Digital Music Distribution: Napster Vs. Kazzaa Essay example

One alternative Napster could pursue would be to work with the music industry to distribute certain sample tracks to the public. These tracks could be distributed royalty-free as promotion for the album, or Napster could agree to pay royalties. A cooperative effort with the music industry has the advantage of being totally legal and

According to the text A Gift of Fire, Napster “opened on the Web in 1999 as a service that allowed its users to copy songs in MP3 files from the hard disks of other users” (Baase, 2013, p. 192, Section 4.1.6 Sharing Music: The

Napster was developed by a Northeastern university student named Shawn Fanning and launched in 1999. Its development made peer-to peer (P2P) sharing of MP3 files easy and accessible to the masses. Fanning’s development caused a burst in the popularity of music - file sharing. It became so popular, that almost overnight millions of people were downloading and uploading files.

Since becoming popular iTunes has had to compete with many music competitors. These music competitors included Napster, RealNetworks, Inc., Wal-Mart, and Amazon. All of these companies provide the same music. However, these companies provide music for a minimal fee or free. For example, up until 2002 Napster subscribers were able to download music for free with an account and an internet connection. RealNetworks, Inc. users were able to download songs for $.49 cents or an album for $4.99, Wal-Mart had songs ranging from $.64 to $1.24, and Amazon account holders had access to over 15 million songs. Although these prices might not seem as much, they made a big difference to Apple since they were charging $1.29 for a song and up to $9.99 for

What is Napster? According to SearchCIO, Napster is a controversial application that allows people to share music over the Internet without having to purchase their own copy on CD. Not only that, Napster allowed people to download the music on to their own CD and could be played from their own server and use chatting forums. (Rouse) Napster was created by a college dropout named Shawn Fanning and one of his friends who was only nineteen. He became quickly popular on college campuses. Some colleges were banning Napster due to the high bandwidth demands. (Rouse) By the year of 2000, Napster had already had over 26 million users. Basically, according to The Observer Napster was programmed to go into someone else’s music files and choose the songs they wanted and download them on to their computer, which also known as peer-to peer or file is sharing. (Lamont)

The music recording industry is in trouble. For several years now, sales of new and popular music have steadily declined and show no sign of changing. The record companies are quick to blame the growing popularity of the Internet; music is being traded in a digital form online, often anonymously, with the use of file-sharing programs such as Morpheus, KaZaA, and Imesh, to name a few. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) succeeded in disbanding the pioneer Internet file-sharing program, Napster, but is facing confrontation with similar programs that are escaping American copyright laws. While there is an obvious connection between declining popular music sales and increasing file sharing, there is more going on than the

A summation of the decision was posted by the panel, the Copyright Royalty Board, Pandora and other webcasters like it, will have to pay record companies 17 cents for every 100 times they play a song when they stream music to listeners who do not pay for subscriptions. The current rate is 14 cents.

Over the last fifteen years, the music industry has been revolutionized by technological improvements. It all began with the creation of the mp3 file format; music suddenly became easy to distribute. Napster took advantage of the new file format by creating a peer to peer network, which composed of the first on-demand streaming company. While their company was riddled with lawsuits, they became the initial leaders for digital music. With iTunes’ release, providing users a digital marketplace, the market began its initial shift. The desire to buy and listen to albums’ in entirety diminished; the industry changed to a singles market. In 2008, Spotify noticed the à la carte downloads that made iTunes quite valuable. Using Napster’s peer to peer model as an initial framework, they created a peer to peer system where they actually paid royalties to the copyright holders. With a freemium service, people could listen to whatever song they wanted as long as they could tolerate intermittent advertisements. Yet what Spotify has managed to do, which no other music streaming company has done, is that they have been able to amass a 40% premium user rate, an astonishing number especially when compared to Pandora’s 5.6% paid user rate. Despite streaming services, particularly Spotify, negative reputation, their entrance into the music industry has not only increased exposure for indie artists, but is also revolutionizing the industry.

Back in 1999, a college student by the name of Shawn Fanning created a college “project” called Napster. Napster was a file-sharing service that many people utilized to get their music. Before Napster, the only way to share a file was to email it to a recipient, or to burn it to a disk or thumb drive and physically give it to someone. Napster only survived a few years

<br>The fact that Napster is free and more convenient than visiting a record store makes it an appealing way to get music for consumers. The problem the record companies have is that there is no way of regulating who has access to the information, and hence no way of profiting from it.

Napster stresses that it is a software provider, and that the users are at fault for any illegally traded files. Napster does not itself make available any MP3 materials over the Internet. It merely provides computer software that lets its users choose which files to make available to each other and which files to download.

Napster, which was created in 1999, became an internet sensation in the blink of an eye. It was a free file-sharing community that involved millions of users. Napster linked numbers computers to a centralized server, which was accessible to almost anyone that had access to the internet. When logged onto the server, users could see music files along with their location, and begin to download them to their computer library. Users had the ability to search for music on peoples computers around the world.

Ever since file sharing became commonplace, record companies have complained that they have lost billions of dollars in revenue. Record companies have produced studies backing this claim, while file sharing advocates have produced reports saying the effect is indistinguishable from zero [2]. While the true impact probably lies somewhere in the middle, record companies have insisted that DRM schemes can be used to prevent customers from sharing music online. Price point has also become and issue for record companies. The standard price for online music is $0.99 per track. Record companies have stated numerous times that they would like to increase this amount, but music stores have resisted. Even though the costs associated with selling digital music downloads are much lower than that of physical media, these cost savings aren't passed on to consumers. DRM schemes also force customers to purchase the same song multiple times. For example, suppose one downloaded a song from Yahoo! Music, to play on their Microsoft mp3 player. However, a year later they purchased an iPod. Since the music purchased from Yahoo! would not be compatible with their iPod, they would have to purchase the song a second time from iTunes.

First, it is important to discuss the direct, contributory and vicarious infringement claims against Napster. Direct copyright infringement claims are based on a breach of a copyright owners’ exclusive rights to the copyrighted work(s). A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004, 1013 (9th Cir. 2001). Napster was found liable for this because the users used its platform to upload and download copyrighted music, thus infringing on two exclusive rights: reproduction and distribution. Id at 1014. Contributory copyright infringement claims are based on secondary infringers who have either actual or

From the early days of the internet, Napster first introduced the globe to digital music with easy accessibility, and has been morphing and developing with time. With hefty copyright lawsuits underway, a number of successors have reattempted to design music-sharing platforms that acquiesce to consumer demands, while also limiting the damage to artists and the music industry as a whole. With a number of well-recognizable investors and supporters, Spotify emerged in 2008 and had arguably grown into the most formidable entity in the realms of digital music.