What's your opinion on the whole Napster issue? They just offered the RIAA $1,000,000,000......what do you think about that?

__________________
ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

I believe that they estimated that, with the 50 million users, it would amount to something like 1.66 per user per month. Heck, I would certainly pay for that.

Most definitely.

So how long would it take to pay it off.....

__________________
ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

I don't think napster ever will be shutdown. As soon as they realized how many people used it a giant $ sign flashed in front of their faces.

I wouldn't mind paying a small fee either. But should the service be shut down, I've gotten MP3's in other ways. From Irc to ftp searches, the RIAA will never get rid of mp3's.

But isn't a billion a drop in the bucket for these guys? I say they'll reject it and go for the jugular. If any of these guys had a brain, they'd implement a way to go to a record store, browse through every song ever created, then burn their own cd in a booth. A fee of around $7 would apply. But that would mean artists would have to put more effort into all their songs instead of packaging a couple of songs onto an otherwise crappy cd.

But then again I'm just rambling. =)

__________________
"The holodeck will be man's last great creation."

-Scott Adams

Hi,
I think in general that the whole issue brought forth by the record companies was ultimately started when they realized the large number of users and saw them as an untapped market/revenue source.

Clearly, their claims are valid. However, I think Napster is just a scapegoat. Everyone knows that people will always trade music, it used to be tapes, then CDs, then MP3s. I wont stop. The record companies can only hope that by stopping the largest and easiest trading method they can make the process of trading online so hard to use that many users wont bother.

Im not sure how Napster is structured, but from using the service, I think that if they structured it as a file-sharing service, not just MP3s, such as AVI, etc, They could bill themselves as a true intermediary that provides connections among users, not content.

One important thing that I feel the record companies and the recording industry needs to realize is that they CAN NOT stop trading of music. They never will. Even if Napster is shut down, avid Internet users will surely find another way. They should come to terms with Napster, perhaps around $2 or $3 per month per user and try to make some money off of the trading, rather then lose this potential source of income, which they cannont repress.

These are just my thoughts. Please feel free to comment, I look forward to the discussion.

Scott O'Hara

This article at /. covers a press release given out by the RIAA, and covered at Salon Magazine which says that CD sales dropped by 39% last year, and they're blaming it on Napster. If you look further down the article, they're actually only CD SINGLES that dropped in sales, and not albums, which actually went up in volume. CD Singles are about 1% of the industry's total sales, so, basically, the music industry lost 0.5% of their total sales of $14B+, which may or may not be due to Napster.
Read it for yourself.

__________________
"And knowing is half the battle!"

Hi,
Good article.

It actually makes sense when you think about it. Most songs on Napster that arent rare or live are the more popular singles, so one could assume that these are the most often shared.

And while single sales have dropped, at least everyone I know who uses Napster uses it to get a feel for a band before buying the able, which the statistics seem to back up.

The recording industry should actually back Napster, even with a low fee per month structure. Its a functional PR machine to promote bands.

Scott