What Is Napster?

If you're into music and got a computer you can't have failed to have heard the name 'Napster'. But what exactly is it and why has it got so many record company executives frothing at the mouth in anger? It's a simple question to answer, but be prepared to read a techy description first, don't worry it won't hurt your brain and it will explain it in the best way possible. Firstly if you've read the pupiline MP3 article, its great place to start, then you will have a clue about this bit.

The MP3 comes from MPEG, a group of people who developed a way to shrink digital audio and visual files without changing or messing up the sound or visual quality. This led to an audio compressor being developed, which reduced the file to around a tenth of its size, which could be used to download in a rapid manner from as ource like, I don't know, a CD is a good example. When this was put on the net to test, guess what, it was immediately used to compress or 'rip' CD's so they could be uploaded onto the Internet, which others could then download.

So where does Napster come into this? Well it's software which links PC's via their servers to other PC's then, when linked, the user can then search through other user's, logged onto Napster, MP3 files and download them onto their computer. So basically everyone on Napster is sharing their MP3 files which results in around 500,000 files being available at anyone time. Now here's the bit that has got the music execs wetting their pants, users can download as many tracks as they want for FREE, yes FREE. Therefore the men in suits lose out on their royalties, for doing next to nothing, but so do the artists and some have voiced concern over this.

Metallica and Dr Dre are the biggest opponents of the biggest revolution to hit the music industry since home taping. They feel that their 'art is being treated like a commodity' and that Napster is a organisation out to make a profit from piracy. The problem is that the artists own the copyright in their songs, in most cases, these rights are infringed by using Napster which is ILLEGAL. Napster claims to get around this by providing a copyright violators reporting system and a disclaimer that using to breach rights is illegal. So then the user is in 'the wrong', so Metallica and Dre were confronted with having to take legal action against their own fans, this has yet to come to anything.

While we have the record companies and some bands opposed, others are rabidly in favour as they see it as a way to spread their music amongst the masses, and don't see it as something that will harm their sales. As Dexter Holland of the band The Offspring says 'Last year we were the most downloaded band on the Internet and geee, it certainly didn't hurt our record sales', The Offspring had a No.1 US album and a No.1 UK single. Other Napster enthusiasts include Radiohead, Limp Bizkit, Chuck D, Belle and Sebastian and Blur.

So what is the situation now, well on the 28th July 2000 a Californian Court ordered Napster to shut down as they were said to encourage copyright infringement. However they were reprieved at the 11th hour by winning an appeal, on the basis that all the site does is to provide a service for non-commercial use of music sharing. So Napster is still up and running and likely to be so for the foreseeable future. So is the end for the music industry as we know it? Well...not really, what it will probably be is the start of a major rethink of the way the music industry operates on the Internet. There has been talk of Napster style MP3 sharing sites, set up by record labels on a subscription basis. However only time will tell.