Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Napster meeting today
Author: Howard Hansen Posted: 6/20/2000; 9:07:54 AM Topic: Napster meeting today Msg #: 17946 (In response to 17927) Prev/Next: 17945 / 17947
Thanks for the Love/Albini links, Dave. They've re-focused my feelings about Napster. I've been amazed and pleased by it and also repulsed and frightened. And I'm not even in the music business!It seems to me that the main problem with Napster is its randomness. Sometimes songs that I'd want to hear would be there, sometimes they wouldn't.
This reminds me of my reaction to good content early in the life of the web -- I would reflexively download it to my computer so I would always have access to it. Then I started emailing links to myself. More recently, I threw it up on my weblog, or just trusted my brain to remember the subject and the search engine to find it.
Some of this change is due to bandwidth. At 14.4, I didn't want to download anything twice. Even with DSL, I don't want to d/l an MP3 more than once, especially when I don't know if it'll be there in the next minute.
But look forward a bit: more bandwidth, stronger Napster network effects. This means every song you'd ever want lives somewhere on the net and it takes a few seconds to d/l. Which means that you probably won't bother, you'll just listen.
So, I think that a glimmer of hope remains for the music business, but it would require them to open up. There's no hope for the current system, thank goodness!
Howard
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