Apropos of the discussions of intellectual property here of late.
(I was hoping to see discussion of this story last week here or on LRC’s blog, but better late than never.)
The overstepping labels have now angered Steve Jobs, which is not a good sign. All of this could end with completely anonymous file sharing where file sharers can’t be identified and sued. Then the labels will only have themselves to blame for a failed attempt to cartelize P2P systems.
This article suggests that there is still plenty of money in touring for hot artists, despite the alleged fall in returns from recording sales.
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An alternate explanation to falling returns from recording sales is that most modern music is trash, disposable, barely worth listening to once on the radio.
Who is going to spend $25 on a CD without having sampled the artist?
Does no one remember what “Napster” stood for? “New Artists Program”, a way to widely publish ones work without having to go through the Labels first.
There’s the marketing aspect of Napster that was also its downfall: Record keeping. The Napster servers tracked what was requested, what was downloaded, how often, to who, etc. How many billions does Madison Avenue make trying to guess about what the Napster servers could have revealed in fact?
By pushing file sharing further and furher from any method of tracking, the labels “killed the goose that would have layed the golden eggs.”
I never heard of “New Artists Program.” Wasn’t Napster named after the author of the software, whose nickname is/was ‘Napster?’
Napster started a “New Artists Program” late in the game. See here.
“Napster” was indeed the founder’s nickname. See wikipedia.
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