I think record companies would be making a lot more money right now if they'd embraced Napster and started to compete with their own websites. But that's hindsight.
Delivery of music over the internet killed cd sales. Napster proved that people wanted online music. That enabled everything else. It forced the industry to adapt or die.
I'm not entirely sure if I would agree with what you say about Napster. While for a while what you said was true, these days we're back to most people listening to music in walled gardens like Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
Something I found fascinating about Napster at the time is that it was fiercely difficult to use... but it didn't matter, because what it gave people (access to ANY music) was so desirable that they would learn how to use it.
Dispute indeed. Napster failed legally because had a central datastore that aided in transferring the music. They just weren't passing around links, they were passing around files, too.
At no point in my entire life has modern or popular music been more available than it is now. I haven't "bought an album" in over a decade, because virtually everything is instantly available at no additional charge beyond the one simple service I subscribe to. Short of all recorded content being de facto uncompensated, which is what the logical conclusion of Napster winning would have been, it's hard to see an outcome here that would be better for consumers than the one we have.
I suspect we'll be in a similar position with video content in 10 years as well. Already, I think it's easy to make the case that we're better off than we were in the status quo ante of cable bundles and video rentals.
A number of years back, an analyst friend of mine made a claim in a talk that Napster was more about convenience (i.e. near instant access) than it was about cheapness. I didn't buy the argument at the time but habits that have developed in the time since suggest there's a lot of truth in what he said. Video is more complicated than music because of fragmentation and outright unavailability of a lot of content. But most people with even remotely mainstream music tastes are very widely fine with just streaming.
Yeah. Strictly speaking, the reason why the music industry shat their pants over Napster was because someone found out a more economically efficient way to scam artists. They'd been fighting for decades to ensure that they would be the one ripping off artists, and then charging the public as if the artists were actually making a decent living.
Every time I see an artist worry about online piracy, I roll my eyes. It's not not a threat, but it is a rather weak one unless you're a best-selling author or musician. You're far more likely to either get ripped off by a "for exposure" bro[0] or music label, or just have your work languish in obscurity.
There's actually a bunch of authors that signed a letter of support for the Internet Archive in this suit, specifically because libraries are very, very good at getting mid-list authors into readers' hands. They value the author's work at the expense of the publisher's ownership, which is why publishers hate them. An author that gets a bunch of library exposure can sell people on another book tomorrow, but the publisher is out on "lost sales" today.
[0] I expect this to be replaced with GPT/SD enabled hustles eventually
Just an anecdata point but I was one of the people who used Napster for legitimate purposes (I used it to distribute music I created, gaining small recognition that wasn’t something I could’ve achieved otherwise with my music and my means and other technologies available). The thing that was disappointing in the fallout was that it caused many years of evasion tactics that made finding a comparable distribution multiplier very difficult. For my own use, I stopped caring about making music for others and trying to find a way to get an audience, and I happily play and write music now for my own joy and amusement, but I hate to think how many artists really struggled to find an audience the same way and came up short
It's not a website but I loved Napster. When you were downloading a song and then could browse the filesystem of that user to see what they had. It was like opening a cave with treasure inside and finding all these songs that might not have been available online at all at that point.
> An analyst I know once argued pretty strongly that Napster became popular not because it was free but because it was more convenient than going to the record store and buying a CD.
Some context for the younger HN audience: a CD used to cost $15-20 new and almost no artist in the US sold singles. If you wanted a song you heard on the radio you needed to go to one or more record stores to find the CD and pay your $15. Rarely did you get to sample anything on the CD at the store. So you'd get home only to realize you essentially paid $15 for one stupid song. Hopefully you liked half the songs on the album so you were maybe paying $3 per song you liked. Ripping that CD to MP3 was also more time invested.
Even over a 28.8k dial-up downloading the same song of Napster would only take about twenty minutes.
As the various online music stores showed, money wasn't the main issue with Napster et al. People were fine paying for music so long as it was convenient. By the early 00s buying CDs was far from convenient for how people actually wanted to listen to music. Music streaming is just the latest convenience since everyone has an Internet connected device in their pocket and their "library" is just every song in the service's catalog.
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