Peter Sinclair: The free music dream is finally over

Now, where was I before I was so rudely interrupted? Oh, that's right: Napster ...

Returning from the garage after a few adjustments to the increasingly unreliable vehicle in which I chug along life's motorway, I found the net draped in sackcloth.

While I had been rediscovering the delights of the book for two computerless weeks, the bottom had dropped out of everything. Again?

Always as ready as the next pundit to join in a rousing chorus of "Woe," I applied a touch of ashes and skimmed the headlines.

Napster was now, indisputably, toast. Despite a gallant 'We are still going strong' on its opening screen, a user collapse of more than 60 per cent at the time of writing says not.

Both it and the music industry are hurling claims of bad faith at each other, with Napster (having filtered out more than 50 per cent of its downloads) reduced to pleas of physical inability to meet Big Music's demands.

The record companies are evincing the same degree of sympathy for these pathetic squeaks as my cat when it has a mouse where it wants it.

So was it all just a lovely dream? Not with work-arounds like Gnutella, plus a brand new class of Napster proxy which scrambles the names of music files on the Napster server which any other user can decode.

Ingenious; but programs like this may mean the RIAA can't afford to let Napster's servers remain on the net under any terms or conditions.

Tight budgets are racking most major dotcoms.

Even Yahoo, about as blue-chip as you get in cyberspace, has drastically revised projections for the next quarter and performed the increasingly common ritual of throwing its CEO overboard.

There's rich irony, too, in the fact that online share-traders are losing client bases aggregated over the past few years to the very brokerage firms they were supposed to be putting out of business. Financial hand-holding is back in style.

And I nearly had a relapse when I read the announcement by editor Strobe Talbot that Salon, long operating as a fearlessly independent and iconoclastic web newspaper, has finally reached the conclusion that staff and freelance workers have to be paid, bandwidth bought, servers maintained and reporting expenses taken care of.

It's only taken them five years to work this out, but better late than never and from next month, for a $US30 ($74) annual subscription, they will offer our loyal readers a special Premium Service.

To help keep Salon's unique voice booming - I would have said its style was more an urbane drawl - subscribers will be able to view without banner or pop-up ads, meaning the e-zine has effectively scrubbed the banner-advertising business model altogether. Cue chortling and rubbing of hands by traditional publishers.

Now, who's going to be brave enough to tell them this business model doesn't work on the web either? Ask Slate.

So, were the Luddites right all along? Not in Silicon Valley's view - unemployment in the land of the microchip remains at an incredibly low 1.7 per cent.

That vague entity generally known as informed opinion seems to hold that while the sky may be sagging a little, its fall will be delayed until further notice.

Lies, damned lies

*Britain's best-known internet firm, Lastminute.com, today joined the no longer terribly exclusive 90 per cent club - its shares have fallen 90 per cent since floating a year ago, when the company was valued at $1.5 billion.

*Dracula Surfs! A full moon is more likely to make us go online than at any other time of the month, according to research from British Telecom. The lunar cycle apparently explains a monthly surge of calls. Says Roy Gillett, president of the Astrological Association of Great Britain: "It supports what astrologers have been saying for years."

*Hole In The Bucket: A total of 52 internet companies failed in the US last month, according to Webmergers. About half of the 327 failures since the beginning of 2000 have been in the past three months.

*Mobile Sex: A survey in Asia for Siemens reveals that most of those surveyed would not leave home without their mobiles, and half slept with them. Nearly 60 per cent of Singaporean men claim to have had intimate conversations on their mobiles. Only 45 per cent of the women say the same. Hmm ...


BOOKMARKS


Peter Sinclair's top websites

SPACIEST: J-Track

Talking about the sky falling, Mir made it back and no one got squashed. But what about all the other bits of space junk?

I mean, North Koreans are probably building satellites out of flattened pet-food cans. Keep track of all the circling and plunging debris at this impressive site.

Advisory: duck!

MOST SATIRICAL: Mirgabe

At the University of Zimbabwe, however, Mir was merely a source of Mirth. If you ever wanted to be a space-jockey, here's your chance.

Advisory: Robert Mugabe provides a soft landing.

* petersinclair@email.com

LINKS


Napster

Recording Industry Association of America

Gnutella

Yahoo

Salon

Slate

J-Track

Mirgabe

Lastminute.com

British Telecom

Astrological Association of Great Britain

Webmergers

Siemens