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The Napster files | page 1, 2
None of that really matters. Napster itself may not be the final word in MP3 distribution software. Just as Visicalc lost the spreadsheet market to Lotus 1-2-3, which in turn lost out to Microsoft Excel; and just as Mosaic was superseded by Netscape, which fought a losing battle against Microsoft Internet Explorer, Napster, too, may fall by the wayside. Maybe up in Redmond they're already hard at work on a Microsoft clone of the program -- Billster! Whatever happens to Napster, what's inevitable is that the existing physical model of the music industry -- the shrinkwrapped CD in the clumsy jewel case with the stupid plastic tabs that always break off -- is going to vanish, as surely as the vinyl LP and the shellac 78s before it. And however loud the RIAA screams, the new online distribution model is never going to be as tightly controllable, or as profitable, as the old physical approach. We'll all pay for our music one way or another, but we'll probably pay less, and we'll have many more opportunities to preview it and share it and adapt it to our own ends. Scott Rosenberg I don't lose any sleep for the Warner Bros. of the world, and I fully expect that the artists of the future will still earn a living from their work -- though the obscene superstar structure of the current music business may find itself undermined, which wouldn't be a bad thing. The biggest changes are in store not for the casual listener but for the serious music fan, who already has vastly expanded opportunities for finding out about new music and new artists than in the old days, when FM radio playlists and MTV rotations were the only game in town. Napster and MP3 are just the first wedge of much bigger changes in the distribution of music and all media. Today you can get a CD burner for a couple hundred dollars, buy blank CDs for a dollar or two and copy your MP3 files onto CDs for easy Walkman or car-stereo access. But before too much longer you may not even want to. Storage-technology experts are confidently predicting that standard PCs will ship with terabyte-sized hard disks by 2005; a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, and a gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes. To grasp what this means, a typical audio CD contains about 600 megabytes of data. So your terabyte-sized drive will hold the equivalent of roughly 1,500 music CDs -- and that's with full-sized files, not using MP3 compression. At some point, I think we will all wake up and accept that storing this stuff as discrete physical objects rather than data no longer makes any sense, except for collectors. Along with many new ways to catalog and access the music we love, we'll all gain a lot more shelf space. Meanwhile, the waves of change that are roiling the music world today will crash into the movie and TV industries next, as bandwidth improvements make the loose electronic redistribution of video as easy as audio has become today. No wonder the media behemoths are worried. The assumption throughout the corporate universe is that the arrival of fast broadband connections will mean a reassertion of old-fashioned broadcast-media-style centralized control over the Net. Once the pipes are fat enough to allow for high-quality video, the thinking goes, the folks who are professionals in that field -- the TV networks and the movie studios -- will assume their rightful roles as the providers of content to a mass audience sitting passively at the end of Internet lines. The lesson of the Napster saga is that, once again, the powerful populist dynamics of the Internet's many-to-many architecture may surprise the moguls. Fast broadband connections mean that AOL Time Warner can pump its content at you and me; they also mean that you and I can share content with each other. Maybe doing so won't require an advanced engineering degree. Napster suggests it can be done pretty easily. And now, excuse me, there are some rare They Might Be Giants tracks I want to find and download.
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