To those of us for whom Napster offered a welcome glimpse of the bright future of the distribution of recorded music, all the record-company high-fives the other day over their appeals-court judgment against Napster look like a Jurassic convention of brontasauri celebrating the death of the first mammal. They may not have noticed how few of the critters scuttling around at their feet share their enthusiasm. Most of us are now looking about for a more robust warm-blooded creature to take care of us.
Personally, Napster brought me a lot of joy, and whenever I talked to anybody else about it they’d come alive: Their enthusiasm for the service was exceeded only by their enthusiasm for the music they’d discovered. It was as if recorded music had suddenly become meaningful again.
Discovery is the key word. The complaint voiced by the record companies about Napster is that it undercuts the mass purchase of popular product, which they see as their own turf: They’ve created the demand for Britney and Christina; now they worry that they’ll move only 5 million albums instead of 10.
This doesn’t square with the experience of anybody I know. Generally, we’ve used Napster to explore, educate ourselves and chase down obscurities—areas either badly served by the record companies, or not served at all. Napster gives you access to music at the speed of intellect; I can recall more than once a quick download settling a musical argument.
I never actually bothered to downloaded an album. Napster traffics in individual songs, so downloading an album requires a lot of work. This inclines you evaluate as you go along, and ditch more than you listen to. Thus, one unintended result of Napster’s ascendance is the destruction of the myth of the long-playing album as the ideal medium of delivery.
And surprisingly, I kept very little of what I downloaded. Record companies rend their garments about lost sales, but I doubt I would have bought most of the music I downloaded and saved anyway. Before Napster, I wouldn’t have known a lot of it existed.
No, the real threat Napster poses to the record companies is in the knowledge that its easy sampling provides. Napster is radio-on-demand with an accessible catalog. In the record companies’ ideal world, knowledge about the products they sell may only be purchased with the product itself—to hear something once you must own it. The ugly little record-company secret Napster has exposed is that if you are able to find out what you really want and liked, you consume less of what they have to offer you.
In that regard, Napster at it’s best worked like a well-stocked universally-accessible public library. (The underlying principle is exactly the same: A single purchased copy held in trust for multiple users—Napster’s crime was merely one of being more efficient and effective at carrying it out.) It gave you access to a huge catalog of music—on a good night, seemingly the entire history of recorded music. As with any good catalog, you often end up making aesthetic connections you might not have thought of before. Using Napster was the first time I’d ever been able to see music as an intellectual resource.
Ultimately, Napster reminded me how much I love music—not the music the record companies want to sell me—but recorded music as a vibrant, cultural phenomenon. It also showed me how little of it I actually need to own. It’s the social element of discovery that comes with sharing, which is a world away from buying and possessing.
So, the record industry has burned down the library of Alexandra. What now? Personally, I intend to boycott: I’m never going to buy a compact disk again. (This is incidentally no loss to the record companies—compact disks have always been such an outrageous rip-off that I hardly ever bought them anyway.) But now I’m going to violate copyright whenever I can. I’ve bought myself a CD burner and I’m going to use it any chance I get. I will of course share everything I have with everybody I know.
But mostly, I will look for and support any online service that aims to provide the kind of service Napster has provided. I have seen the future when musical life is not entirely under the thumbs of a few corporate types fighting for their gold-plated bathtub fixtures. It’s worth fighting for.
-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2001
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