Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Napster Business Model
Author: Robert Cassidy Posted: 6/27/2000; 1:35:13 PM Topic: Napster Business Model Msg #: 18180 (In response to 18178) Prev/Next: 18179 / 18181
Personally, I suspect that with good enuf hardware, the degradation from a single straight copy of a song will be barely noticeable and probably not noticeable at all by most people (or maybe all people).But the problem isn't with a single generation of copying. If 10% of the population distributes their legal copy, you probably only face a 100% increase in material over what was actually paid for. If that second generation repeats the exercise (and the third, etc), that's where things really get out of hand. Widespread problems require multiple generations of copies to be distributed.
Remember many recordings made with analog equipment with ancient circuitry sound better than digital! I just can't see that a noticeable degredation is inevitable.
With good analog equipment that's true. Few of the people I know that have good analog equipment would pass on the $15 fee for music. The mechanism that worked in the past was that good duplication was expensive - so much so that acquiring the equipment for that purpose was no cheaper than buying a ton of music in the first place.
But now, everybody has a computer, justified by reasons other than copying music. The cost to acquire the perfect duplication mechanism is $0. The cost to acquire the music is nearly $0. The cost to duplicate is basically $0 (the market for big portable hard drives now seems to be driven by massive MP3 collections).
The economics of perfect duplication of music are for the first time WAY in the favor of the end user. This is new. Napster filled in the missing piece of how to acquire. Had RIAA delivered this at a reasonable cost, Napster may never have caught on. It would have still been written, but the utility of Napster is in it's high adoption rate. As Dave recently noted, critical mass is necessary for it to work. RIAA might have been able to prevent that from taking place.
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