Napster has always been a revolution within the commercial music business, not against it, and yesterday’s deal between BMG and Napster demonstrates that at least one of the 5 major labels understands that. The press release was short on details, but the rough outlines of the deal has Bertelsmann dropping its lawsuit and instead working with Napster to create subscription-based access to its entire music
catalog online. Despite a year of legal action by the major labels, and despite the revolutionary fervor of some of Napster’s users, Napster’s success has more to do with the economics of digital music than with copyright law, and the BMG deal is merely a recognition of those economic realities.
Until Napster, the industry had an astonishingly successful run in producing digital music while preventing digital copying from taking place on a wide scale, managing to sideline DAT, Minidisc, and recordable CDs for years. Every time any of the major labels announced an online initiative, it was always based around digital rights
management schemes like SDMI, designed to make the experience of buying and playing digital files at least as inconvenient as physical albums and tapes.
In this environment, Napster was a cold shower. Napster demonstrated how easily and cheaply music could be distributed by people who did not have a vested interest in preserving inefficiency. This in turn reduced the industry to calling music lovers ‘pirates’ (even though Napster users weren’t in it for the money, surely the definition of piracy), or trying to ‘educate’ us about about why we should be happy to pay as much for downloaded files as for a CD (because it was costing them so much to make downloaded music inconvenient.)
As long as the labels kept whining, Napster looked revolutionary, but once BMG finally faced the economic realities of online distribution and flat rate pricing, the obvious partner for the new era was Napster. That era began in earnest yesterday, and the people in for the real surprise are not the music executives, who are after all
adept at reading popular sentiment, and who stand to make more money from the recurring revenues of a subscription model. The real surprise is coming for those users who convinced themselves that Napster’s growth had anything to do with anti-authoritarian zeal.
Despite the rants of a few artists and techno-anarchists who believed that Napster users were willing to go to the ramparts for the cause, large scale civil disobedience against things like like Prohibition or the 55 mph speed limit has usually been about relaxing restrictions, not repealing them. You can still make gin for free in your bathub, but nobody does it anymore, because the legal liquor industry now sells high-quality gin at a reasonable price, with restrictions that society can live with.
Likewise, the BMG deal points to a future where you can subscribe to legal music from Napster for an attractive price, music which, as a bonus, won’t skip, end early, or be misindexed. Faced with the choice between shelling out five bucks a month for high quality legal access or mastering gnutella, many music lovers will simply plump for the subscription. This will in turn reduce the number of copyright violators, making it easier for the industry to go after them, which will drive still more people to legal subscriptions, and so on.
For a moment there, as Napster’s usage went through the roof while the music industry spread insane propaganda about the impending collapse of all professional music making, one could imagine that the collective will of 30 million people looking for free Britney Spears songs constituted some sort of grass roots uprising against The Man. As the BMG deal reverberates through the industry, though, it will become apparent that those Napster users were really just agitating for better prices. In unleashing these economic effects, Napster has almost single-handedly dragged the music industry into the internet age. Now the industry is repaying the favor by dragging Napster into the mainstream of the music business.