Word: napstering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Over the course of its yearlong court battle to squash music-swapper Napster, the RIAA was not known for its futurism. And with a host of other free-music sites out there - BearShare, Gnutella, Aimster, yada, yada, yada, - snapping up downloaders as we speak, Rosen's optimism for a more moral world of online music (or merely a more lucrative one for the record companies, whichever you prefer) may be a bit premature. But she's right about one thing - the Senate wasn't doing much more than holding a star-studded wake...
...even now that the recording companies have muzzled Napster, their real solution is nowhere in sight. Computer nerds, bless their souls, seem to have an unyielding desire to boast their virtual manhood. Encryption codes will be broken; system will be beaten. Gnutella, for example, is a small, mysterious little file sharing program that has no central servers to blame and will probably allow piracy to thrive as long as the Internet exists. No one can stop the wave...
...goldrush thrill of hearing a no-name album and discovering that it is really, really good. Word of mouth is the advertising market of music that stands on its own, that refuses to be ignored. Simply put, if an album is worth owning, people will hear about it. Napster, for all its blatant disregard for the law, provided the most organized and extensive word of mouth forum on the planet, and has swayed the purchasing power of at least one consumer, me, toward support of relatively unknown bands...
...Napster has facilitated breaking the law, but every age needs its Robin Hood. Before we give a few pop stars a multi-million dollar pat on the back and put our tails between our legs, ashamed of our overflowing hard-drives, perhaps we should consider getting pissed off. Napster has been regulated and commercialized, stripped of its lawless integrity. Apparently a grass-roots industry was just too good to be true...
...this may not be the best moment for cyberspace. Napster is stumbling. NASDAQ is a bust. Whole sectors of the virtual economy are wrapping up their stories at Chapter 11. But who cares if investors lose faith in the digital world? The artists are sticking with it--at least the ones who lately have been making some galleries look like Circuit City, full of dot-matrix screens and wall-mounted monitors. Remember when videotape was the hot new medium? Compared with CD-ROM art and screen-saver art, with website artworks or virtual-reality goggles, videotape is starting to look...