Green light for the sons of Napster

By PETER GRIFFIN

Remember the glorious days of Napster? When web surfers with enough bandwidth, hard-drive space and patience could wile away their evenings expanding their music collections for free?

By the time Napster, hammered by wall-to-wall court orders, pulled the plug on file-swapping in July, the vultures had been circling for some time.

They came in the form of a new breed of peer-to-peer file-swapping start-ups, ready to swallow Napster's huge audience and marketing potential. Among the better known are MusicCity, Kazaa and Grokster - the sons of Napster.

US-based research house Jupiter Media Metrix estimates use of Napster fell 49 per cent between March and August as access to songs was gradually stripped by 90 per cent at the demand of the music industry.

US visitors to Napster during the period fell from 10.8 million to 5.5 million, while its new successors expanded their combined user base from 1.2 million to 6.9 million.

Despite their slick sites, user-friendly software and cheesy adverts, Napster's successors - which do not just dwell on audio files - are often nowhere near as useful. Searching for songs is time-consuming and often fruitless.

So where do we go from here? The future of web-streaming songs and music downloads could lie in two high-investment projects - MusicNet (www.musicnet.com) and Pressplay (www.pressplay.com) - that will act as musical gatekeepers.

Their birth was legitimised last week when approval was given for the legal trading of digital music on a large scale. The US-based National Music Publishers Association, its Harry Fox licensing agency and the Recording Industry Association America reached agreement on licensing terms for online music sales.

It is a complicated settlement under which millions of dollars will change hands, but it will let artists, publishers and labels finally extract some well-earned cash from the internet.

MusicNet, a joint venture between RealNetworks, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and the EMI Group, is set to begin operating this year on a subscription model. It will join PressPlay, backed by Sony and Vivendi Universal, in the race to sign up users willing to pay monthly.

MusicNet's interface made a low-key debut this month when preview copies were shipped to journalists across the US.

RealNetworks is integrating the music service into its popular digital jukebox software, and Yahoo! and MSN services will tap into Pressplay.

So it is likely you will pay a monthly amount for the right to download, say, 50 songs and top up your account when you've exhausted your credit.

It seems like a good idea - if the traditionally greedy record companies get real about pricing. But the services have a pile of cons, apart from the fact that it will cost money to join.

If you become a member of MusicNet and your favourite artist is signed to the Sony label, you will have to double up on subscriptions, or buy the CD after all.

And don't think you will be able to transfer downloaded songs to mobile mp3 players - these songs are destined for your hard drive only, so don't throw out your battered Walkman yet.

With the big labels hastily developing their own paid subscription services, clipping the wings of the copyright-violating cuckoos before they leave the ground is essential.

But the recording industry is fighting a far more versatile beast this time around. The software underlying MusicCity, Kazaa and Grokster is not dependent on the central file-sharing system that made file browsing on Napster so user-friendly.

In the post-Napster environment you can kill the brain but the body will keep twitching.

Napster worked when those who had downloaded the proprietary software logged into Napster servers to browse for favourite tunes. With Grokster and its contemporaries, users do not access a central file database. The interaction is between individual computers only.

It is an anarchic concept, but one developed with litigious record executives in mind.

Most of the systems - MusicCity's Morpheus and Kazaa's Media Directory - are based on the same software, developed by Amsterdam "virtual" company FastTrack. And they all access the same network of file-sharing computers.

But countering the side-stepping tactics of FastTrack is a more aggressive vein of legal action. The record industry lawyers who went after Napster did not go after its financial backers. This time it has been made clear that the money men could be in the gun as well.

This month the Recording Industry Association and the Motion Picture Association began a legal suit against Grokster, Kazaa and MusicCity, dubbing the network of services a "21st century piratical bazaar".

So far they have been successful, spending millions on legal action, taking Napster off-line, shutting its imitator www.scour.com and strangling minor player www.aimster.com.

Napster settled part of the long-running suit against it last month, agreeing to pay music publishers $US26 million ($61.7 million) for copyright infringement claims to be dropped. The company still faces action from the record companies and potentially crippling damages.

Meanwhile, the service that brought peer-to-peer to the mainstream, is pushing on with its own subscription service that will tap into MusicNet and feature material from independent labels.

All the rebel company has to do now is stay financially buoyant long enough to meet its end-of-year relaunch date.

Links

Music City

Grokster

Napster

RIAA

Kazaa