Feelings on Napster?

The latest news on this front claims Napster is negotiating with one of the Big Five record companies about becoming an online subscription service. Given their previous arrogance and disregard for generally accepted ethics, is it safe to call this move "selling out"? Not to fear, though, as they still get their day (week, month, etc.) in court. The same story says the RIAA was very reassuring on that point. After all the fuss this latest maneuver does leave me wondering whether Napster actually thought to get away with it all or were they just using their users for leverage and exposure to further a different agenda?

If this is a master plan by Napster than I want Scott (that's his name right?) running the country. The above mentioned company is BMG and I'm pretty sure this is all ad hoc. But, perhaps this is vindication of my idea that the best plan for the record companies was to assume that .mp3's would be around and to try to plan based on that assumption rather than spending too many resources fighting the inevitable.

Napster is going to go from like 6 million users to 30. Everyone I spoke to on the napster chat said "screw that I'm not paying for anything". There's plenty of other options out there and I'm sure more will pop up. Try out www.imesh.com or gnutela (not sure if I spelled the second one right).

There are a lot of good points already made...but a couple of things to think about. The bubble has burst! It's the record companies who feel that they have the most to loose with Napster...that's why they are paying magabucks to shut it down. They can shut it down in the US, but then it will just move offshore where US laws do not apply. They need to find a way to deal with it...shutting it down is only temporary. Ever wonder why you pay less for a cassette than a CD of the same music?...when the cassette shell actually costs more that the CD blank. Record companies have been ripping off the general public...and the artists for decades. They toss pennies at the artists and make gastly steep profits on per unit sales. The artists need to wake up and form their own businesses...invent a way to transmit CD or SACD quality, digitally, over the net and sell their product directly to consumers over the internet for $2.00 an album,instead of taking a buck a copy from the record companies. The only way to deal with the technology of the 21st century is to make the product so cheap to buy that no one will want to pirate it or "trade files" ...they will just go buy the product...of course that will mean that the record companies will have to sell the product for what it's worth...for the first time in history! Hold tight...we soon will be trading files for software and anything else that can be digitized. Everyone selling anything digital will have to sell it cheap enough to make the general public want to have their own, origional copy. This again means that Mr. Gates will have to sell his Office 2000 suite for $20 to $25 bucks a pop and only make 2-300% profit per unit instead of the gazillion percent profit he now makes on every copy. Sorry, but the laws of supply and demand will still rule the digital world. As long as the price is high...most folks will "make do" with the crappy, compressed, "Napster" like quality (but still better than that cassette that Columbia is still willing to sell you for $7.98) that they can get for free...instead of buying the real deal.

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.