Feelings on Napster?

Lshreve, Very good points, since the record companies have indeed been ripping off the public and musicians for quite some time. It's also quite funny that Napster and mp3's came along at a time when the record companies have seen their profits dipping not because of Napster (as they would have us believe) but due to the fact that vinyl to CD reissue profit machine has come to a grinding halt. Pretty soon they will be expecting most of us replace our CD's (which in many cases were replacements of LPs) with some form of Super Audio discs. No thank you. As for Napster providing an outlet for sampling items before buying - maybe that works but I've Napster to be somewhat hit or miss when doing this. As a jazz fan I feel somewhat guilty about ripping mp3's of a CD which is only going to sell 5000 to 10000 copies at best. Perhaps I should put a few samples of some artists on Napster and see what happens.

To Pghedge@aol.com: Maybe "distributing copywritten, intellectual property, in any form, is illegal" - if so how does MTV and radio fit into the picture? One could have a vcr or tape deck running all day and copy a whole bunch of "copyrighted" material. Napster is going to become the "radio" of the future if only because the radio (at least in most of the USA) really sucks. I've wanted to hear something from the recent recordings by several lesser known artists - what do I do? Sit in front of radio for weeks at time hoping to catch maybe a tune at 4 a.m.? No, I long onto Napster, do a search and within 5 minutes I've got at least one track to check out. Works great. Now if I buy the CD or not depends on quite a few other factors. And it's the fact that those "buying factors" differ from person to person that really upsets the apple cart. As an older, fairly well heeled audiophile, I like to pick up the best sounding version a recording that I can find. Napster certainly does not provide that but for a college student or teenager whose only stereo is their computer system, well the 128K Napster file probably sounds just fine and it doesn't cost them anything. Yeah, the new age is here, now the industry just has to find a way to deal with it.

Robba: Here's the basic problem - there are really two parties involved in the Napster ripoff, the big bad record companies and the poor starving atrists. Most people don't seem to care if they hurt a record company but people really don't want to hurt some poor artist (unless of course they are not all that poor). I still that the record companies need to find a new way of doing things. CD's are way over priced, the radio sucks, music is pigeonholed into meaningless catagories and Napster solves a whole bunch of what's wrong. Napster is a sympton of an underlying disease and in classic American fashion we attack the sympton while the disease goes untreated. And I never said that it's okay to "steal" via an mp3 site - just that one can understand why many people feel it's okay to do so.

Pghedge: I'm primarily a jazz fan, and an avant-garde jazz at that, so there's basically nothing anything like that anywhere on Napster. However, there is plenty of material by the big name acts, like U2 and Santana. Does Napster hurt them? I don't know but it would hurt someone like Ken Vandermark - a superb tenor sax player out of Chicago. However, I do know that Vandermark and several other jazz musicians that I spoke with would not mind having their music available on Napster if it would mean more exposure. And that's the rub: exposure versus "stealing". The present music distribution really sucks unless your a big name artist.

Kacz: You said it prefectly - and that's why the record companies had better stop complaining and find a way to deal with it. How about cutting the prices of new CDs instead of raising them? Another method could be on-line direct sales. There's a jazz label, OkkaDisc, which has their entire catalog available on-line and way cheaper than at any store or on-line vendor. But that's just wishful thinking - they'll just raise prices and come with some godawful watermarking scheme - less sound, more money.

Carl: Your response was a bit over the top and you may even be correct. The music industry has survived plenty of "scares" - radio broadcast, MTV, home taping, live taping, etc. I've heard some really poor sounding live recordings that only a true fan would want to hear, let alone own. And I'm sure that there's plenty garbage out there on Napster that I wouldn't download, let alone buy. And what the heck are we doing in this tread discussing such a lo-fi format while the powers that be are busy gearing up for yet another format war (SACD vs. DVD Audio) and another round of us replacing all our Beatles recordings.

Carl: you gotta learn to go just a little bit easier. I may not have much experience with Napster - but then again it's not all that complicated or difficult to learn and use. And yes, I have based my comments on my "limited" experience. So what. I'm still entitled to an opinion. Plus you missed the point of my comment about another "format war". It was meant as a joke about the music industry crying the blues while they are planning for yet another super-duper profit making venture. And they did make huge profits when they introduced CDs (with "prefect sound forever") and had everyone replacing all their LPs. However, I do agree with you that with the mp3's and CD-R's it's going to be much harder for the music industry to launch their next improvement on prefection.

Round and round we go. Fpeel (any relation to Mrs. Peel?) once again brings the courts into the picture (haven't we had enough of the courts showing us what's fair?) and again I say who cares? The record companies would have us believe that they're protecting the high holy copyrighted works of their oh so talented preformers. Oh really? Did you ever see the documentary film about the artist R. Crumb? In the film he tells the story of his most famous illustration, the cover for the Janis Joplin recording "Cheap Thrills". Oh yes it's copyrighted, by Columbia Records. They paid him $600 for his work, thank you and he hasn't seen another dime since. All perfectly legal and all rather unjust. Or how about this scenario: I own a vinyl copy of a Van Morrison recording, purchased legally many years ago. I'd like to have a digital verison of this record to play on my CD boombox while working in the garage. I download the mp3s from Napster and burn a CD on my computer. What law have I broken? Not paying twice for the same recording? There are users and abusers for just about anything, Napster included. I personally feel that many the younger people downloading songs from Napster would not have purchased the CDs but rather would be just as happy to listen to the radio. And there's people like myself, who have hugh music collections and use Napster as just another source for checking out some tunes.