella, on the other hand, is more like an archipelago connected by underground tunnels. No one group runs Gnutella and there is no readily-available tracking mechanism. The members of the RIAA, if they are wise, will advertise the benefits of their own pages like mad to stave off the inevitable rise in gray market music file-sharing. Then again, they’re exhibiting the same attitude movie studios did when VCRs were released 20 years ago. Movie studios forgot to take into consideration the impact that a large screen and booming sound has on a moviegoer’s enjoyment. While the record labels may not have the same cache, they must learn to market (or make) a difference between their products and mp3s if they are to survive.

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu